The racist, violent attack on Black Wall Street and its residents is finally in the open and raising questions about all that Americans don’t know and have tried to hide.
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.
On the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre - in which a thriving Black neighborhood was burned to the ground and hundreds of residents were killed by an angry white mob - local and national leaders find themselves grappling with the lasting effects of racial injustice and violence.In Oklahoma, prominent public figures will be on hand this week for the grim 100-year anniversary, including President Biden, members of the Congressional Black.
On a recent Sunday, Ernestine Alpha Gibbs returned to Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church.Not her body. She had left this Earth 18 years ago, at age 100. But on this day, three generations of her family brought Ernestine’s keepsakes back to this.