Good Morning POU and welcome to the weekend. Today is the last installment in our series on Ottowa Gurley and Black Wall Street.
Late in the evening of May 30, 1921, after everything had closed for the night, a group of the black men who had gone to the courthouse earlier, made their way back. They flashed their guns as they approached and again confronted the police chief on the courthouse steps.
“Parading around with those guns is against the law” he told them. “Violence is easy to start, but hard to stop.” He pointed to the top floor of the courthouse where snipers were positioned with rifles. “Look up at those windows, see those gun barrels pointed at you? They will cut you down before the first person reaches the courthouse. Now go home before a lot of people get shot.”
As he was speaking, a white man approached the steps.
“Nigger, what are you going to do with that pistol?”
“I’m going to use it if I need to”.
“No, you give it to me”
“Like hell I will.”
The two men began to struggle over the gun. A shot discharged as they fought and then all hell broke loose.
A hail of bullets came from the white mob, hitting several of the black men on the steps. Those who could, moved into alleys and started to run towards Greenwood. Men in cars with gun barrels protruding from the windows mowed down people who tried to escape.
As the black men raced back into Greenwood, the rioters followed, shooting up buildings and throwing bombs through windows.
Gurley was in bed with his wife Emma when the fighting started. He could smell smoke and hear the gunfire in the distance. When the sun came up he looked out the window of his hotel to see smoke and flames. The violence had been followed by waves of looters who were looting stores, burning down the homes of black citizens and killing them in the streets.
Through the smoke, Gurley saw 6 white men holding shotguns, jugs of gasoline and torches. One of the men told Gurley “You better get out of that hotel because we’re gonna burn all this goddamn stuff. Get your guests out.” The men went down the street, door to door, telling people to evacuate before they started burning.
Gurley ran back inside, found Emma and told her “we need to go, their fire is gonna get us.”
“But where will we go”, Emma cried.
“I don’t know.”
The Gurleys decided to try and run south across the train tracks to Tulsa. The people knew Gurley there. He’d been reasonable, the one who tried to keep the young men of Greenwood in line. Surely they’d spare him. Surely someone would give him shelter. When they got outside, two white men began shooting at the couple. Emma fell to the ground.
“Don’t worry about me. You need to run” she told Gurley.
Gurley took off without saying good-bye or looking back.
As Gurley ran, he saw the National Guard and mobs of white men pouring into Greenwood. He was grabbed by some members of the guard who were removing blacks from Greenwood and quarantining them at a baseball park just across the tracks.
At the park, Gurley was isolated, the constituents of the district he built stared at him without speaking. They blamed him. His racial conciliation. His self-interest.
“My Lord! It’s Gurley!”
OW turned to see Emma up in the stadium bleachers. She ran down to Gurley and they embraced.
OW had lost the faith of his people, he had lost his dream, and he would eventually lose more than $250,000 ($3.4 million) in the riots, but that moment, he was glad he hadn’t lost Emma too.
After the riots he tried to sell his ruined lands to a local railroad company, but the deal fell through.
In the months afterward, he moved to a 4 bedroom house in south Los Angeles and opened a hotel. A rumor spread that he was dead, that he had been lynched. Gurley was not dead, but his dream was. In the end, he sold his land to other African Americans in Greenwood who ultimately stayed there and began to rebuild.
In 1926, WEB Du Bois visited Greenwood again. The riot’s damage had been repaired and new buildings had risen. Looking to the resilient black faces of the Promised Land, he wrote, “Black Tulsa is a happy city. It has new clothes. It is young and gay and strong. Five little years ago, fire and blood and robbery leveled it to the ground. Scars are there, but the city is impudent and noisy. It believes in itself. Thank God for the grit of Black Tulsa.”