As Tulsa commemorates the centennial of the massacre this weekend, the city is still haunted by unresolved questions about it: How many people were killed?
Who was Dick Rowland, the Black teen whose arrest sparked the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre? And what happened to him after he was falsely accused of assaulting a 17-year-old White elevator operator named Sarah Page?
After his arrest sparked the Tulsa Race Massacre, Dick Rowland disappeared
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This black-and-white photographic postcard titled National Guard Machine Gun Crew shows a group of soldiers marching through Tulsa on June 1, 1921. (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
He liked to call himself Diamond Dick.
Dick Rowland, a tall teenager with velvet skin, wore a diamond ring as he shined shoes in downtown Tulsa. Rowland, 19, had recently dropped out of Booker T. Washington High School, where he was a star football player, because he was making so much money polishing the shoes of oil men in a city that billed itself as the oil capital of the world.
Bill McCreary dead: Pioneering Ch 5 anchor, reporter was 87 newsday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newsday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Bill McCreary Dies at 87; Blazed Trail for Black Journalists on TV
He was hired at what became the Fox flagship station in New York in 1967, when there were few Black faces on the air, and became an Emmy-winning anchor.
The veteran New York television journalist Bill McCreary in 2009.“The news directors suddenly realized, ‘Hey, we don’t have any connections in these Black communities,’” he said of his early days. “There were less than a handful of us on television back then.”Credit.Michael N. Todaro/FilmMagic, via Getty Images
May 11, 2021
Bill McCreary, an Emmy Award-winning reporter who was one of the first Black television journalists in New York, and whose perspective helped fill a noticeable gap in local public affairs reporting, died on April 4 in Brooklyn. He was 87.