Historian says black district not bombed

Saturday, January 6th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

TULSA, Okla. (AP) _ With less than two months remaining before it must report to the Legislature, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission is still divided over the historical facts surrounding the 1921 destruction of black neighborhoods in Tulsa.

Eyewitness accounts of the riot indicate that Tulsa's black Greenwood district was bombed during the riot. The accounts include the statements of some black survivors that they were shot at and firebombed from the air.

But Beryl Ford, an amateur historian and director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, told the commission on Friday it was his professional opinion that the area could not have been bombed as the commission's historical consultant, Scott Ellsworth, states with some reservation in his report to the commission.

Ford said photos of the district show no signs of explosions. Homemade incendiaries, Ford said, would have been impractical and dangerous in the open-cockpit, wood-and-fabric Curtiss JN-4s _ commonly called Jennies _ thought to have been used.

A number of commissioners found Ford's statement unconvincing.

``How could you discount all those eyewitness accounts?'' Vivian Clark-Adams said. ``Because they are black, their stories are discounted.''

Commissioner Eddie Faye Gates said she, too, puts greater faith in the witnesses and said not all authorities agree with Ford's assessment.

``Would it not be possible,'' commissioner Jim Lloyd asked, ``for someone to make an incendiary device from petroleum jelly and kerosene and throw it out of an airplane?''

``You'd be a damn fool to do it,'' said Ford.

According to contemporary newspaper accounts, the Jennies were manned by police or pilots operating under police instruction and were used for reconnaissance. Gates thinks the planes were part of an organized and well-planned assault masterminded by what she calls ``the elites.''

Ford agrees white businessmen wanted parts of the Greenwood district for industrial development, but he says there is no evidence they resorted to violence to get it.

The fighting broke out May 31, 1921, when a lynch mob clashed with a group of blacks seeking to protect a black shoeshine man who was being held in an attack on a white woman.

White mobs opened fire on the Greenwood district and torched churches, hotels, restaurants and more than 1,000 homes.

Many blacks believe the riot was a premeditated assault, launched by city leaders and driven by racial hatred, jealously and greed.

Ford and other white Tulsans believe it was a spontaneous outbreak driven by rising racial tension and ignited by two linked events _ the arrest of a young black man on a trumped-up assault charge and the mobilization of armed blacks to protect him.

Seventy deaths have been documented, but experts maintain the death toll easily could have exceeded 300, making it one of the deadliest race riots in the nation.

The commission plans to meet next on Jan. 26. At that meeting it hopes to approve a summary of the commissions' findings and the commissioners' various viewpoints and finalize the report to be presented the Legislature by Feb. 15.

The commission faces a Feb. 28 statutory deadline.