Sarah Page knew Dick Roland.
Maybe they were as much friends as a respectable 17-year-old white girl with dishwater blond hair working her way through business college and a 19-year-old shoeshine "boy" could be in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921.
Maybe they were lovers. There's reason to suspect they were, but the detail makes the story richer. Their love would be forbidden. Every time Dick stepped into Sarah's elevator in the Drexel Building, something would pass between them. Behind the backs of the other passengers their eyes would meet. Those rides could have been fraught with delicious, dangerous tension.
Dick rode Sarah's elevator multiple times every day. Sometimes he was delivering to the oil executives on the third and fourth floors of the Drexel Building their freshly polished shoes or boots. Sometimes he was headed to the "colored-only" restroom on the building's top floor--the shoeshine parlor that employed him had no separate facilities for blacks, and it was the closest one available.
And if we are continuing to force our star-crossed lovers motif into the narrative, it would provide him with another opportunity to see Sarah.
Anyway, on Memorial Day, May, 30, 1921, Dick got into Sarah's elevator, and something happened.
Maybe the elevator didn't stop even with the floor, maybe Sarah hadn't timed it right and the floor of the elevator was uneven with the threshold, and Dick tripped as he got on. Stumbling forward, he reached out blind and grabbed her arm. Maybe he pulled her off balance, maybe she fell. Certainly she screamed--she made some sort of sharp noise.
The Tulsa Tribune said he "attacked her, scratching her hands and face and tearing her clothes." Their source for this was apparently Sarah; reading the newspaper article it appears she made a statement to this effect to the police, who subsequently arrested Dick "Rowland," who the newspaper claimed identified himself as Diamond Dick.
But it wasn't Sarah who went to the police. It was someone from Renberg's Clothing Company, a mens' store that occupied the first two floors of the Drexel Building. This employee--never named in any of the contemporary accounts--heard Sarah make her sharp sound, hurried to assist her, "and the negro fled."
In his recent book Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Race Riot, Tulsa World reporter Randy Krehbiel pauses for a moment over the curious anonymity of the Renberg employee who ran to Sarah's aid. If he was a hero who had prevented a sexual assault, why wouldn't the newspapers want to make more of his involvement?
Krehbiel, noting that the store would have been closed on Memorial Day, suggests that the intervener was someone more prominent than a store clerk, and may have been store owner Sam Renberg, a major advertiser who might have persuaded the newspapers to keep his name out of it.
In any case, we can hold on to our fiction. Sarah was startled when Dick tripped and fell against her. When the man saw her and Dick together she panicked. It was the Renberg man who went to the police, and Sarah, frightened for her reputation, went along. We don't know; there's no record of what Sarah might have told them.
Dick bolted, knowing that he risked being lynched if he was taken into custody for attempted rape.
This was not paranoia. "There was a movement afoot . . . among white people to go to the county courthouse . . . and lynch the bootblack," the Tulsa World reported after his arrest. (A persistent rumor that the Tribune published an editorial under the headline "To Lynch Negro Tonight," has been widely debunked, but the newspaper printed plenty of other inflammatory rhetoric.)
Authorities soon determined Dick wasn't safe in the jail, so they secretly moved him to the top floor of the county courthouse. He was the lone prisoner on the block, surrounded by three deputies and Sheriff Willard M. McCullough (all members of the Ku Klux Klan, according to Tulsa historian Steve Gerkin) with a temporary gallows sitting right outside his cell.
But Dick's whereabouts somehow leaked, and a white mob formed outside the courthouse. By sunset on May 31, it had grown to more than 1,000 people, some of them armed. McCullough disabled the elevator and barricaded the only door, gave his deputies the order to shoot on sight anyone coming up the stairwell.
About 9:30 p.m., 50 to 60 black men, many of them World War I veterans, arrived on the scene carrying rifles and shotguns. They said they had come at the behest of the sheriff, who later denied he had asked for their help.
Some of the white folks left. Some came back with guns. More black folks arrived with guns. Someone tried to take someone else's gun. A shot was fired; maybe it was an accident or intended as a warning. But it set it off.
A few seconds of gunfire and as many as a dozen people, black and white, lay dead in the street. Outnumbered more than 20 to 1, the black folks headed back to their North Tulsa neighborhood. Back to Greenwood Avenue, back to the Black Wall Street.
On June 1, North Tulsa burned. The Klan had an air force; they firebombed buildings from the sky. Hundreds of people died, thousands were left homeless. Some white folks took some black folks into their homes.
Dick was not lynched by the mob that night. Sheriff McCullough told his adoptive mother, Damie Ford, that deputies had spirited him away that night to Kansas City, Mo., to live with some of Sarah's relatives. (!?)
I want to believe this, but Gerkin does not. He believes Dick might have killed by the deputies and left in a ditch, or had his body thrown into the Arkansas River. Or maybe more likely, he'd been put on a train and told never to come back.
They couldn't hold him; Sarah refused to press charges.
The editor of the Tulsa Tribune, Richard Lloyd Jones (Frank Lloyd Wright's kid cousin), wrote an op-ed for the June 2 Chicago Tribune: "The bad black man is a beast. He drinks the cheapest and vilest whiskey. He breaks every law to get it. He is a dope fiend. He holds life lightly. He is a bully and a brute. A dozen of such collect at the Tulsa county courthouse with firearms when they hear the lynching rumor . . ."
Americans shouldn't need an HBO drama about masked vigilantes to educate them about the Tulsa Riot of 1921, but apparently we did. The opening moments of Watchmen stuck pretty close to the facts. There was no need for hyperbole to make it cinematic. No need to make up anything.
I'll make something up. Dick and Sarah were in love. They got away. They grew old together someplace. Someplace far from Tulsa.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 11/05/2019