The razing, murder, burning, theft, and rape by white mobs that engulfed Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 resulted in untold deaths has correctly been called a racist pogrom; and one the most barbaric in U.S. history. But it was a pogrom met by a powerful, organized, and dogged resistance which inflicted enormous, and hidden, casualties among the pogromists. Chandler Owen, co-editor of with A. Phillip Randolph of ‘The Messenger,’ with an essay on the class and ‘hue’ character of the conflagration.

‘Tulsa’ by Chandler Owen from The Messenger. Vol. 3 No. 2. July, 1921.

ACROSS the country yonder the prairies roll out to the Oklahoma plains. In the Northeast part of the state, upon the crest of a hill, rests–or trembles–the tumultuous city of Tulsa. Within this urban center of seventy-five thousand souls ten thousand Negroes carry on an almost separate economy—a distinct existence, as it were. Some of these Negroes are wealthy, a few very wealthy; the huge majority of them are poor, very poor.

The few wealthy ones own oil wells just as certain white men own oil wells in Oklahoma. Between these two there is competition. The masses of the black poor in Tulsa compete with the masses of poor whites in the perpetual fight for jobs. Between these two feeling is generally high. With the white and Negro businessmen there is a competition to sell their goods, their commodities. Between the black and white laborers there is this same competition to sell their labor power. In Tulsa then, we have a unique situation-a complete division between Negro and white capital and between Negro and white labor.

We wonder one day whether these groups will not clash. We hope not and yet we expect difficulty. As the old folks of the South would say, “We’ll go to bed and sleep on it.”

It is eight o’clock as we awake. We turned and twisted; we rolled all night. When we did sleep we dreamed, lurid, horrid dreams. We beheld strange scenes. A group of Negroes and white men are discerned at the Tulsa, Oklahoma Court House–apparently in argument! What is it all about? The white men mutter, “We’ll get him; we’ll learn the damn nigger a lesson.” Guns are sticking out of their pockets. Some seem to be holding a rope.

Automobiles are gathering. They look like armored motor cars. The Negroes are mumbling rather indistinctly. Their tone seems resentful. We overheard the remark: “If they lynch him they’ve got to lynch me too.” Then another: “I ain’t got but one time to die and I expect to carry along some white man with me.” And again: “If we could die in France for this white man’s country, we can die for ourselves right here.” Finally in a sort of subdued chorus: “Now we’ll all stand together through thick and thin. Each of us will get one white man, if they start something.”

By this time the crowd was growing. More cars were drawing up; some with white men in them, others with Negroes. Neither the white men in the cars nor the Negroes in theirs had much to say. Their cars seldom stopped and when they did, it was for but a short time. Both groups seemed to be manouvering into position. It struck us as a sort of show of power to let the other know what dangerous resistance might be expected whenever the die was cast. Their movements were not unlike the actions of a great nation which sends its battle ships around the world threatening no one in particular but just letting others know what they may expect if the nation is attacked or should be invited to attack.

There are now hundreds of each race–a veritable sea of faces. Looking over them from our point of vantage, a perfect dead line appears between them. No Negro is mingling with the whites; no whites are among the Negroes, save a very few light complexioned mulattoes whose racial assignment has no doubt long been fixed in the community.

The whole atmosphere is charged. The scene pregnant with excitement. On the faces of the whites can be seen that dogged and tenacious Anglo-Saxon determination to have its own sweet way. Their glistening eyes, too, evince the psychology of the Southerner; restive, fretting, nettled to think that he should be retarded, maybe even thwarted, in his designs-by “N***s.” Ye Gods!

Shifting our view, we next watch the Negro countenances. Fearless of consequences their eyes show an heroic fatalism, the kind of expression which emanates from knowledge of almost certain death in the performance of inevitable duty from which, however, one has no desire to escape.

It was as though they had been reading, rehearsing, thinking about the splendid poem of their fellow race poet, the inimitable Claude McKay (who so admirably expressed what we were reading in their faces. And just as soldiers before a battle, from which they may never expect to return, in silence frequently utter the Lord’s prayer, resigned to the death which almost certainly awaited them; so these Negro heroes in deep, resonant whispers timed to the meter of their pulsing hearts, were earnestly chanting McKay’s “If We Must Die!” In dead earnest they proceeded:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die, oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us, though dead!

Oh, kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but–fighting back!

We looked; we listened; we stared; we gazed! These black boys’ miens spoke cold resolution. The time had passed for lightly alleging rape against a Negro, and then, as if the sport of the Gods, lynching him at midnight, mid-day, anytime–before a group of howling, dervish-dancing barbarians who carry off the bones for souvenirs. We wondered who this Negro type was, where he had come from, what had evolved him.

We began to analyze their faces. In color they were black, brown, yellow-nay, even white-so variegated in color that we wondered how black men had become so many lighter hues, especially in the Southland where the races are divided, we are told, by an “instinctive,” “mother’s-milk,” “ineradicable” race prejudice.

In stature they were varied, multiform; some tall like veritable giants, some stalwart in body but medium of height, while others were the veriest runts, born probably in poverty or slavery, forced on the streets of crime, confined first in jail, then in peonage–half-fed, slimly clothed, poorly housed, till their bodies were stunted, deformed, arrested in development.

Socially, too, the types were separable. There was the hardened criminal, born and reared in poverty and vice, denied the right to play or learn during childhood, predestined by the chanceless environment of the South to misery and mire. This type hated all white men.

Again, there were black boys, brown boys, white-colored boys, who had secured such education as the short-termed, poorly-equipped country school of Oklahoma afforded. These were the great average, the persistent mean, the predominant type, however. Then, too, as happens always where great race battle have to be fought, could be seen the fine intellectual specimen of Negro manhood, the group which as the result of its education, success and social triumph, is the constant butt of attack from the whites because it is a competitor. Again, it has to carry the burdens of the race on its back because it is more conscious of proscriptions, foresees more clearly the wanton narrowing of opportunity and, pricked with a thousand civilized desires, growing more intense and extensive, feels most keenly the burden of being black things in America. We study this type even more. Their faces are inexpressibly sad. They are recognized as the leaders; they are looked up to by the others; upon them is the responsibility for advice, for guidance. The force is at hand always, but this group must supply light, leadership, information.

In one thing they seem uniform. All seem to have a will of iron–an invincible determination to put down the Hun in America. All seem resolved to make their dying hereafter a costly investment. And who, pray, is this creature!

It is an apparition. No, it is “Baquo’s Ghost” to the South. It is the Nemesis of Dixie. It is the Sword of Damocles over Georgia, over Mississippi, over Texas, over Alabama, et al. It is the hand writing on the wall for alleged white superiority in America.

Verily it is the New Negro who “has arrived with stiffened back-bone, dauntless manhood, defiant eye, steady hand, and a will of iron.”

It is he with whom the maddening white mob of Tulsa, Oklahoma, is about to clash.

The Riot

As a policeman approached the Negroes, one of them stepped out to meet him. “Give me your gun,” he said.

To which the Negro replied: “And are you going to protect me?”

“No,” said the policeman.

Then, said the Negro, “You cannot protect me, yet you don’t want me to protect myself.”

The policeman was impatient with this impertinence from a “n***r,” so without more talk he attempted to search the Negro for his gun. When the Negro indignantly shoved the policeman away, the officer drew his gun and fired, killing the Negro instantly.

The Negroes shot back, killing the officer. Firing became general. Hell broke loose. The riot was on.

Negroes take the offensive. The whites force them back. The news quickly spreads and the whites are reinforced.

The Negroes retreat. Reinforcements from the black belt are coming. They arrive. The Negroes make a stand. The whites are again reinforced. They drive the Negroes before them. Once more the Negroes make a stand and, like the little band of Greeks at Thermopylae, they rain death and destruction upon their opponents.

The white fiends are riled, frenzied! Negroes fighting back, killing white men is more than they can stand. The lust to burn is rekindled. “Down to the Negro district,” they cry. “We’ll burn their houses.”

Here was the triumph of the mad beasts, the unspeakable ghouls, the man-masked jackals, the prowling hyenas, clothed in white skins out side, but lined with black inside.

The firebrands light the torch. In a few minutes the Negro homes are in tongues of flame. Cringing and shrinking from open warfare with the Negro men, the white fiends, creep and crouch behind the Negro homes, lighting them beneath the helpless women and children.

Shrieks, screams, groans, yells are heard! In night clothes the women and children attempt to escape the lips of flame. A man with children is seen leaving his burning home. The damnable demons, (O! what shall we call them?) shoot him. Later we discover it as the body of Dr. A.C. Jones, a reputable Negro physician and surgeon, and his family.

Gloating, mocking, mirthful, the gorillas of Tulsa moved on, spreading glistening grief, scattering grim death.

Outnumbered seven to one, opposed by the police force, harassed by aeroplanes, dropping bombs upon them the Negroes, though battling heroically, are forced to yield. They are marched to the Fairgrounds and held under guard in detention camps.

Their homes are gone. Their loved ones are dead. Gloom encircles their firesides. They see a dank and cavernous future. The glowing embers are but the only evidence of the charred and blackened ruins of their modest homes, secured and built through a life of toil.

“The human mind naturally shrinks from the perpetration of a palpable evil.” So Tulsa reflected, decided to raise the money and to rebuild the Negro homes. Here was one gleam of justice and of joy.

The poor Negro is goaded from birth to death by American race prejudice. From the unasked cradle to the unwelcome grave, he experiences a gray dawn, a drab noon, a seered evening, a gloomy twilight. Lashed by the fury of mobs, tormented by poverty, crushed by proscription and discrimination, weighted down by wanton narrowing of opportunity–the wonder is that he bears his heavy burden, his wan lot, on to the natural end! But the new Negro has that perseverance and determination which will secure for him final triumph over race prejudice–even in America!

The Messenger was founded and published in New York City by A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owen in 1917 after they both joined the Socialist Party of America. The Messenger opposed World War I, conscription and supported the Bolshevik Revolution, though it remained loyal to the Socialist Party when the left split in 1919. It sought to promote a labor-orientated Black leadership, “New Crowd Negroes,” as explicitly opposed to the positions of both WEB DuBois and Booker T Washington at the time. Both Owen and Randolph were arrested under the Espionage Act in an attempt to disrupt The Messenger. Eventually, The Messenger became less political and more trade union focused. After the departure of and Owen, the focus again shifted to arts and culture. The Messenger ceased publishing in 1928. Its early issues contain invaluable articles on the early Black left.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/messenger/1921-07-jul-mess-RIAZ.pdf