1921
Tulsa Race
War: Background:
Oklahoma
and Texas are the cowboy parts of the American South …
characterised by broken-down
pick-up trucks
blaring 'hillbilly'
and 'cowboy'
music, having rifle
racks, flying Confederate flags, and filled with beer-swilling,
tattooed, tobacco-chewing, violence-prone
Good Ole Boys
wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots …
driving right out of Erskine
Caldwell's 'Tobacco Road' …. on their way to a cross burning.
Truly
mission
territory as
the 'Dust Bowl State',
possessing scrub scenery, and having unending summer weeks of
sultry 100º heat;
one does not visit Oklahoma
except on business: This
is 'why' it was given to the Indians
… until
oil was discovered….
Vividly
depicted in John Steinbeck's
'The Grapes of Wrath', Oklahoma
is politically dominated by corrupt flopper-bellied
'cornpone'-type Southern politicians a la
‘Boss Hogg’ (The
Dukes of
Hazzard), …
legally bribed
by ‘campaign
contributions’ from
the State’s
oil elite a la
'J. R, Ewing'
(Dallas)
to act against the public interest,
… who
appeal to Oklahoma's poor white majority to vote against
their own economic
interest (i.e.,
'Right-to-Work', 'Tort Reform',
'Service Taxes') by
'racially coded'
propaganda for the benefit of the State's wealthy 'country club'
caste, who initially swindled
Oklahoma's naïve Indians out of their allotted and surplus
lands, oil,
gas and mineral rights … with whiskey.
Oklahoma
is a 'serial execution'
state …
whose laws subject children
as young as 13 to the death penalty
… with
'Bible Christian'
cheer leaders at the
State Penitentiary actually
urging on the
executioner …
illustrating the
quality of poor white
Oklahoma bible-belt 'Christianity':
A recent 'law-and-order'
Governor may have executed twelve innocent men, convicted
on concocted evidence, to accumulate 54 macho execution 'notches'
on his belt: See
www.ccadp.org/killerkeating.htm
Oklahoma's
second Governor Lee Cruce (1911-1915) came within one vote of
being impeached by the State's racialist Legislature
for commuting all death sentences upon discovering that the
death penalty in application singles out Blacks for execution:
Although only 7% of Oklahoma's population is Black,
Governor Cruce discovered that 95% of the condemned men on
the State's 'death row' were Blacks….
In
the mid-1960's
the entire
Oklahoma State
Supreme Court
had to be impeached
or were
forced to
resign for
decades-long acceptance
since Statehood of
bribes to 'throw' judicial
decisions, …
illustrating the
quality of
'Oklahoma justice'.
Such thoroughgoing political rottenness lead to the
complete political take-over of the entire
State during the mid-1920’s by the Ku Klux Klan:
Taken
over by the Klan following the
November 1923 impeachment of the State's
courageous anti-Klan Governor,
Jack Walton,
Oklahoma became an American yokel version of the Third
Reich: Terrorised
by hooded Klansmen burning crosses in racial hatred rather than by
jack booted Storm Troopers goose-stepping in torchlight parades.
As the Founder of
both Tulsa and its First Presbyterian Church (6th October 1885),
Presbyterian Elder J. M.
Hall induced Rev. and Mrs. Charles W.
Kerr to assume the Pastorate of the First Presbyterian
Church. Soon after the
Kerrs arrived on Saturday, 10th February 1900, J. M. Hall took them on
a guided tour of the town. J.
M. Hall explained that in the early-days the Black population
had freely settled in the north western corner formed by the
crossing of the East-West Frisco Railroad track and the
North-South Midland Valley Railroad track:
The area north of the Frisco rail tracks and west of the
Midland Valley rail tracks. Known
as 'Greenwood,' this original Black settlement in Tulsa was
uncontroversial …
until the 1901 discovery of oil at nearby Glenpool.
This rapidly transformed Tulsa into an 'oil boom' town.
Tulsa's
Presbyterian Founder:
J. M. Hall
Because rail transportation was the only feasible means of
moving heavy oil field equipment in and out, Tulsa's early-day
civic leadership quickly began coveting the Greenwood district for
transformation into a rail switchyard, industrial supply, and
warehouse district. The
Blacks refused to sell their properties in Greenwood for any
amount of money: The
Greenwood Pastors told Dr. Kerr that Black people never like
selling any property which they own.
This is because white people have often cheated Blacks out
of land and will not readily sell Blacks new land.
A Greenwood family selling their home would be unlikely to
find a new place to live: Tulsa has racial restrictions against
Blacks owning property in white south Tulsa.
So, the 'plans' of Tulsa's civic leadership had to be
shelved ... until
the Courthouse lynching attempt of Tuesday, 31st May 1921,
presented Tulsa's civic leadership with a completely unexpected
opportunity to prevail upon Tulsa's City Government to 'clear out'
the Black population from Greenwood
for their long-proposed rail,
industrial, and
warehouse project …
in what is locally
euphemised as 'The
Tulsa Race Riot' by embarrassed community leaders.
