Race riot opinions differ based on perspective

TULSA, Okla. (AP) -- Almost 79 years since one of the nation's most heinous race riots, Tulsa residents and historians still debate which spark set racial tensions ablaze. One widely accepted version

Monday, March 6th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

TULSA, Okla. (AP) -- Almost 79 years since one of the nation's most heinous race riots, Tulsa residents and historians still debate which spark set racial tensions ablaze. One widely accepted version of the events involves a 19-year-old boot black named Dick Rowland.

On May 30, 1921, Rowland is said to have gone into the Drexel Building, between Third and Fourth streets on Main, to use the fourth-floor "blacks only" rest room. As he was leaving, Rowland somehow came into contact with the 17-year-old elevator operator, Sarah Page. She screamed, he ran and a clerk from Renberg's Clothiers reportedly called the police.

Police arrested Rowland the following morning and rumors that he would be lynched precipitated a confrontation between blacks and whites at the courthouse, where Rowland was being held.

Shooting started at about 10:30 p.m., continued into the small hours of the morning, then resumed with a vengeance at dawn on June 1 as whites swept into the predominantly black Greenwood district.

But the alleged "assault" was almost immediately labeled a misunderstanding. Page refused to press charges, and police said Rowland had simply bumped into her.

Robert Littlejohn disputes the elevator theory. His family has been in Tulsa for generations. He said he remembers his grandfather being one of the men who went to the Tulsa County Courthouse on May 31, 1921, to stop what they thought was going to be a lynching. And he said he has heard tales about the 12 hours of carnage that followed.

But William O' Brien has a different set of memories from hi father. Gerald O' Brien was an attorney who went into Greenwood with the National Guard on the morning of June 1, 1921.

O'Brien said his father was one of the few white attorneys to actively defend blacks and became something of an unofficial bodyguard for black attorney Amos Hall when Hall became the subject of racial harassment.

Back then, Catholics also drew the unwanted attention, along with blacks, of the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, Gerald O'Brien drew some of the same sort of threats.

Littlejohn believes the riot wasn't a riot at all. "It was a planned plot to rid Negroes of their land," he said. O'Brien said that view, no matter how heartfelt, is sensationalized fiction.

Littlejohn says black Tulsans have long believed the elevator incident never even happened. An advertisement in the May 29, 1921, Tulsa World said that the store would be closed for Memorial Day on May 30. However, the elevator may have been open to serve more than two dozen private offices on the Drexel Building's upper floors.

Littlejohn said blacks felts pressured to sell Greenwood real estate, and there was a conspiracy to run them out of the area. O'Brien finds the conspiracy theories untenable, as do most professional historians -- including those sympathetic to the cause of riot reparations.

What happened, they say, was an outrage, but it was not premeditated. The violence was spontaneous, they say, essentially a community temper tantrum.