Death in a Promised Land by Scott Ellsworth Read Free Book Online Page A

loss of life. It was just an incident. Such an attitude had a great deal to do with eradicating the fear that a Negro boy growing up in Tulsa might have felt in the years following the riot.
    Scott Ellsworth has done a magnificent job both of researching the riot and writing about it. Sixty years have passed, and there are not many people alive who are able to recall the events with the reliability that the historian requires. One must be extremely careful, moreover, in using sources, oral or written, about an incident involving such deep emotions. Ellsworth has written with care and good judgment, appreciating the full dimensions of the tragedy, but resisting the temptation to be pretentiously maudlin or excessively moral. We all have our personal versions of the riot, but Ellsworth has written an account of the events that comes as close to being the definitive history of the Tulsa riot as I have seen. In doing so he has written a version for all of us, meanwhile warning us to be careful in the way we use our own version. On his behalf I invite the reader to take most seriously his account, which has both integrity and authenticity.
    John Hope Franklin
     

Death in a Promised Land

Prelude
In the
Promised Land
     
I
     
    Bill Williams once asked his father why he had come to Oklahoma. “Well,” he replied, “I came out to the promised land.” Indeed, when John Williams and his wife Loula came to Tulsa during the first years of the twentieth century, it was for them a place of promise. John was from Mississippi; Loula was a Tennessean. John had worked for a railroad in his home state, and his knowledge of steam engines helped him to secure a job in Tulsa at the Thompson Ice Cream Company, which used steam power to make its products. Although John and Loula Williams were by no means the first black residents of Tulsa, they came at a time when the city’s black and white populations, though growing, were still relatively small. There was not a black doctor in Tulsa, then located in Indian Territory, in 1905 when Loula gave birth to Bill. She chose to travel to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to a black physician there.
    John’s work at the ice cream company paid well enough that the Williamses became the first black Tulsans to own a car. In those days, most automobile owners would repair their own cars, and John was very adept at working on his. As Tulsa’s population climbed and more and more Tulsans purchased automobiles, many of them took their cars to John Williams for repair work. This extra source of income soon became so lucrative that John quit work at the ice cream company and opened a full-time garage of his own, along Greenwood Avenue, which soon became the center of the city’s black business district.
    About 1912, the Williamses built a three-story brick building on the northwest corner of Greenwood and Archer avenues. On the first floor was a confectionary, complete with a twelve-foot fountain and table seating for nearly fifty people. If John had a mechanical mind, Loula had an entrepreneurial one, and the confectionary which she managed soon became a money maker. She sold ice cream, candy, and sodas, and this confectionary was one of black Tulsa’s first commercial refreshment spots other than bootleg whiskey joints. On the second floor of the building was the apartment where the Williams family lived, while the third floor was rented out as office space to dentists, doctors, and lawyers. Greenwood, as the district was called, was fast growing into a thriving business center.

John, Loula, and Bill Williams, about 1912. Their automobile is a 1911 Nonval k.
Courtesy of W. D. Williams
    Then, in 1914, John wanted a bigger garage for his growing automobile business, so the Williamses erected another building, a two-story brick structure, further up Greenwood Avenue. The second story was a twenty-one-room boarding house, and the first floor was to be John’s new garage. John soon found out, however, that there was