Death in a Promised Land

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Interpretations Of Scott Ellsworth's Death In A Promised Land
Known as the “Promised Land,” Tulsa was a boom city in a boom state. The main factor responsible for Tulsa’s rapid growth was oil. In 1904, a toll bridge was opened across the Arkansas River, making the Red Fork oil field more accessible to the labor and business communities. By 1913, Oklahoma produced one-fourth of the nation’s oil. Throughout the 19th century, the city of Tulsa and its black community became larger and more established. Immigration influenced black Tulsa’s social life when blacks born in other states became the majority within the black community. Black Tulsans were “welcomed” to work common labor, domestic, and service jobs all over the city, but they were “not welcome” to shop at white businesses in various parts of Tulsa. This was a main reason why the black business community grew along Greenwood Avenue. The intersection of Greenwood and Archer marks the historical significance of separating Tulsa’s black and white communities.

In the 1890s, the Oklahoma territorial government passed its first Jim Crow laws. Also, within the first twenty years of the 1900s racial violence increased in Oklahoma, including the numerous lynchings of blacks. The Oklahoma Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) suffered under World War I. Black Oklahomans took this personally because the IWW held an interracial body and it supported black rights. The Oklahoma Socialist Party fought strongly for blacks’ voting rights. The fact that black soldiers had fought and died in France fueled blacks’ resentment toward the postwar wave of white violence. As whites enacted vigilantism upon blacks, blacks responded with self-defense against them. In 1915, strong white racist and nativist thought revived itself through the “second” Ku Klux Klan, especially in Tulsa.

In regards to the actual preceding events of the 1921 race riot, ...