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

a city ordinance against having a rooming house above a garage, so he decided to keep working at his old one. John and Loula were then faced with what to do with the empty first floor. The answer came when they read in a newspaper that a theater in Oklahoma City had gone bankrupt, so they purchased its equipment and created the Williams Dreamland Theatre, the first black theater in Tulsa. Silent movies, accompanied by a piano player, were shown and live entertainment was scheduled as well. Loula, assuredly the managerial family member, ran the theater.
    In the best American entrepreneurial tradition, the Williams family prospered.
II
     
    On May 31, 1921, sixteen-year-old Bill Williams, together with some of his classmates at the Booker T. Washington High School, was busy decorating a rented hall on Archer Street for the senior prom which was to be held that night. Other students were rehearsing for the graduation exercises not far away on Greenwood Avenue. But before young Williams and his classmates could finish their decorating, an adult came in and told them to go home. They were told that it looked like there might be some racial trouble that evening. Having read that afternoon’s Tulsa Tribune, which carried the headline TO LYNCH NEGRO TONIGHT , 1 Bill had already sensed this. But rather than go directly home, he headed for the Dreamland Theatre, where his mother was at work. Inside the theater, a man got up on stage and told the audience, “We’re not going to let this happen. We’re going to go downtown and stop this lynching. Close this place down.”
    Shortly thereafter, around eight or nine o’clock in the evening, black Tulsans began to gather on Greenwood near Archer, in the heart of their business district. Some of the men had guns. Soon, groups of men drove downtown in cars, and John Williams was one of those who went. Bill wanted to go, too, “to see what was going on,” but his mother would not let him. Instead, the two of them went home, to their apartment above the confectionary. John came home about midnight, after the shooting had begun, and told the family—Loula, Bill, and a young man named Hosea who stayed with them—to go to bed.

The Dreamland Theatre .
Courtesy of W. D. Williams

Bill Williams, top left, ca . 1921.
Courtesy of W. D. Williams
    Loula had been remodeling the family’s apartment shortly before that night, and she had an inside wall removed near the back of the apartment, leaving only the exposed plumbing and ventilation pipes. When Bill Williams woke up the next morning, around five or six, he found his father in the back, resting his 30–30 rifle against the exposed pipes. A repeating shotgun was also at his side. The shooting had begun again. Situated where he was, John could observe goings on both to the west and the south of their building. When white invaders exposed themselves, John would cut loose with his rifle, firing through the window screens. He told his son that he was “defending Greenwood.”
    John kept this up for a couple of hours. Before daylight, the whites generally stayed out of Greenwood, but after dawn, their numbers and their determination to enter the black community increased. Hidden as he was, it was some time before the whites found out where John’s rifle fire was coming from, but once they did, they started to riddle the building with gunfire. An airplane flew overhead and, probably anxiously, John fired at it. Finally, he told the family that it was time to leave their home. Too many whites were coming.
    The family went downstairs and ran north up Greenwood to an undertaker’s parlor located about eight buildings away. About ten men were already inside, most of them unarmed. John Williams ran across Greenwood Avenue to Hardy’s Pool Hall, where he could get a “right-hand shot” at any whites who were rounding the corner at Greenwood and Archer, or were breaking into his family’s home. In the undertaker’s parlor, Bill went to the back