The long-hidden racist 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
by
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.