The Burning by Tim Madigan

Author:Tim Madigan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER 8

A SINGLE RUTHLESS ORGANISM

Scholars and journalists attempting to reconstruct the great burning in the decades after it happened bumped up against an almost impenetrable conspiracy of silence among Tulsa whites, one inspired by shame in some cases, in others by the lack of a statute of limitations for murder. In any event, within hours of the catastrophe, the mobsters had disappeared back into the fabric of local life, their atrocious tales to be whispered in the secrecy of the Klan meetings, or bragged about in speakeasies when a mobster was overly drunk, or recounted on deathbeds when the prospect of hell finally compelled the guilty to unburden themselves.

Great remorse indeed plagued some white participants as the years passed. Two members of Tulsa’s KKK conceded as much when talking confidentially to a magazine writer in the early 1970s. The wife of another mob member remembered the day, decades after the burning, when she and her husband heard the tragedy briefly mentioned on a local radio station. The woman said that her husband, then an old man who once had spoken obliquely of a day he killed Negroes, rose from his seat on a sofa, took down his hat and coat and disappeared without a word into the cold outside for a solitary walk that lasted the day. He did not speak to his wife for days afterward, seemingly lost in the past.

Others regretted that more Negroes weren’t killed, that every last building owned by a black wasn’t burned.

“I would do it again,” one Tulsa Klansman, speaking confidentially, said a half-century after the event.

And though the worst culprits remained anonymous, there was no shortage of white apologists in generations to come. Most white Tulsans blamed the tragedy on the Negroes, viewing the blacks’ attempted defense of Dick Rowland as an unforgivable act of provocation. To this day, the catastrophe is generally known as the Tulsa Race Riot, a gross misnomer.

Other whites blamed white ruffians almost exclusively—oil roughnecks, cab drivers, bootleggers and the like—the lower class of caucasians who poured from the boardinghouses along First Street to give their drunken hatreds free rein. But Tulsa hardly contained enough white rowdies to man an army of ten thousand. Photographs of the tragedy also showed that many in the white mob drove the most expensive cars and dressed in clothes beyond the means of the average roughneck. Women who eagerly observed the fighting wore the finest floor-length fashions and the most stylish bonnets offered at Lerner’s Department Store downtown.

Tulsa authorities, meanwhile, chiefly police commanders and local officers of the National Guard, later insisted that their only purpose on the night of May 31 and the morning of June 1 was to protect white Tulsans from the Negro uprising. While conceding that airplanes were used that morning—six two-seat World War I trainers had been dispatched from Curtis Field, outside of Tulsa—leaders insisted that the aircraft were limited to reconnaissance missions over Greenwood. White newspaper accounts of the time, based on interviews with Tulsa authorities, reported

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