Memorial Day, 1921
On May 30, the Memorial Day holiday was in full swing when Dick Rowland, a nineteen-year-old black shoeshiner who worked on Main Street in the white section of Tulsa downtown, entered the Drexel Building. Rowland intended to use the black-only restroom located on the top floor of the building, which had only one elevator, operated by a seventeen-year-old girl named Sarah Page. Across the street, a clerk in a clothing store heard a scream coming from the Drexel Building and saw a black man running from the building. When he reached the distraught Page he assumed that she had been assaulted, and called the police.
The police questioned Page when they arrived, but a written report of what she told them has never surfaced. Rumors that Page and Rowland knew each other began shortly after the ensuing chaos, but have never been confirmed. The police did not immediately start searching for Rowland, indicating that what they were told by Page did not constitute sexual assault. What actually happened to cause Page to scream is uncertain, but Rowland fled to the Greenwood area. The next morning he was arrested by two officers at his mother’s home in Greenwood and held in the jail in the county courthouse.
When the newspapers reported the story that afternoon it was in a sensationalized fashion, and the Tulsa Tribune ran an opinion piece which allegedly warned of Rowland being lynched that night. Copies of the paper do not exist other than on microfilm, and that is missing the page which supposedly contained the warning editorial. A mostly white crowd began to congregate around the courthouse that afternoon. A year earlier, a white prisoner had been taken by a mob from the jail and lynched, and the Sheriff was determined to protect Rowland from a similar fate. Guards armed with shotguns, rifles, and handguns were placed on the roof of the courthouse and within.
Meanwhile, the black community in Greenwood was divided over how to respond to what they believed was the possibility of Rowland being taken out and lynched, especially considering that such a fate had occurred to a white man the preceding year. One of the community’s leaders, O. W. Gurley, went to the courthouse and received assurances from the sheriff that there would be no lynching. Impressed with the sheriff’s assurances and the preparations Gurley observed, he returned to Greenwood and urged restraint.
Despite Gurley’s pleas for calm, a group of about 30 men, most of them veterans, armed themselves and went to the courthouse with the intent of backing up the sheriff and his men as they protected Rowland. When they arrived the Sheriff and a black deputy informed them that Rowland was safe and that their support was unnecessary, asking them to go home. The white crowd observed the armed blacks, and many of them began to arm themselves as well. Some of the growing crowd attempted to break into the National Guard Armory to obtain weapons but were repelled by Guardsmen. The white mob around the courthouse was by now around 2,000, growing steadily and many were armed.