A quiet, succinct, unflinching examination of the 1921 Tulsa race
riot, last and proportionately worst of the outbreaks during and
after World War I - when rising black expectations (WW I service,
the migration to the cities) collided with increasing white
repressiveness (anti-radicalism, the KKK). An auspicious debut,
too, for a young Tulsa-bred doctoral candidate (in the Oral History
Program, not incidentally, at Duke). To evoke the racial climate,
Ellsworth mentions the new "barbarity" of lynchings and supplies a
newspaper account ("The Negro was unsexed and made to eat a portion
of his anatomy"); to convey Oklahoma's lost potential as a promised
land, he juxtaposes an 1880s attempt to make it "an all-black
state" and the 1910 revocation of the franchise. For the most part,
however, he focuses - tellingly - on Tulsa itself: the burgeoning
of the long-established black community (with particulars on "Deep
Greenwood," a.k.a. the "Negroes' Wall Street"); three local
incidents - two involving whites - which convinced Tulsa's blacks
that law-enforcement officials were no bulwark against mob
violence. Also evident is the effect of inflammatory press
reportage. Thus: the events of 1921. On May 30, a young black
bootblack had an (unwitnessed) altercation with a young white
female elevator operator; on May 31, he was arrested and, while
under investigation, excoriated in the Tulsa Tribune as an
assailant liable to be lynched; on the evening of the 31st, a white
crowd formed outside the courthouse, armed blacks appeared to help
guard the prisoner, and when one (a WW I vet) refused to give up
his gun to a white, fighting broke out - which resulted, within the
next 24 hours, in the destruction of the black community and the
death of approximately 75 blacks and whites. Blacks did fight back
(Ellsworth opens with an eyewitness account of the defense of "Deep
Greenwood"); but half of them, cripplingly, were interned (as
against no whites). Blacks also rebuilt their community - Ellsworth
stresses - without direct white aid. Blacks ("armed negroes" plus
outside "agitation") were blamed for the riot, too - but "the
lynchings ceased." "At a terrible price," Ellsworth writes in one
of his few editorial statements, "black Tulsans had shown their
white brethren that they were not going to let it happen here." His
unassuming command of the source materials, plus his relaxed way
with a narrative, could spur others - even on an advanced high
school level - to explore the local past. (There will also,
pertinently, be pictures.) The book's historical contribution -
limited only by a dearth Of willing white informants - makes it a
worthy companion to William M. Turtle's established study of the
1919 Chicago riot in the literature on the era's racial conflict.
(Kirkus Reviews)
When a crows began to gather outside the jail in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, on the evening of May 31, 1921., the fate of one of its
prisoners, a young black male, seemed assured. Accused of
attempting to rape a white woman, Dick Rowland was with little
doubt about to be lynched.
But in another part of town, a small group of black men, many of
them World War I veterans, decided to risk lives for a different
vision of justice. Before it was all over, Tulsa had erupted into
one of America's worst racial nightmares, leaving scores dead and
hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed.
Exhaustively researched, 'Death in a Promised Land' is
compelling story of racial ideologies, southwestern politics, and
yellow journalism, and of an embattled black community's struggle
to hold onto its land and freedom. More than just the chronicle of
one of the nation's most devastating race riots, this critically
acclaimed study of American race relations is, above all, a
gripping story of terror and lawlessness, and of courage, hedonism,
and human perserverance.
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