Tulsa Massacre Article

5/29/2021 The Dreams of Jack and Daisy Scott - WSJ
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THE TULSA MASSACRE
The Dreams of Jack and Daisy

Scott
How the Tulsa Race Massacre tragically rippled across one
family in segregated Oklahoma
By
Lee Hawkins and Charity L. Scott
May 28, 2021 12:53 pm ET
Listen to this article (15 minutes)
Jack Scott, a 33-year-old professional boxer-turned-trainer who lived in Tulsa’s

thriving Greenwood neighborhood, would often tell his wife Daisy, “We’re going
to be rich one day.”
On May 31, 1921, he found himself outside the county courthouse, one of more
than 75 Black men who had gathered to prevent the rumored lynching of a 19-
year-old Black man. The next 24 hours would upend his plans and change the
trajectory of the Scotts’ lives.
The Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department was holding and protecting Dick Rowland,
a shoe shiner, in a jail cell on the top floor of the courthouse, according to Scott
Ellsworth,
a historian at the University of Michigan, who teaches in the
Department of Afro-American and African Studies. The day before, a white male
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dreams-of-jack-and-daisy-scott-11622220784?mod=series_tulsa&mod=djemwhatsnews#comments_sector 1/17
store clerk had accused Mr. Rowland of entering an elevator and assaulting its
teenage white operator, Sarah Page.
Even though she rejected that account and refused to press charges, the Tulsa
Tribune published an editorial headlined “To Lynch Negro Tonight” in one of its
May 31 editions, Prof. Ellsworth said. Talk of a lynching spread through Tulsa and
a white mob that swelled to 1,000 gathered outside the courthouse.
Mr. Scott and a cadre of Black World War I veterans and others headed there in
response. But their plan to help protect Mr. Rowland was derailed when an elderly
white man attempted to wrest away a gun from a tall Black man and it went off,
Prof. Ellsworth said.
That was the beginning of what has long been known as the “Tulsa Race Riot,”
though in recent years Oklahoma began to officially use the term “massacre”
instead. The details of the tragedy and its aftermath are known from court
documents, newspaper articles, eyewitness accounts and oral history projects
involving generations of Tulsa families, as well as from the work of historians and
other experts.
More than 1,200 homes were destroyed in segregated Greenwood and thousands of people were left homeless.
PHOTO: OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY-TULSA
The Black men retreated to Greenwood, the segregated neighborhood on the other
side of the railroad tracks that divided the town, after exchanging gunfire with the
portion of the mob that pursued them. Some white Tulsans spent the night
planning an invasion of the neighborhood. Police deputized hundreds of the white
men who had gathered in front of police headquarters. In Greenwood, some
residents prepared themselves to defend their homes and lives, while others
decided to flee, Prof. Ellsworth said.
Around 5 a.m. on June 1, thousands of armed white civilians and special deputies
poured over the train tracks into the district, overrunning the neighborhood. Over
the next eight hours, white Tulsans shot and killed residents and looted and
burned down 35 square blocks, with uniformed white police officers aiding in the
destruction, according to eyewitness accounts. Thousands of people were left
homeless, with more than 1,200 homes destroyed. An additional 215 homes were
looted but left standing, the American Red Cross reported.
Some 6,000 Black citizens were held in makeshift internment camps before being
relocated to the fairgrounds, where some of them were forced to work by the
National Guard, cleaning up the rubble left by the mobs, according to the
Oklahoma Historical Society. Most of the residents who didn’t flee the city lived in
a Red Cross-erected tent city built on Greenwood’s smoldering ashes for at least a
year.
The residents did succeed in saving Mr. Rowland’s life. He was indicted on a
charge of attempted rape on June 6, 1921, but charges were dropped after Ms.
Page refused to cooperate with his prosecution. He moved away and “slipped out
of history,” Prof. Ellsworth said, as historians don’t know when and where he died.
The Makings of a Riot

The city of Tulsa is located in the northeast part of Oklahoma, which had been
founded in 1907 and was racially segregated by law. Greenwood had its own post
office, library, schools, a hospital and several churches. Despite the Jim Crow laws
that relegated Black Tulsans to a lower-class status, by 1921 Greenwood had
grown into a “prosperous, vibrant” district that thrived through economic
collaboration and interdependence, said Prof. Ellsworth, who served as the lead
scholar on the 1921 Race Riot Commission. A Tulsa native, he drew on those
experiences to write his new book, “The Ground Breaking: An American City and
Its Search for Justice,” which delves into the massacre’s contemporary issues and
legacy.
The most affluent Blacks were usually the top-tier merchants, many of whom
owned modern one- and two-story homes, while a larger class of Black
entrepreneurs operated smaller businesses such as cafes and tailor shops. But the
lifeblood of the community was the thousands of Blacks who patronized those
businesses—the maids, butlers, chauffeurs, dishwashers, cooks and laborers who
worked in the white community.
Caver's French Cleaners was among the businesses destroyed during the massacre.
PHOTO: TULSA HISTORICAL SOCIETY & MUSEUM
These people, about 85% of Black Greenwood, primarily lived in very modest
wooden homes, most of which lacked running water or electricity, Prof. Ellsworth
said. But their spending with Greenwood’s Black-owned businesses helped the
community thrive. According to a review of the 1921 Tulsa City Directory
conducted by the 2001 Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot,
Greenwood had 191 businesses by 1921, including doctor’s offices, law practices
and two newspapers. It was home to nearly 9,000 Black residents.
Before the massacre, Mr. Scott traveled all over the country as a lightweight
boxer. He met Daisy during a trip to Little Rock, Ark., and they married in 1917 and
settled in Tulsa. Daisy Scott became a political cartoonist for one of the local Black
newspapers, the Tulsa Star. Her work spoke to the will of many Blacks to fight the
continuous stream of lynching across the U.S. and Jim Crow laws. She was
pregnant with the couple’s second child at the time of the massacre and gave birth
that September.
Rebuilding
Jack Scott’s boxing promo photo from 1907.

PHOTO: COURTNEY COLES FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Within days of the violence, Black Tulsans had already begun the long process of
rebuilding Greenwood. Black business owners filed claims for their losses, but
they were denied because authorities characterized the incident as a Black
uprising. Deeming the event a riot, as city officials did, triggered a commonly used
exclusionary clause that prevented payouts and applied to claimants of any race.
The Scotts lost their home, personal belongings and everything associated with
the milliner and seamstress business Daisy ran out of their home, said Lea
Michelle Cash,
their 68-year-old granddaughter. The Scotts went on to have 10
more children, but didn’t tell them about the massacre.
“They never spoke about it,” Ms. Cash said about the elders of her family and the
broader Tulsa community. “They kept it quiet, and it disappeared. Generation
after generation learned nothing about it.”
Ms. Cash never located any paperwork documenting her family’s losses, but she
did find her grandfather’s name on a plaque in Greenwood memorializing unpaid
claims, which lists $48,980.50 in Scott family losses. That is equivalent to
$739,008 in today’s dollars.
Five days after the massacre, Tulsa County indicted Mr. Scott, along with other
men, for traveling to the courthouse “in a violent, boisterous, unlawful and
tumultuous manner” and shooting “at and against the peaceable citizens of the
City of Tulsa,” according to a copy of the original indictment provided by Ms.
Cash.
Jack Scott and other Black men were indicted for traveling to the courthouse in an unlawful manner and shooting at the citizens of Tulsa.
PHOTO: SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE|, GIFT OF CASSANDRA P. JOHNSON SMITH
There was never a trial, and he didn’t serve time in prison. Some of the other men
charged, such as Stradford Hotel owner J.B. Stradford, decided to flee. Police chief
John Gustafson was indicted and convicted for his mishandling of the massacre,
and was removed from office, according to “Black Wall Street,” one of several
books on the massacre by lawyer Hannibal Johnson.
Mr. Gustafson never served
jail time. The charges against Mr. Scott and 53 other Black men were officially
dropped in 2007.
“For those men who were indicted, this hung over them like a dark cloud for the
rest of their lives,” Prof. Ellsworth said, “because they never knew whether they
would get arrested or picked up.” The exoneration “was very meaningful to me,
because of the fact that [the charge] was a lie,” Ms. Cash said. “They did not incite
the massacre. They were protecting the life of a young man.”
After the massacre, the Scotts rebuilt, with Mr. Scott training and managing
boxers. They rented out two homes and owned a small grocery store. Daisy Scott
never returned to her editorial cartoons.
Post-Traumatic Greenwood
The Scotts lost their home, personal belongings and everything associated with the
business Daisy ran out of their home, said their granddaughter Lea Michelle Cash.
The memories still linger in the minds, hearts and bodies of Black families from
Greenwood. The financial impact remains an open wound for many. These mental
images of burning buildings, bloody corpses, charred remains and people living in
tents are part of why so many Tulsans across races weren’t told about the
massacre by their families, said New York-based psychoanalyst Lee Jenkins,
whose work focuses extensively on racial trauma.
Many managed to rebuild, but the loss of their initial assets meant that they had
less wealth to pass to the next generation, which compounded the effects, said Dr.
Jenkins.
“If the idea that a Black man and a white woman being together on an elevator and
the resistance to Black progress would cause white people to feel justified in
destroying an entire neighborhood,” Dr. Jenkins said, “think about the day-to-day
challenges they faced in trying to get properly educated, applying for positions
and all the ways that they were excluded because of their color. That would have
an effect on anybody.”
The men who were indicted didn’t have

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS the benefit of society understanding the
When did you first learn about Black Wall effects of post-traumatic stress. It was as
Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre? Join though what happened during the
the conversation below. massacre “was all their fault, when they
hadn’t done anything but be victimized,”
Dr. Jenkins said. “But they were able to
live in spite of it.”
Ms. Cash’s mother, Altamese Marion Scott-Hudson, born 11 years after the
massacre, didn’t learn about the family’s history until she was 66 years old. She
had always described her father as an “angry Black man,” which led to “domestic
violence in the family,” Ms. Cash recalled. Learning of the massacre gave Ms. Cash
a better understanding of her grandfather, she said.
One afternoon in August 1946, two of Daisy Scott’s preteen daughters found her
fallen ill. They called a priest from St. Monica, the main Catholic parish in the
Greenwood District, who happened to be white. He rushed over before calling
another priest, and they offered to take her to the hospital. But when Mr. Scott
walked in and saw the two white men, he yelled, “We don’t need your charity,” and
ordered them to leave. Later he beat Altamese for calling them, Ms. Cash said.
Mrs. Scott died five days later, at age 48. The cause on the death certificate: “A
cerebral hemorrhage due to heat exhaustion.”
‘They never spoke about it,’ said Lea Michelle Cash about the elders of her family and the broader Tulsa community.
“There’s a blame that was put on their father’s head,” Ms. Cash said, because of
the domestic violence the children had both witnessed and experienced. Over
time, nine of the 11 Scott children moved out of Tulsa and “their association with
their father was limited,” Ms. Cash said. By the time Mr. Scott died in 1964, he was
estranged from most of his children.
Ms. Cash said her mother spoke of often seeing her father leaf through papers he
stored in a trunk when she was a little girl. Whenever she asked what the papers
were, he would say, “We’re going to be rich one day.” But he never discussed the
documents or the events of 1921.
“Everything went up in smoke. That total of his riches disappeared overnight,”

Ms. Cash said. “What did that do to his heart, and any man’s heart that had big
dreams?”
Years later, Ms. Cash delved into her grandfather’s estate paperwork and
unearthed property records showing that he had acquired land in Tulsa,
Centerville, Texas, and El Dorado, Ark. None of the heirs probated his will and
therefore they never claimed any of the land, which totaled at least 15 parcels, she
said. Ultimately, Ms. Cash said she believes that the Scott children’s estrangement
from their father and the resulting breakdown in communication cost them their
inheritance.
No white civilians were charged for their involvement in the massacre. Media
reports quickly shifted from calls for peace to casting blame on the residents of
Greenwood for its destruction. “It has been extremely difficult to ever get any
white person to admit that they participated in the riot or even for descendants to
admit that fact,” Prof. Ellsworth said.
White Tulsans shot and killed residents of Greenwood and looted and burned down 35 square blocks, with uniformed white police
officers aiding in the destruction, according to eyewitness accounts.
PHOTO: OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY-TULSA
Tulsa native Eric Celeste, 53, isn’t afraid to discuss his family’s involvement. Last
year, his father told him that his great-great uncle, Benjamin Fowler, was among
the white rioters.
Mr. Celeste said the news stunned him. He had known for years that a relative on
his mother’s side of the family was “at least sympathetic to the KKK [Ku Klux
Klan].” But Mr. Fowler was a paternal relative. “It was shocking to me that it came
from the side of my family that I always took pride in, that sort of formed my
world outlook as being somebody who would be horrified by that,” he said.
Still, he wasn’t as surprised that the family didn’t talk about it. “We’ve always
been a ‘Keep your problems buried in your toes and talk about it with your wife or
your priest or your therapist’ kind of family,” Mr. Celeste said.
Reparations for the 1921 massacre have become a public topic in Oklahoma on at
least three occasions. A majority of the commissioners responsible for the 2001
report on the massacre supported reparations for Greenwood. But the body said it
had no formal authority to “determine damages, to establish a remedy, or to order
either restitution or reparations.”
The commission’s report and supporting documents detailed the role the National
Guard and the Tulsa Police Department played in the invasion of Greenwood. The
roughly 135 survivors living at the time, who were in their 80s or older, received
no monetary restitution. Then-Gov. Frank Keating
initially endorsed some form of
reparations, but later said he didn’t believe the survivors would receive
compensation because the commission report didn’t demonstrate the state’s
culpability.
“The commission recommended that they be given a cash payment,” Prof.

Ellsworth recalled. “The state of Oklahoma refused to do that and instead gave
them a gold-plated medal.”
More recently, a team led by Tulsa attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons has

brought a lawsuit against the City of Tulsa and other defendants on behalf of
survivors. The lawsuit seeks the creation of a victims’ compensation fund, among
other things.
Mr. Celeste said learning about his family connection made him more open to the
idea of reparations for descendants of the massacre survivors. “It’s totally fair for
there to be an examination of what can be paid to these people,” he said. “I don’t
know how you could over-measure. I don’t know how you could make the bill too
high.”
Jack and Daisy Scotts’ headstones in Tulsa, Okla.

The Tulsa Massacre | 100 Years Later

The Wall Street Journal explores the legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre and its
economic reverberations, piecing together a story of both resilience and loss.
The Tulsa Race Massacre Sidelined A New Generation of The Dreams of Jack
Massacre Legacy of Black Black Entrepreneurs and Daisy Scott
Wealth in Wants to Recapture
Greenwood Greenwood’s Past
New Law Threatens When Tulsa’s Black Black Land Ownership In North Tulsa,
Lessons About Tulsa Wall Street Went Primed Greenwood’s Inequities in Medical
Race Massacre Up in Flames, So Rebound After Infrastructure Drive
Did Potential Massacre Health Gap
Inheritance
Insurance Exclusions
Left Black Tulsans
Footing the Bill for
the Massacre
Write to Lee Hawkins at lee.hawkins@wsj.com and Charity L. Scott at

Charity.Scott@wsj.com
Appeared in the May 29, 2021, print edition as 'The Dreams of Jack and Daisy Scott.'
Copyright © 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit
https://www.djreprints.com.

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5/29/2021 The Dreams of Jack and Daisy Scott - WSJ

THE TULSA MASSACRE

The Dreams of Jack and Daisy

Listen to this article (15 minutes)

Jack Scott, a 33-year-old professional boxer-turned-trainer who lived in Tulsa’s

The Makings of a Riot

Jack Scott’s boxing promo photo from 1907.

The men who were indicted didn’t have

“Everything went up in smoke. That total of his riches disappeared overnight,”

“The commission recommended that they be given a cash payment,” Prof.

More recently, a team led by Tulsa attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons has

Jack and Daisy Scotts’ headstones in Tulsa, Okla.

The Tulsa Massacre | 100 Years Later

Write to Lee Hawkins at lee.hawkins@wsj.com and Charity L. Scott at

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