Black Birds in the Sky Read online

  Atlanta preacher and colonel William J. Simmons felt the same way and, fueled by Griffith’s film, as well as Thomas Dixon’s book The Clansman, was determined to restore the Klan to what he saw as their glory days. In 1915, Simmons and over a dozen other men gathered at Georgia’s Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving night and burned a wooden cross—one of the Klan’s trademark fear tactics. It was official: the Ku Klux Klan was back.

  And this time, the target of their hatred wasn’t only Black people but also Jewish people, Catholics, and anyone they considered “foreign.” The new version of the KKK was intent on narrowing the vision of who they considered “real Americans”; they were intimidated by immigrants moving to the United States and also fearful of a communist revolution, like that of the Bolsheviks in Russia. This created the myth of them as heroes in the eyes of many white people, who believed the KKK to be patriots who were simply trying to save the country from people they’d come to see as enemies, to return the nation to the “good old days” of the Old South.

  Although Klan members have often been portrayed as poor, uneducated white Americans, the new KKK counted people of many occupations and socioeconomic levels among its ranks, including attorneys, doctors, and clergy. All around the country, even in Northern states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, the Klan’s membership was growing by the hundred thousands. The terrorist group became so powerful that members eventually held political office in various states, including Indiana and Colorado.

  The KKK began to set up shop in Oklahoma in the early 1900s. By December 1921, the Tulsa branch reportedly had 3,200 members. It also prided itself on a separate group for women, as well as a KKK branch for children, available to boys ages twelve to eighteen. And in the early 1920s, soon after the Tulsa Race Massacre, several Tulsa city and county representatives were known Klansmen.

  The existence of the KKK and the unchecked violence against Black people they encouraged begs the question: Where were the police?

  The history of policing in the United States is complex, with roots dating back to slavery, but the very first public police forces were founded in the seventeenth century. Operating in Boston and New Amsterdam (present-day New York City), the forces were initially organized as part-time night watchmen. However, throughout the rest of the colonies, police forces were privately funded, a system adopted from the English. The night-watchmen arrangement was somewhat problematic, in that some of them were doing the job as punishment for their own crimes and some drank alcohol or even napped while they were supposed to be on watch. Their main duties involved cracking down on gambling and sex workers.

  Boston was the first to create an official, publicly funded police department, in 1838, founded out of a need to protect businesses and goods shipped from the city’s port. Looking to the London Metropolitan Police as an example of how to operate, several cities also used this model when they established their own departments shortly thereafter, including New Orleans, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, Baltimore, and Newark. Their primary goals were to stop criminal activity and disorderly behavior.

  Southern states, however, were a different story. While Northern cities such as Boston were primarily in the business of shipping, the South was in the business of agriculture, driven by slave labor. And slaveholders wanted to be sure the people they were enslaving wouldn’t jeopardize their business by running away or revolting, so they created slave patrols: the first of what we would consider to be police forces in the South. South Carolina was the first state to implement a slave patrol, in 1704, and other states soon followed.

  Slave patrols took many forms; depending on the area, they were made up of white volunteers, guards, police departments, or even state militia who were solely focused on the persecution of enslaved people (and freed Black people, in some cases). They searched for runaways and doled out brutal punishments to those who were found, as well as those who were reported to be causing trouble on the plantation. Patrollers had few, if any, restrictions when it came to upholding the institution of slavery; they were even allowed to force their way into homes where they believed enslaved people were hiding, without any reason or warrant.

  Although there was no need for official slave patrols once the Confederacy lost the war and slavery was abolished, their focus on targeting Black Americans lived on. Instead of capturing enslaved people who’d run away and ensuring plantation rules were followed, Southern police during Reconstruction tasked themselves with enforcing Black codes and segregation, ultimately doing whatever they could to limit the rights and progress of freed Black people.

  As their job had never been to protect or serve Black Americans—essentially the opposite—police officers often looked the other way when it came to the actions of white terrorists like the KKK or other vigilantes who intimidated and violated the Black community. White mobs routinely carried out violence against Black people without intervention; lynchings went unpunished, even when members of the police departments had heard about plans for them in advance. In fact, the KKK and the police have a long, intertwined history. While the group claimed its vigilante justice was saving Americans from crime the police force wasn’t tackling, the Klan was often working in tandem with the police to carry out its violence. Throughout the country, the KKK has counted police officers among its membership, collaborating on lynchings, intimidation like cross burning, and other forms of terrorism.

  During his campaign in 1922, Walter M. Pierce, who would be sworn in as Oregon governor the following year, was openly endorsed by the KKK, as were the Portland sheriff, chief of police, district and US attorneys, and the mayor. Together, they worked with the terrorist group to limit the rights of Catholics and Japanese immigrants in particular. These actions were in line with Oregon’s racist history—dating back to 1844, before it was even part of the United States—when it passed a “lash law” forcing all Black people, enslaved or freed, to leave the state or “receive upon his or her bare back not less than twenty nor more than thirty-nine stripes.” (Just five years later, in 1849, Black people were banned from moving into or even visiting the state.)

  The Klan also has law enforcement roots in Anaheim, California, where in the early 1920s, residents elected four Klansmen to the five-member city council, which allowed its members who were also police officers to parade around in full KKK regalia during their shifts. So while it may seem shocking that the KKK was allowed to terrorize and murder with abandon, in fact their actions were sometimes approved of or even carried out by police officers themselves, and the governments that oversaw and funded them.

  A key symbol associated with the KKK is the noose, and for good reason. Lynching, a term for any murder committed to punish an alleged crime without administering a fair trial, was a common form of vigilante justice in the late 1800s and early 1900s; it manifested primarily as death by hanging (often preceded by torture and burning). Both white and Black people were at risk of being lynched for a number of perceived offenses, but in the South, lynching was systematically used as intimidation by white people who were angry that Black Americans had gained their freedom en masse. They wanted to keep Black people “in their place,” and the fear of being killed by a mob for trivial, unproven, or fabricated offenses often did just that.

  Before Oklahoma gained statehood, lynching was often used to punish criminals, as the territories lacked formal court systems and police departments. From 1885 to 1907, most victims were white, and they were usually lynched for such crimes—or suspected crimes—as robbing stagecoaches and trains, gambling, and theft of livestock. However, after Oklahoma became a state in 1907, established branches of state government, and began enforcing Jim Crow laws, nearly all lynching victims were Black.

  The allegations against Black men in particular were often sexual assault, rape, or murder. However, many if not most of these claims were false and used as an excuse to justify the lynchings by vengeful white supremacists. The accusations were often born out of a completely innocent interaction, such
as a fleeting look or accidental touch; this is what many believe happened between Dick Rowland and Sarah Page in that Tulsa elevator in 1921. But, sometimes, a Black man who’d been in a consensual but secret relationship with a white woman was accused of rape when the truth came out to preserve the white woman’s reputation or to save her from punishment by white supremacists. Historian Philip Dray wrote: “Whites could not countenance the idea of a white woman desiring sex with a Negro, thus any physical relationship between a white woman and a black man had, by definition, to be an unwanted assault.”

  The “safety of white women” was not only a major focus—and thinly veiled justification—of vigilante violence, but in states such as Louisiana, white women were the only women protected against rape by law. Black women, who had been habitually raped and sexually abused during slavery, were not protected by the law, whether enslaved or free. Louisiana also enforced a law calling for the execution of any enslaved Black man accused of raping or attempting to rape a white woman. Southern writer and eventual politician Rebecca Latimer Felton said in 1897, “If it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week.” To be sure, Felton, an outspoken white supremacist, was referring only to the protection of white women like herself.

  In June 1920, six young Black men in Duluth, Minnesota, working with the John Robinson Circus, were accused of raping a young white woman while holding her white boyfriend at gunpoint. A family physician who examined the woman the next morning found no evidence of sexual assault or rape, but that didn’t stop authorities from arresting the Black men and throwing them in jail. Although the accusations, reported by local newspapers, were enough to put these men in serious danger, the situation was further enflamed by a fast-spreading, completely false rumor that the woman had died from the alleged assault.

  Black people were a tiny percentage of the Duluth population at the time—just 495 of the city’s 98,000 residents were African American. The city discriminated against its small Black population in many ways, including lower pay and unequal housing conditions. Between the allegations, the rumors, and the fact that many white people in Duluth resented Black people for moving from the South to work at the local branch of the United States Steel Corporation, a white mob thousands strong quickly formed outside the police station, where the men were being held. The white people broke into the jail, using heavy logs and bricks to smash windows and bust down doors. There, they reportedly held a mock trial for the six Black men; found three of them—Isaac McGhie, Elmer Jackson, and Elias Clayton—guilty of rape; beat them; and hanged them from a light pole a block away. The remaining three men in jail were protected by the Minnesota National Guard, then shuttled to the county jail in St. Louis the next day, along with other Black “suspects” working in the circus, to prevent more lynchings. No one from the white mob was ever charged or convicted of the three murders.

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  Ida B. Wells-Barnett

  One of history’s most well-known anti-lynching activists was a Black woman named Ida Bell Wells-Barnett. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, Wells was orphaned at age sixteen due to the yellow fever epidemic (which also claimed her infant brother), and became the primary caregiver for her younger siblings through her work as an educator. She moved her family to Memphis, Tennessee, where she continued teaching. Wells fought racism early on, filing a lawsuit against a train company for discrimination in 1884; she won a $500 settlement, though the decision was later overturned. Publishing under the pseudonym “Iola,” Wells began writing about Southern race and political matters, and became publisher of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and Free Speech. In 1891, she was fired from her teaching position because of her frequent criticism about the unequal conditions of Memphis’s segregated schools.

  The next year, after her friend Thomas Moss was lynched for trying to defend his business, Wells began speaking out against the practice in her editorials and traveled throughout the South collecting information on recent lynchings. In May 1892, while she was visiting New York, a mob of white men destroyed her newspaper office, threatening to lynch her if she ever returned to Memphis. She briefly remained in New York, writing a comprehensive report on lynching for the Black newspaper the New York Age, before moving to Chicago. Over the years, Wells achieved one milestone after another, such as founding the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, serving as the first secretary of the National Afro-American Council, and cofounding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—though she eventually left after deeming the group too politically moderate. Wells founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913 in Chicago and defied racist white suffragettes from the South when she marched beside them—rather than behind them—at that year’s Woman Suffrage Parade.

  She married attorney Ferdinand Barnett—hyphenating her name in a time when few women would consider it—and had four children. Wells-Barnett died on March 25, 1931, in Chicago, from kidney disease. She appeared on a US Postal Service stamp in 1990, and in 2019, Chicago renamed a major thoroughfare Ida B. Wells Drive, the first major street in the city to commemorate a Black woman. In 2020, Wells-Barnett posthumously received a Pulitzer Prize for “outstanding and courageous reporting.” She likely would have been pleased with this honor, as she is quoted as saying, “I’d rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing than to save my skin by taking back what I said.”

  * * *

  According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, which obtained data from the Tuskegee Institute and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 147 people were lynched in Oklahoma from 1885 to 1930. Fifty of them were reported to be Black; however, the actual number of Black people killed is likely much higher due to the fact that many lynchings went unreported. And while the number was decreasing, when Oklahoma entered the Roaring Twenties, vigilante justice and mob violence were still prevalent.

  Three violent events that took place in Oklahoma in 1920 may have been clues as to what was in store for Tulsa just a year later.

  In August, a young white taxi driver named Homer Nida was shot and robbed by three white passengers, a woman and two men, who told him they were headed to a dance in the Red Fork community of Tulsa. One of the men shot Nida in the stomach, pushed him out of the taxi, and left him to die on the side of the road. Nida was soon found by someone driving by the scene and taken to the hospital to be treated for his wounds.

  The next day, after bragging publicly about knowing one of the people involved in the crime, a young man named Roy Belton, who had a gun on him, was arrested in nearby Nowata and taken to Tulsa in police custody. Still in the hospital, Nida identified Belton, who was also known as Tom Owens, as one of his attackers. At first, Belton denied it, but his alibi fell apart when the woman he’d supposedly spent the evening with admitted to being in the cab and offered up Belton as the shooter. Belton eventually confessed, though he claimed the shooting was an accident.

  Knowing the jail could be mobbed if Nida died, Sheriff James Woolley installed extra guards. But it was no use. When Nida succumbed to his injuries and Belton pleaded not guilty, a mob a thousand people strong stormed the jail with guns. The sheriff apparently tried to deter them, saying, “Let the law take its course, boys. The electric chair will get him before long, but you know this is no way to interfere with the law.” However, the mob would not be stopped. They kidnapped Belton at gunpoint, forcing the sheriff to release him from the top floor, where the jail usually housed Black prisoners to keep them safe from exactly what was happening to Belton.

  “We got him, boys,” members of the mob announced as they marched Belton outside.

  The Tulsa police force followed the mob as they drove him outside city limits, but they didn’t do anything to protect Belton; though they should have been the ones to stop the illegal violence that was certain to take place, they were
under strict instructions not to get involved. Police chief John Gustafson believed “any demonstration from an officer would have started gun play and dozens of innocent people would have been killed and injured.” One report claims the police were directing traffic during the event for a procession of cars that was “nearly a mile long.”

  Roy Belton was given a cigarette in his last few moments, then hanged beneath a sign for a tire company. As was often the custom of lynchings, spectators took pieces of clothing and rope as souvenirs. Chief Gustafson expressed regret about the murder, claiming he did “not condone mob law” and that he was “absolutely opposed to it,” but in the same breath stated, “It is my honest opinion that the lynching of Belton will prove of real benefit to Tulsa and [the] vicinity. It was an object lesson to the hijackers and auto thieves, and I believe it will be taken as such.”

  Sheriff Woolley agreed, saying it showed criminals “that the men of Tulsa mean business.”

  The Black newspaper the Tulsa Star expressed concern about Belton’s murder. If vigilantes were so quick to lynch a white man, that gave the Black community little reason to believe they wouldn’t be next—even though no Black person had yet been lynched in Tulsa. The paper’s editor, A. J. Smitherman, wrote: “There is no crime, however atrocious, that justifies mob violence.” In contrast, the white newspapers the Tulsa Tribune and Tulsa World sided with the mob, sheriff, and police chief, with the latter going so far as to say the lynching “will not be the last by any means.”

  The paper’s prediction came true. Just a day after Belton was murdered, a young Black man named Claude Chandler was lynched in Oklahoma City, a mere one hundred miles away. Three police officers had raided Chandler’s home, where he and his family made moonshine. These were the early days of Prohibition, when the US government banned the sale and production of alcohol. A shootout had ensued, and Chandler’s father died, as did one of the officers. Chandler was accused of murder and thrown into jail, but, same as Belton, he was removed by vigilantes seeking their own justice. Members of the Black community got word of the kidnapping and set out to save Chandler, but they were too late. The next day, around lunchtime, they found Chandler’s body, beaten and shot, hanged from a tree a few miles outside Oklahoma City.