Foot-loose and fancy-free By Angie Debo

She chose a very good year to be a Republican running for Congress in Oklahoma. Five of eight representatives that year were Republican, and the anti-feminist past sixty years of age found herself on of those members. Oklahoma also sent a Republican United States Senator to Washington that year.

Congressmen curious about their new female colleague found that in appearance she was “built on similar architectural lines as the late Champ Clark.” Her clothing was never the latest fashion but was described as “something black,” and more suited for Muskogee than Washington, D.C.

She had no intention of upsetting the male dominated Congress. She was to pride herself on never speaking when she could avoid a speech. She had always gotten with men than with women and had “always done a man’s work, carried a man’s burdens, and paid a man’s bills.” She was ready to work with Congress and be “just one of the boys” again.

Miss Alice did believe that a woman might have one special role in Congress. She believed that a woman should help make the government more honest and truthful, as indicated by her campaign slogan of, “I cannot be bought; I cannot be sold; I cannot be intimidated.”

While she did not plan to make waves when she arrived in Washington, she could not help but be noticed. She was frequently called upon as a guest speaker; this was a request which believed used energies and time which should have been devoted to her duties in Congress. She took committee assignments seriously and tried to attend all meetings. She had a sharp wit and her comments were often worth quoting, especially as the congresswoman was also an anti-feminist.

Of special interest for the press was the meeting of Miss Alice and the only female member of the British Parliament, Lady Astor. She like the foreign visitor when they met, even though a feminist group sponsored Lady Astor’s visit. Miss Alice complimented her by saying “I have been impressed with an appreciation of the fact that the sanest women active in political work are wives and mothers accustomed to think for the future of their children. . . .” Perhaps she included herself in such a group, for while she remained single, she adopted, raised and educated one young girl. There were always children around that she helped. The daughter of a close friend even lived with her for a time while she was in Congress. She noted the children around her, “Some women collect china or jewels or lace. I have a fad for collecting boys and girls. . . .”

She was soon faced with the dilemma which confronts elected officials. Should she listen to her constituents and vote the way they instructed her; or should she listen to her own conscience and vote as she believed? She chose to be her own voice and quickly found herself in trouble with her voters. One of the unpopular votes was on a veterans’ bonus bill, which she voted against. This was an unusual vote for a woman who had given so much of her time and resources to help these very soldiers during the war. But part of her campaign promises had been, “I am a Christian; I am an American; I am a Republican,” and the Republican part of her believed that paying a bonus to able-bodied men was a bad precedent. Her vote received much attention, and she had the courage to return home and defend her actions in person before a veteran’s group. This was an unpleasant and difficult meeting. She asked for a show of hands of those men who had voted for her; among the angry veterans, only one man raised his hand. He must have had as much courage as Miss Alice did. She thanked him for his vote and realized that much of her political support was now lost.

The second unpopular vote was on the Sheppard-Tower Bill, also called the Maternity Bill, which included a provision for the government furnishing instruction to mothers on the care of young children. It was the legislation which the women’s rights groups had chosen to champion as the symbol of their new power in political affairs, and her negative vote probably did not lose any political support. She even urged women to write to their legislators and express their opposition to the bill. Prior to her vote and speech in Congress, she attacked the bill in public saying it would allow “the establishment of practically uncontrolled, yet Federally authorized centers of propaganda.” She commented on the pressure being bought on her by women’s groups, “They are trying to scare me into support of the bill, but I can’t be scared.”

He defeat at the election of 1922 was no surprise. She realized that politically she was in trouble early that year when she wrote her sister, “My political fences are in terrible shape everywhere. I made a speech which was so mishandled in the telegraphic re-prints in the newspapers that I am simply seething in boiling oil just now.” Oklahoma could not be expected to continue in the unusual pattern of voting Republican for too many elections, so Oklahoma’s only woman in Congress returned home after one term.

She was not bitter about her defeat remarking, “Happiness is contentment, and I always manage to content myself and find something that needs to be done.” She realized that the high point of her career had come rather late in life, as she remarked, “I’ve been a Cinderella at sixty-nine, but now the pumpkin is round the corner, waiting to wisk me back.”

She did get in one jab at enemies back home, especially other women. She had been told by some women in Oklahoma, “You see, we didn’t want you to go to Washington in the first place, and now we are going to keep you.” She responded, “How do you know I’ll come back?”

But everyone realized that Miss Alice of Muskogee would of course come home. For all that she had seen and done while in Washington, she was looking forward to hearing those Oklahoma mockingbirds. Evidently she did hope that the Republican President would reward a faithful party member with an appointment connected to Indian affairs, but she returned home just a private citizen.

What did Miss Alice’s career in Washington accomplish? She has an unusual response to such a question, telling a reporter, “If you asked a housekeeper that what do you think she would say? I’ve been keeping house for the nation just like a woman would in her own home—busy, busy, every day, in every way, without any outstanding thing to show for it.” Most freshman Congressmen can point to very few outstanding achievements, Miss Alice included.

She had clashed with the feminists mainly because she believed they were asking for rights she did not want for herself. Typical of her comments on the right to vote was, “I did not want suffrage. I didn’t ask for it, but they gave it to us, and as God gives me strength, I’ll carry the responsibility.” She also believed that feminists were asking for privileges simply because they were women. She said, “I have never asked any discount on account of my petticoats.” She also believed that very few women had the training to succeed in public life, even though she had managed to do so. She thought other women had “gone into politics the wrong way, beginning at the top instead of bottom. . . . When a woman shows she is fitted for office, she will receive the call to office just as a man does.”

This was the way it had been in her life. At important times in her career others had come to her and asked her to do more. Her best work always brought recognition, but she had an advantage other women did not have. She could not forgot that her name was already famous in Oklahoma; she was the granddaughter of Samuel Worcester and the daughter of Ann Eliza Worcester Robertson. She always seemed to work this information into interviews. In a very long and candid interview as she left Washington, she managed to show the two Bibles in her office which had been translated into Indian languages by her ancestors. Miss Alice did not need a famous name in order to succeed because she was very capable in her own right, but with the prominent name she had much more going for her than other Oklahoma women. So when the call to public office came, the caller knew her name so much better.

Tulsa Burning

LaFortune pulls out one of the few remaining copies of a self-published, eyewitness account of the riot, written by a young black woman named Mary Jones Parrish . A YMCA typing instructor, Parrish had included in her remarkable volume three wide-angle photographs of the destruction, taped and folded within the book like a triptych. Now LaFortune spreads open the panorama for his guest. "It looks like Hiroshima, or worse," he says.

The photographs are breathtaking: 35 blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, reduced to cinder and rubble. On a single night, more than 10,000 armed and crazed whites looted and burned down the city's entire black section. In the pictures on LaFortune's desk, the smoke is still rising off the scorched earth, drifting between charred trees and the few jagged remains of brick walls.

For most of the past 75 years, the riot remained Tulsa's brooding secret. But on June 1, 1996, the 75th anniversary of the event, Tulsa held its first commemorative service and erected a memorial. And in October LaFortune performed his own role in the ritual healing.

During an emotional ceremony, he cleared a long deceased black man named J. B. Stradford of the charge of inciting the riot.

Stradford was one of Tulsa's most prosperous black entrepreneurs in the 1910's. He owned a 65-room hotel, a savings and loan, and other real estate in Greenwood. Having lost everything in the riot, Stradford escaped to Chicago, where he began life anew and became a successful lawyer. When he died in 1935, at the age of 75, the incitement charge still hung over him. With the riot's anniversary, the family wanted his name cleared. But first LaFortune and Assistant District Attorney Nancy Little had to uncover the details of the events of 1921.

"I would almost say I was staggered by what I learned," Little said.

"I had heard my parents talk about a riot by black people that came out of a rape." She was bewildered to find out that neither half of that equation had been true. In particular, Little was struck by a series of firsthand accounts, all by black victims of the riot, in the back of Mary Jones Parrish's book. "Those stories," said Little, "were among the most moving I have ever read." And the more she read, the more she thought, "This doesn't look like a riot. It looks like a war, an invasion of the area.

Little's dismay is shared by almost any Tulsan today who learns the truth about the riot. Tulsa, after all, had none of the bitter memories of the Civil War or Reconstruction. It was no sprawling northern metropolis plagued by poverty, unemployment and rotting tenements. Nor was it a Southern backwater where racial prejudice was endemic. Tulsa was full of pride and prosperity on both sides of the tracks. The city's black section was as remarkable as the boomtown of the white oil barons. Moreover, this riot happened during the Roaring Twenties: in modern times. The fact that a southwestern frontier town could experience such a paroxysm of hate, anger and violence seemed to speak to the very notions of equality and civility. And white Tulsa's denial of its own guilt remains a case study in cultural amnesia.

Tulsa in the 1920s was a boomtown with a short fuse. Originally part of the sprawling Indian Territory, Tulsa had for years been beyond the reach of state or federal law, and after the discovery of oil nearby at the turn of the century, the town became a notorious haven for criminals. An otherwise boisterous history, ordered up by the city in the 1970's, speculated about those early boom years: "There seemed to be an unwritten law between the town and the outlaws in which Tulsa furnished them with asylum in exchange for being spared from criminal acts." Even after Tulsa fell under the American legal system, it remained unusually rough. The volatile mix of desperadoes, gamblers, prostitutes, cowboys, wildcatters, roustabouts and Ku Kluxers was enough to weaken the knees of the bravest law-enforcement officials.

Many a town father decided it was more prudent—and sometimes more lucrative—to join the miscreants rather than fight them. James Mitchell, a student at the University of Tulsa in 1950, wrote his master's thesis on the politics of Tulsa in the early 1900s. "A vice ring consisting of newspapermen and politicians, operated a protection racket for illegal enterprises," he concluded. "Many crusades against open town conditions by newspapers in Tulsa's boom years were said to result when the editors were denied their part of the payoffs." 



Greenwood district prior to the riot— Greenwood Cultural Center archives

By 1910, Black Tulsans made up 10 percent of the city's population. Most of these residents were immigrants from the East and South, but many others were native to the area, having been former slaves of wealthy Creek Indians. The Blacks in Tulsa, totally segregated on the north side of the railroad tracks, were building up a prosperous community that boasted the second highest black literacy rate among Oklahoma counties, and a neighborhood of shops, hotels, gaming halls and restaurants that was gaining a reputation across the Southwest. The Greenwood section of Tulsa bristled with such energy, prosperity and promise, that Booker T. Washington himself—so the legend goes—dubbed Greenwood Avenue "the Black Wall Street." 

This Black prosperity caused resentment among poorer whites, and the city elders worried that it was bad for the city's image. In 1912, the Tulsa Democrat complained: "Tulsa appears to be in danger of losing its prestige as the whitest town in Oklahoma." The paper went on to ask: "Does Tulsa wish a double invasion of criminal Negro preachers, Negro Shysters, crap shooters, gamblers, bootleggers, prostitutes and smart alecs in general?"

At the time of the riot, the Ku Klux Klan had something of a stranglehold on Tulsa. Mitchell found that during the early 1920s the Klan "operated as a phantom regime," putting its imprimatur on political candidates. In the year of the riot alone, 59 Blacks were lynched in border and Southern states. Just six months before, in Oldenville, Oklahoma, a young Black man accused of assaulting a white woman was taken from jail, strung to a telephone pole, and riddled with bullets. The fact that a white man had been lynched in Tulsa the previous summer only proved that skin color was no protection. Accused of murdering a taxi driver, Roy Belton had been "mobbed" by a group of whites while the police directed traffic at the lynching site, ensuring everyone a good view. A Black newspaper wrote at the time: "The lynching of Roy Belton explodes the theory that a prisoner is safe on top of the Court House from mob violence."

Since the end of World War I, Black leaders had begun to encourage resistance to "Judge Lynch." In 1919, Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had declared: "When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed." In Tulsa, the success of the Black community had only made this resolve more powerful.

The incident that set off the Tulsa riot was the same incident that set off so many other race riots before it: a report of an assault by a Black man on a white woman. In the case of Tulsa, a woman of little credibility and a story apparently trumped the report up, a combination of an allegation by a newspaper with even less. But those small details would not be fully understood before Black Tulsa burned to the ground.

Walter White, an NAACP official who arrived in Tulsa during the height of the riot, would offer a detailed account of the "assault" in The Nation later that month. According to White, a young Black messenger named Dick Rowland called for an elevator in a downtown Tulsa building. The operator, a young white woman named Sarah Page, on finding she had been summoned by a Black man, started the car on its descent when Rowland was only halfway in. To save himself from injury, Rowland threw himself into the car, stepping on the girl's foot in doing so. Page screamed and, when a crowd gathered outside the elevator, claimed she had been attacked. The police arrested Rowland the following day but with little enthusiasm, perhaps because they knew the reputation of his accuser. Page, a new arrival in Tulsa, had left her husband in Kansas City, and Sheriff Willard McCullough had served divorce papers on her just two months before. He was reported to have said later that if half the charges alleged in the divorce petition were true, "she is a notorious character."

Nevertheless, her charge of assault gave Tulsa's most disreputable newspaper enough to work with. Richard Lloyd Jones—a cousin of the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright—had purchased the Tulsa Democrat two years before. Jones had changed the paper's name—to the Tulsa Tribune—but not its behavior. He not only continued the newspaper's racist ways but raised them to a higher power, referring to the Black section of Tulsa as either "Little Africa" or "N-----town."

The Tribune's coverage of the alleged attack on Page clearly inflamed feelings in Tulsa. The adjutant general of Oklahoma would later blame the riot on "an impudent Negro, a hysterical girl, and a yellow journal." No original copies of the offending articles exist today, either in bound volumes or on microfilm, having been destroyed in the years following the riot. But a University of Tulsa student managed to find a copy for his 1946 thesis, and published it in its entirety.

On its front page, the Tribune had charged that Rowland had attacked Page, "scratching her hands and face and tearing her clothes." The managing editor of the paper would, days later, admit that the scratches and torn clothes were fictions. The article stated that Rowland had been identified and arrested, had admitted grabbing Page's arm, and would be tried that afternoon. The final sentence was a guaranteed tearjerker: It stated that Page, whose age it gave as an improbable 17, "is an orphan who works as an elevator operator to pay her way through business college."

The Tribune also ran an editorial that day. No copies are known to survive, but people interviewed after the riot recalled an article that spoke of a lynching, and may have even encouraged one. Scott Ellsworth, who wrote the definitive book on the riot, Death in a Promised Land (1982), believes the headline read "To Lynch Negro Tonight." Whatever the Tribune said, the fuse was now lit. Shortly after the paper hit the newsstands, talk of a lynching was making its way around town. Within hours, hundreds of whites were milling in front of the courthouse—a common prelude to "Judge Lynch."

According to the unpublished memoirs of J.B. Stradford, the Tribune's stories "aroused the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan," and the KKK let it be known that they would "mob" Rowland that night. Stradford went on to say that Sheriff McCullough telephoned the office of the Tulsa Star, a Black newspaper, to warn "he expected an attack would be made on the jail that night." The sheriff promised that he would do all he could to protect Rowland, but that "if he found he could not cope with the situation, for us to get together and he would call us to help protect him."

A meeting was convened at the newspaper's offices. Stradford was sent for and called upon to speak. As he wrote in his memoirs, "I hesitated at first, for the situation was a perilous one; I advised the boys to be sober and wait until the sheriff called for us. I further said that I had expected something of that nature on account of the bitter feelings against our group and I said then as I had said before that the day a member of our group was mobbed in Tulsa, the streets would be bathed in blood." In the event of a lynching, Stradford left no doubt as to what he thought the community should do. "If I can't get anyone to go with me, I will go single-handed and empty my automatic into the mob and then resign myself to my fate."



After looting, black homes set on fire by white rioters—McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa archives

In the end, the Black leaders assembled in the Star's office voted to go to the courthouse without waiting for the sheriff's summons. (Nor did they all heed Stradford's call to remain sober.) Fully armed, some 25 Blacks drove to the courthouse. Sheriff McCullough and Deputy Sheriff Barney Cleaver, Tulsa's first Black police officer met them there. The two law officers persuaded the emissaries to return to Greenwood, which they did peacefully. But the white crowd did not disperse. It continued to swell to ominous proportions, reaching 1,500 to 2,000. The Blacks returned, this time numbering between 50 and 75. Once again, McCullough and Cleaver tried to send the entourage home, but before they could succeed, an older white man made the mistake of confronting a young Black veteran of World War I. According to author Scott Ellsworth, the white man said, "N-----, what are you going with that pistol?" The answer was as polite as it was direct: "I'm going to use it if I need to."

Within moments, a struggle for the gun ensued, a shot rang out and guns were blazing. The Blacks retreated toward Greenwood while the whites began to prepare for their revenge. In the next few hours, a dozen stores in downtown Tulsa that sold firearms—sporting-good stores, Pawnshops, and even jewelry stores—were broken into and looted. The National Guard Armory was spared only because a small band of guardsmen, warned in advance, held off the multitudes. The whites, now numbering 10,000, headed for Greenwood, as a smaller rear guard of Blacks tried to hold them off. Mary Jones Parrish, who had read about recent riots in Chicago and Washington, D.C., heard the firing in the distance and later wrote: "It was hours before the horror of it all dawned upon me. . . . It did not seem possible that prosperous Tulsa, the city which was so peaceful and quiet that morning, could be in the thrall of a great disaster."

The horror was also dawning on city officials. For hours Police Chief John Gustafson clung to the belief that local authorities could control the situation. In what was an act of either naiveté or depravity, he deputized as many as 500 white volunteers with "special commissions."

The NAACP's Walter White, being very light complexioned, volunteered for duty shortly after his arrival in town, and was given one of these commissions. "Now you can go out and shoot any N----- you see," he was told, "and the law'll be behind you." White would spend a tense night riding about the city in the company of five members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Before long, even Gustafson realized events were out of his control. He signed a telegram, solicited by the governor, requesting the aid of the National Guard. The telegram was a model of concise communications: "Race riot developed here. Several killed. Unable to handle situation. Request that National Guard forces be sent by special train. Situation serious."

The fighting, pillaging and burning continued all night and into the morning. The riot was now a war; being fought building by building, block by block. The white's rage was blinding: At one point, the advancing mob noticed a lone, unarmed pedestrian across the street. Mistaking him for Black, the rioters opened fire, hitting him some 25 times. "Death was instantaneous," reported the Tulsa World the following morning. "He was hit so many times his body was mangled almost past identification." Now and again the mob would string a Black corpse to the rear bumper of an automobile and drag the body around town. Whenever a fire engine appeared on the scene, the white mob refused to let the fire crew deploy its hoses, forcing them back to the station. Police and their "deputies," those who were not actively engaged in the looting and burning, rounded up Black noncombatants, the elderly, women and children, and trucked them to holding facilities. At least one of these prisoners, Dr. A.C. Jackson, whom the Mayo brothers had once called the "most able Negro surgeon in America," was killed while being held in police "protection."

Mary Jones Parrish, who was still holed up with her daughter at the edge of the fighting, later wrote: "Looking south out of the window of what then was the Woods Building, we saw car loads of men with rifles unloading up near the granary. . . . Then the truth dawned upon us that our men were fighting in vain to hold their dear Greenwood."

The National Guard finally pulled into town by train from Oklahoma City at 9:15 a.m. with Adjutant General Charles Barrett in command. "In all my experience," Barrett wrote years later, "I have never witnessed such scenes as prevailed in this city when I arrived at the height of the rioting. Twenty-five thousand whites, armed to the teeth, were ranging the city in utter and ruthless defiance of every concept of law and righteousness. Motor Cars, bristling with guns swept through the city, their occupants firing at will." Nevertheless, the guards' first official act was to prepare and eat breakfast. One man who had the temerity to question this indulgence was immediately arrested. The guardsmen themselves, once they finished their breakfast, proceeded to round up the remaining Black residents at bayonet point, often drawing blood and frequently showing no sympathy for the homeless Blacks who were supposedly under their protection.

When it was all over, the Red Cross would report treating almost 1,000 people. Classrooms at the Booker T. Washington School were converted into an emergency facility. Parrish wrote: "I can never erase the sights of my first visit to the hospital. There were men wounded in every conceivable way, like soldiers after a big battle. Some with amputated limbs, burned faces, others minus an eye or with heads bandaged. There were women who were nervous wrecks, and some confinement cases. Was I in a hospital in France? No, in Tulsa.

It is impossible to judge the severity of the Tulsa Riot by its death toll. The official count was 36, but the earliest newspaper accounts ranged between 75 and 175, and Scott Ellsworth gives 100 as his best guess. (Many Blacks and some whites believe the actual number of deaths was much higher, with truckloads of corpses dumped into mass graves or into the nearby Arkansas River.) There were other riots around that time that had official counts almost as high, or even higher—the East St. Louis riot of 1917 (at least 125 dead), the Chicago riot of 1919 (at 38 dead); the Elaine, Arkansas riot of 1919 (at least 30 dead). But what had been lost in Tulsa was far more than lives. It was a community and a dream.

As bad as the riot was, what followed was in many ways worse. To the hot-blooded crimes of murder, pillaging and arson were added the cold-blooded crimes of false imprisonment, unusual cruelty and incredible hypocrisy. Richard Lloyd Jones would once again set the tone in his editorial in the Tulsa Tribune: "Acres of ashes lie smoldering in what but yesterday was 'N-----town'." He went on to use the riot as a pretext for attacking his political opponents. Over the next several days the headlines told the story of how white Tulsa would choose to view the riot for decades to come:

—PROPAGANDA OF NEGROES IS BLAMED.

—BLACK AGITATORS BLAMED FOR RIOT.

—PLOT BY NEGRO SOCIETY?

—BLACKS HAD LEADERS.

—BLOOD SHED IN RACE WAR WILL CLEANSE TULSA.

—NEGRO SECTION ABOLISHED BY CITY'S ORDER.

The attorney general of the state, during an address to the Tulsa City club two weeks after the tragedy, declared: "The cause of this riot was not Tulsa. It might have happened anywhere for the Negro is not the same man that he was 30 years ago when he was content to plod along his own road accepting the white man as his benefactor."

Over the following days and weeks white Tulsa put forth two ideas: Blacks had caused all the trouble, but the white community had opened its purses and hearts and rebuilt the burned neighborhood. The president of the chamber of commerce furnished press associations across the country with a broadside that stated: "The sympathy of the citizenship of Tulsa in a great wave has gone out to the unfortunate law-abiding Negroes who became victims of the action and bad advice of some of the lawless leaders, and as quickly as possible rehabilitation will take place and reparation be made."

In fact, at the same time the city fathers were busy passing new ordinances preventing Blacks from rebuilding in the Greenwood area. About the only intact structures left standing in the forlorn landscape were outhouses. Although awash in oil money during its boom years, Tulsa had never extended the city sewer lines to the Black north side.



Burning of the Greenwood District— McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa achives

And as the rioters emptied their cans of oil, they didn't bother with the outhouses, many of which were at some distance from the street. Now Tulsa wanted the north side of town to become a new industrial and transportation center. As for the Blacks, the mayor told his city commission: "Let the Negro settlement be placed further to the north and east." The courts overruled that ordinance four months later, but by then Blacks had lost precious time in rebuilding.

As to rehabilitation and restitution, there never would be any. Behind closed doors, Tulsa's white leaders plotted to do precisely the opposite of their proclamations. The Executive Welfare Committee in charge of "relief" efforts voted to solicit no money for aid, nor accept any donation, "financial or otherwise," to "reconstruct the Negro District." What money did come in to the Welfare Committee was used to reimburse the Red Cross for its Herculean efforts immediately following the riot. Scott Ellsworth pored over the official records while researching his book. "One myth that persists is that the white community created a generous relief effort and rebuilt Black Tulsa," he recently told a reporter for the Tulsa World. "The city fathers tried to keep Black Tulsans from rebuilding. They tried to swindle them out of their land. They refused donations from charitable organizations around the country, telling people they were going to rebuild the Black community." The winter of 1921-22 would find close to 1,000 Black Tulsans with nothing but tents to protect them from the cold and snow.

Hundreds of Blacks left Tulsa immediately after the riot, never to return. One of these was A.J. Smitherman, the editor of the Tulsa Star, whose business had been destroyed and whose name had been added to the grand-jury indictment. Gone too, was Stradford. The day after the riot, he and his wife had been held under "police protection" along with some 6,000 Black residents. But with the help of some white acquaintances, Stradford managed to leave town and eventually made his way to by train to Independence, Kansas, to stay with his brother. The day after his arrival, the Kansas police knocked on his brother's door and arrested Stradford, on the grounds of having incited the riot. The evidence: testimony that the first armed carloads of Blacks had left from in front of Stradford's hotel on Greenwood Avenue. Stradford was quoted as saying after his arrest: "They wanted me and now they have me."

There followed a law-enforcement soap opera. Tulsa wanted Stradford extradited. The attorney general of Oklahoma, along with the Tulsa County attorney, traveled to Topeka to plead with the governor of Kansas, bringing letters "from prominent men in Tulsa" assuring the governor that Stradford "would be given a fair trial and would be adequately protected from mob violence." The governor was convinced and ordered Stradford rearrested. But Stradford was no fool. Already out on bail, he fled with his son to Chicago.

As for Deputy Sheriff Barney Cleaver, he became the toast of Tulsa. Although the town's newspapers showed little remorse that the entire Black section had been burned to the ground, they were sympathetic about Cleaver's losses, which were considerable. Cleaver had amassed $ 20,000 worth of real estate on a policeman's pay. If this were not enough to raise questions about Cleaver's conduct, an article about him in the Tribune strongly suggested that he was playing a double game: "In all of Tulsa today there was just one Negro who walked the street openly and unafraid, molested by no one and greeted with a cheery smile by all who knew him."

What had Cleaver done to deserve such good will? Whatever he had done before, he now sided with the whites in blaming his fellow Blacks for the riot. Two days after the riot, Cleaver was quoted as saying: "I am going to do everything I can to bring the Negroes responsible for the outrage to the bars of justice. They caused me to lose everything I have been accumulating and I intend to get them." Get them he did. It was largely Cleaver's testimony, in court and out, that helped convince white Tulsa that it was blameless.

Dick Rowland was released from jail two weeks after the riot. Sarah Page dropped her charges three months later, and left town. Police Chief John Gustafson was found guilty on two counts: dereliction of duty during the riot and "conspiracy to free automobile thieves and collect rewards." Sheriff McCullough admitted to the press later that he had fallen asleep. "I didn't know there had been a riot until I read the papers the next morning at 8 o'clock," he said. Reminded that he too had signed the telegram requesting the aid of the National Guard in the middle of the night, the sheriff said he had not bothered to read it. Richard Lloyd Jones suffered a fitting fate for his role in triggering the riot. Eight years later he commissioned his cousin to build a house in Tulsa. It would be perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright's least successful house, a towering sprawling affair that resembled a penitentiary and leaked like a fishing trawler.

As for the Black community of Tulsa, it soon rebuilt Greenwood without the promised help. In the '30s and '40s, the area experienced something of a revival as one of the country's leading jazz centers. But in the decades that followed, Greenwood decayed. Dissected by highways, emptied by suburban drift and enervated by integration, the neighborhood finally succumbed to the bulldozer. Today, all that remains of "the Black Wall Street" is a single gentrified block of Greenwood Avenue, surrounded by new urban-renewal projects: a new university complex, a duck pond and a new cultural center that houses a jazz museum.

Dreams of a memorial to the Tulsa tragedy had long been popular in the city's Black community, where the riot had never been forgotten. Don Ross, a Black State representative, had been trying to put together some sort of commemoration since the 50th anniversary in 1971. And James Goodwin, a Black lawyer whose family owns the Oklahoma Eagle, had gone so far as to draw up elaborate plans for a memorial and museum.

What was missing was white participation and enthusiasm. Without white support, fund-raising would be far more difficult and the point entirely lost.

Enter Ken Levit. A young law graduate and former staffer for Sen. David Boren, Levit had the fragmentary knowledge of the riot usual among white Tulsans. "I knew that some racial incident of historic proportion took place," he says. "I didn't really understand any of the details—where, when, why, and how." While studying for the bar in the summer of 1994 he came upon Ellsworth's Death in a Promised Land. Using his associations and connections with Tulsa’s legal community, Levit, along with James Goodwin and Don Ross began formulating the plans for the 75th anniversary commemorative and raising money for a memorial.

The anniversary ceremony took place on June 1, 1996. It began with singing, prayers and speeches at Greenwood's Mt. Zion Baptist Church, itself a powerful symbol of the riot, having been torched only two months after its completion, and then lovingly rebuilt over the next 31 years. A crowd of 1,200 overflowed the church. On hand were Benjamin Hooks, former executive director of the NAACP, former senator David Boren, now the president of the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa Mayor Susan Savage and Scott Ellsworth. At one point Rep. Don Ross rose to say that over the last 75 years, no public official had ever apologized for the riot, so therefore he, an elected official, would do so. The irony that a black man was taking on the white man's burden of expiation was lost on no one. The guests then walked a few hundred yards to the dedication of a granite slab called the Black Wall Street Memorial.

The day's events left many a Tulsan, black and white, near tears. "That service was something of significance and real power," Levit recalled later. "For me, it was probably one of the most intense moments I have ever experienced. Don Ross was electrifying."

Plans for the commemoration of Tulsa's race riot made the Today Show. And watching Bryant Gumbel on the morning of May 31 happened to be J.B. Stradford's great-grandson, Chicago Circuit Court Judge Cornelius Toole. The judge thought that the Stradford family should be included in any commemoration of the riot, and he called the mayor's office and the Greenwood Cultural Center to lodge his protest. No one returned his call.



Aftermath of the Tulsa Race Riot— Greenwood Cultural Center archives

The judge then fired off letters, explaining J.B. Stradford's central role in Black Tulsa before the riot. Along with a photographic portrait, he sent this description of the patriarch of the Stradford clan: "He was magnificent, and had the courage and physical strength of a Mandingo warrior." Toole finished by mentioning the memoirs, which are still in the family's possession. "We are of course writing our own story of this era and his life.

Toole's letter set in motion a series of conversations that would lead to another moving ceremony. On October 18, Toole and 20 other members of the extended Stradford clan, who traveled from Texas, Illinois, Ohio, and New York, standing a stone's throw from where the Stradford Hotel once stood, listened as Bill LaFortune formally dropped the charges, and Oklahoma governor Frank Keating granted an honorary executive pardon.

At the request of the family, J.B. Stradford's name was added posthumously to a list of those allowed to practice law in Tulsa.

"It's regrettable that we have come here to recognize an embarrassment, a historical event that never should have happened," said Keating. "Our tragedy as Oklahomans is that the Stradfords are not living here." And he wasn't overstating the case: No Stradford had ever set foot in Tulsa since J.B.'s hasty departure, but the family had flourished. Stradford's son became a prominent Chicago lawyer and a founding member of the National Bar Association, arguing and winning Hansberry v. Lee, a crucial civil-rights case, before the U.S. Supreme Court. His granddaughter Jewel LaFontant-Mankarious, born one year after J.B.'s escape from Tulsa, would go on to become a deputy solicitor general and U.S. ambassador-at-large. Her son, John Rogers, Jr., is founder and president of Ariel Capital Investment in Chicago, and was named by Time magazine in 1994 as one of the country's most promising leaders under the age of 40. Another granddaughter, Letitia Toole, would become a stage and film actress and a member of the American Negro Theater, acting with Ossie Davis and Sidney Portier, and arrayed in front of Keating during the ceremony were four generations of Stradford's extended family, including a cardiologist, a tennis professional, a sculptor, a ballet dancer, and a movie director.

For his part, Judge Toole was delighted. "It was a wonderful ceremony," said the judge. "The governor spoke and made an apology to the Stradford family; he said something happened that should not have happened, and we know that, but I have never seen such a forceful apology." As for Don Ross, he seemed of two minds. On the one hand, he said, "The African American community of Tulsa can now say we were the victims and not the criminals in this racial upheaval." On the other, Ross still believes reparations are in order. He is thinking of introducing a bill that would pay out a total of $6 million to the families that lost everything in the riot. Nancy Little, too, doubts that Tulsa's season of remembrance and contrition can yet come to a close. "There is a time to leave the past behind," she mused. "I think that time is not when something has not been dealt with. Most people still do not know about it."

Perhaps the newsletter sent out by the Greenwood Cultural Center following the Stradford reception said it best. Under a photograph of the new memorial was a bit of verse that went:

"Things ain't what they oughta be, Things ain't what they gonna be, But thank God things ain't like they was."

The Arts in Oklahoma
By W. David Baird and Danney Goble⁴¹
The Kiowa Five
When Plains Indian culture was at its zenith, one symbol of its power was the remarkable art that emerged from nearly every tribe. On the Southern Plains the Kiowas have a long history of art traditions linked their their pride in the master of horsemanship, as successful hunters of the great buffalo herds, and as a culture that prides the beauty of dance, song, stories, and the visual arts. The Kiowas were noted especially for their calendars. Known as winter counts, these were elaborate series of pictographs composed and executed collectively to record the tribe’s history through the seasons and the years. Individuals also displayed on hides their personal history and notable exploits with elaborate and colorful images. So striking was the tribe’s use of art, that some people said that every Kiowa was a natural-born artist.

“The Kiowa Five”: Tsa-to-ke, Hokeah, Mopope, Professor Jacobson, Asah, and Auchiah (L to R)

After the American army defeated the Indian warriors and destroyed their nomadic cultures, their art assumed a different role. In 1875 tribal elders reluctantly designated more than seventy of their young men for punishment for the tribes’ raids against whites. Federal authorities transported these Kiowas, and other tribal members, far from their homes to a prison in Fort Marion at Saint Augustin, FL, where they remained until 1878. Captain Richard H. Pratt (who later founded the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania) headed the prison. He recognized at once that his “pathetic” prisoners were energetic painters. Providing them with

“Squaw Dance” by Stephen Mopope

paper (lined army ledger books), pencils, and paints, Captain Pratt suggest that they create art to sell to the white tourists who often stopped by to see the “wild Indians.” More than 600 drawings and paintings resulted. Known as ledger art, these were not like the tribal displays of the past; instead, they were the private expressions, often painfully autobiographical, of individual Indians. Many even signed their paintings with their private mark. When they returned to Oklahoma, their people called them by a word previously unknown in most Indian languages, “artists.”

Few white people recognized the significance of the work created by these Indians and those inspired by them. Determined to root out all traces of Indian identity, the superintendent of Anadarko’s Indian School forbade it when he found some young Kiowa children devotedly sketching and painting. He protested that “they should have been trying to become white men rather than wasting a lot of time with drawing.” One of the few who though otherwise was Susie Ryan Peters.

A native of Tennessee, Mrs. Peters had come to Oklahoma Territory in a covered wagon. In 1916 she went to work as a field matron for the Kiowa agency in Anadarko.

“Greeting of thee Moon God” by Jack Hokeah

Uninterested in teaching young girls to clean house, she was convinced that her charges—both girls and boys—included several natural artists. In 1918 she arranged for an art instructor from Chickasha to come to Anadarko and teach them, paying the artist’s salary herself. Although these informal lessons lasted only three or four months, Mrs. Peters persuaded Saint Patrick’s Mission School in Anadarko to accept the most promising of the students. At the school, Sister Olivia and Father Al enthusiastically added to the students’ preparation.

The budding Kiowa artists were neither average students nor stereotypical “savages.” Several were the sons and grandsons of famous war chiefs and holy men, and most came from important Indian families. All were close to the leaders of their people, for whom ancient traditions remained vivid memories. Many continued themselves to participate in rituals that dated from long before the whites’ arrival.

In 1923, Mrs. Peters and Father Al asked the University of Oklahoma to admit some of the Kiowa artists, but none had the necessary scholastic background or the money for tuition. Although they never enrolled as students, Professor Oscar B. Jacobson, head of the university’s school of art, invited them to live in Norman, where they could paint in the university’s art studios under his supervision. In 1927 five young Indians arrived to great excitement. Collectively they were to achieve fame as the “Kiowa Five”: Monroe Tsa-to-ke (1904-1937), Stephen Mopope (1898-1974), Spencer Asah (1905-1954), Jack Hokeah (1902-1969), and Lois Bou-ge-tah Smokey (1907-1981), who was later replaced by James Auchiah (1906-1974).

They were almost instant celebrities. Awed by their quickly developing gifts, Professor Jacobson mounted a university exhibit of their work within weeks of their arrival. In November 1927 they gained national recognition when the American Federation of Arts exhibited their paintings at its national convention in Denver. Soon the world learned of the Kiowa Five through their exhibition at the First International At Exposition in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1929 a prestigious French publisher issued a beautiful folio of some of their more-important works. Travel in the 1920s and 30s was a unique opportunity for them to follow the age-old Kiowa tradition, to “journey to the four corners of the Earth.”

Imaginatively combining color and detail in a highly stylized format, the Kiowa artists launched an entire school of instantly recognizable Indian art. In some measure they

“Warriors” by Monroe Tsa-to-ke

may have even influenced the U.S. government’s policy toward the Indians. The artwork of the Kiowa Five became well known for its representational, narrative style with ceremonial and social scenes of Kiowa life as their subject matter. Their work drew attention to the traditional culture and history of the Kiowas and other tribes. Auchiah once commented: “Our forefathers’ deeds touch us, shape us, like strokes of a painting. In endless procession their deeds mark us. The Elders speak knowingly of forever.” The enthusiasm for rediscovered Indian traditions, sparked in part by the Kiowas’ brilliant work, found one expression in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. One of the New Deal’s reforms, this was the law by which Washington finally abandoned its determination to assimilate Indians into white society through the calculated destruction of their separate cultures.

In Oklahoma the Kiowa Five continued their work through the 1930s. In particular, several found employment when the New Deal hired unemployed artists under the Works Progress Administration. Later they went their own ways, some continuing as painters while others took up more ordinary employment to support themselves and their families. Still, even today, a few of Oklahoma’s older public buildings display the murals and other projects that they created. Their legacy, however, is much, much more than that.

The Blue Devils came together in 1923 and made their headquarters in Oklahoma City’s Ritz Ballroom. Mostly they traveled to play at clubs, including white clubs across Oklahoma and surrounding states. The group’s greatest popularity, however, was on the old-time Chittlin’ Circuit, a string of black-owned clubs that booked black bands for appreciative black audiences. The location of many of those black clubs in Kansas City, MO made that city the nation’s jazz capital during the Roaring Twenties.

Kansas City promoters regularly involved the Blue Devils in their famous Battles of the Bands. These were open competitions in which rival bands successively tried to outdo each other’s hottest licks. Not infrequently, the Oklahoma Citians bested every big-time band in the region in those competitions.

With the Great Depression of the 1930s, clubs, both black and white, withered; and denied audiences, the Oklahoma City Blue Devils disbanded. Many of their members made their way to Kansas City, where they became the nucleus for a new band directed by one of the Blue Devils’ old piano players. That band, the Count Basie Orchestra, continued for decades as America’s premier jazz band—a continuing reminder of black achievements behind Oklahoma’s walls of segregation.

Jerome Tiger’s grandfather, Lewis Coleman, was the church’s pastor. Like the Rev. Coleman and his wife, Hettie, Jerome’s parents, Lucinda Coleman Tiger and John Tiger, were bilingual. English was used with the whites, but all were more comfortable with the Creek that they spoke at home and in church. Because other Indian families moved in and out of the other houses on the grounds, young Jerome lived not only amid an extended family but in something approaching a traditional Creek communal village. Daily he was surrounded by the living traditions of his fellow Indians.

“The Guardian Spirit” by Jerome Tiger

But these were modern times, and Lucinda and John Tiger left Eufaula for Muskogee. Lucinda took a “white” job, pressing clothes at Teel’s Laundry. John did too, beginning to drive fifty miles to Tulsa and his job at the Douglas Aircraft plant. For the first time Jerome and his brothers attended predominately white schools—Edison Elementary, Alice Robertson Junior High, and Muskogee Central High schools.

School was not particularly hard for Jerome Tiger, but neither was it much fun. He spent most of his spare time with Indians his age and other lower income boys whom other students regarded as hoods. His chief interests were an odd combination of violence and sensitivity—boxing and art. Bored with school, he quit after his junior year, served a two-year hitch with the U.S. navy, and returned to Muskogee. He hope to enroll in Bacone College.

The little college had begun as a Baptist missionary school for Indians. Although many (even in Oklahoma) had never heard of it, it had been a national treasure for years because of its art department begun by Acee Blue Eagle. Blue Eagle, also a Creek, had studied art at the University of Oklahoma, beginning there just after the Kiowa Five left. While Blue Eagle headed Bacone’s art departement from 1935 to 1938, he had established national reputations for both himself and the college. Subsequently, Woody Crumbo, of Creek and Potawatomi ancestry, took Blue Eagle’s place and, like him, further developed the Indian style and enhanced the college’s fame in art circles. He too had studies under both Professor Jacobson and Mrs. Peters like the Kiowa Five. When Jerome Tiger returned to Muskogee, Dick West, a Cheyenne, headed the legendary Bacone art department. Unfortunately for Jerome, he could not be admitted to the college, since he lacked a high school diploma. His older brother, Johnny, however, was a student there, and through him, Jerome learned the conventions and styles of Indian art.

No one had to give Jerome Tiger his talent. From his boyhood onward, he had spent hours drawing scenes inspired by events around him and from his imagination as it had been shaped by his elders’ stories and tales. Naturally right-handed, he could also draw amazingly well with his left hand. In fact, he once did four drawings simultaneously—one with each hand and one with each foot!

Returning to his grandparents’ home in Eufaula, Jerome Tiger married, had the first of two children, and began to work seriously at his art. Soon his paintings came to the attention of Nettie Wheeler, owner of the Thunderbird Shop. Located north of Muskogee on Highway 69, the little shop sold tourist trinkets and doodads. Stashed among the prevailing disorder were priceless original works of art, for Nettie Wheeler was an expert on and patron of Indian artists. Recognizing Jerome Tiger’s genius, she began to promote his paintings and entered two of them in competitions at Sante Fe and Tulsa, where both won prizes. She also encouraged Jerome to take advantage of a new program of vocational training offered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Jerome, his wife, and his daughter moved to Cleveland, OH, where he studied at the famous Cooper School of Art.

Cold and crowded, Cleveland was utterly unlike any place where Jerome Tiger had ever lived. Other than the Major League Baseball team, there were few other Indians in Cleveland, and most of them were Navajos, with whom Tiger regularly fought. He did like the Cooper School, however, even accepting for the first time the discipline required in formal art training. He might have stayed at the school if he had not happened to wander by a professor’s office one day. Standing unseen in the hallway, he overheard one teacher tell another that, although the young Oklahoman certainly had talent, “by the time we get through with him, he’ll be just another Indian that bit the dust.”

Jerome Tiger had other plans for his life. He left Cleveland and the Cooper School behind, returned to Muskogee, and polished and perfected his craft. In little time he developed a style so personal that his works were instantly recognizable. Although based on the conventions and themes pioneered by the Kiowa Five and furthered by others, his works were unlike anything ever seen in Indian art before. Clean and uncluttered, their fine lines and exquisite colors seemed to flow together to suggest movement and emotions as much as they did objects and people. Amazed to learn that he was largely self-taught, critics pronounced him a “painter’s painter.” His works, whether based on traditional Creek ways or illustrating the humor and the poignancy of contemporary Indian life, completely fulfilled the mandate that his grandfather had given him. “Put on paper what the Creek has in his heart,” old Coleman Lewis had told him. Jerome Tiger did that better than anyone else ever had.

Tiger created an amazing number of paintings. By the hundreds they poured from his home in Muskogee. Working primarily in a corner of his bedroom, he painted whenever and as long as the inspiration moved him, sometimes working all night and into the next. Some he gave away to friends and family. Others he sold, often for a little as thirty or forty dollars. For many purchasers, his work provided their introduction to Indian art, or, for that matter, original art of any kind. Outside his immediate surroundings, Jerome’s paintings regularly won national prizes and took his fame across America. They did not, however, take him. He mailed his paintings to competitions around the country, but Jerome Tiger never traveled outside of Oklahoma again.

The fame that came to him did not change Jerome. He kept up his boxing, one year winning the Oklahoma Golden Gloves championship as a middleweight. He continued to participate in Indian dances and consult with honored Creek holy men. Surrounded by his old friends (some of whom had no idea of his national stature), he played pool, drank beer, and played around with firearms. He was doing the last in the early morning hours of August 13, 1967. After a stomp dance in Eufaula, he piled into his brother’s car with some other friends. Pulling into an all-night restaurant and service station, the group was ready to break up when a deafening explosion shook the car. Jerome Tiger’s .22 pistol had discharged accidentally, sending a bullet into his brain.

When he was buried three days later, the funeral brought television crews, nationally famous artists and critics, and scores of simple mourners to the West Eufaula Baptist Church. That is where it had all begun no much earlier. Jerome Tiger was twenty-six years old.

The Harvest Gypsies
By John Steinbeck⁴²
Article One
At this season of the year, when California's great crops are coming into harvest, the heavy grapes, the prunes, the apples and lettuce and the rapidly maturing cotton, our highways swarm with the migrant workers, that shifting group of nomadic, poverty-stricken harvesters driven by hunger and the threat of hunger from crop to crop, from harvest to harvest, up and down the state and into Oregon to some extent, and into Washington a little. But it is California which has and needs the majority of these new gypsies. It is a short study of these wanderers that these articles will undertake. There are at least 150,000 homeless migrants wandering up and down the state, and that is an army large enough to make it important to every person in the state.

To the casual traveler on the great highways the movements of the migrants are mysterious if they are seen at all, for suddenly the roads will be filled with open rattletrap cars loaded with children and with dirty bedding, with fire-blackened cooking utensils. The boxcars and gondolas on the railroad lines will be filled with men. And then, just as suddenly, they will have disappeared from the main routes. On side roads and near rivers where there is little travel the squalid, filthy squatters' camp will have been set up, and the orchards will be filled with pickers and cutters and driers.

The unique nature of California agriculture requires that these migrants exist, and requires that they move about. A resident population of laborers cannot harvest peaches and grapes, hops and cotton. For example, a large peach orchard which requires the work of 20 men the year round will need as many as 2000 for the brief time of picking and packing. And if the migration of the 2000 should not occur, if it should be delayed even a week, the crop will rot and be lost.

Thus, in California we find a curious attitude toward a group that makes our agriculture successful. The migrants are needed, and they are hated. Arriving in a district they find the dislike always meted out by the resident to the foreigner, the outlander. This hatred of the stranger occurs in the whole range of human history, from the most primitive village form to our own highly organized industrial farming. The migrants are hated for the following reasons, that they are ignorant and dirty people, that they are carriers of disease, that they increase the necessity for police and the tax bill for schooling in a community, and that if they are allowed to organize they can, simply by refusing to work, wipe out the season's crops. They are never received into a community nor into the life of a community. Wanderers in fact, they are never allowed to feel at home in the communities that demand their services.

Let us see what kind of people they are, where they come from, and the routes of their wanderings. In the past they have been of several races, encouraged to come and often imported as cheap labor; Chinese in the early period, then Filipinos, Japanese and Mexicans. These were foreigners, and as such they were ostracized and segregated and herded about.

If they attempted to organize they were deported or arrested, and having no advocates they were never able to get a hearing for their problems. But in recent years the foreign migrants have begun to organize, and at this danger signal they have been deported in great numbers, for there was a new reservoir from which a great quantity of cheap labor could be obtained.

The drought in the middle west has driven the agricultural populations of Oklahoma, Nebraska and parts of Kansas and Texas westward. Their lands are destroyed and they can never go back to them.

Thousands of them are crossing the borders in ancient rattling automobiles, destitute and hungry and homeless, ready to accept any pay so that they may eat and feed their children. And this is a new thing in migrant labor, for the foreign workers were usually imported without their children and everything that remains of their old life with them.

They arrive in California usually having used up every resource to get here, even to the selling of the poor blankets and utensils and tools on the way to buy gasoline. They arrive bewildered and beaten and usually in a state of semi-starvation, with only one necessity to face immediately, and that is to find work at any wage in order that the family may eat.

And there is only one field in California that can receive them. Ineligible for relief, they must become migratory field workers.

Because the old kind of laborers, Mexicans and Filipinos, are being deported and repatriated very rapidly, while on the other hand the river of dust bowl refugees increases all the time, it is this new kind of migrant that we shall largely consider.

The earlier foreign migrants have invariably been drawn from a peon class. This is not the case with the new migrants.

They are small farmers who have lost their farms, or farm hands who have lived with the family in the old American way. They are men who have worked hard on their own farms and have felt the pride of possessing and living in close touch with the land.

They are resourceful and intelligent Americans who have gone through the hell of the drought, have seen their lands wither and die and the top soil blow away; and this, to a man who has owned his land, is a curious and terrible pain.

And then they have made the crossing and have seen often the death of their children on the way. Their cars have been broken down and been repaired with the ingenuity of the land man.

Often they patched the worn-out tires every few miles. They have weathered the thing, and they can weather much more for their blood is strong.

They are descendants of men who crossed into the middle west, who won their lands by fighting, who cultivated the prairies and stayed with them until they went back to desert.

And because of their tradition and their training, they are not migrants by nature. They are gypsies by force of circumstances.

In their heads, as they move wearily from harvest to harvest, there is one urge and one overwhelming need, to acquire a little land again, and to settle on it and stop their wandering. One has only to go into the squatters' camps where the families live on the ground and have no homes, no beds and no equipment; and one has only to look at the strong purposeful faces, often filled with pain and more often, when they see the corporation-held idle lands, filled with anger, to know that this new race is here to stay and that heed must be taken of it.

It should be understood that with this new race the old methods of repression, of starvation wages, of jailing, beating and intimidation are not going to work; these are American people. Consequently we must meet them with understanding and attempt to work out the problem to their benefit as well as ours.

It is difficult to believe what one large speculative farmer has said, that the success of California agriculture requires that we create and maintain a peon class. For if this is true, then California must depart from the semblance of democratic government that remains here.

The names of the new migrants indicate that they are of English, German and Scandanavian descent. There are Munns, Holbrooks, Hansens, Schmidts.

And they are strangely anachronistic in one way: Having been brought up in the prairies where industrialization never penetrated, they have jumped with no transition from the old agrarian, self-containing farm where nearly everything used was raised or manufactured, to a system of agriculture so industrialized that the man who plants a crop does not often see, let alone harvest, the fruit of his planting, where the migrant has no contact with the growth cycle.

And there is another difference between their old life and the new. They have come from the little farm districts where democracy was not only possible but also inevitable, where popular government, whether practiced in the Grange, in church organization or in local government, was the responsibility of every man. And they have come into the country where, because of the movement necessary to make a living, they are not allowed any vote whatever, but are rather considered a properly unpriviledged class.

Let us see the fields that require the impact of their labor and the districts to which they must travel. As one little boy in a squatters camp said, "When they need us they call us migrants, and when we've picked their crop, we're bums and we got to get out."

There are the vegetable crops of the Imperial Valley, the lettuce, cauliflower, tomatoes, and cabbage to be picked and packed, to be hoed and irrigated. There are several crops a year to be harvested, but there is not time distribution sufficient to give the migrants permanent work.

The orange orchards deliver two crops a year, but the picking season is short. Farther north, in Kern County and up the San Joaquin Valley, the migrants are needed for grapes, cotton, pears, melons, beans and peaches.

In the outer valley, near Salinas, Watsonville, and Santa Clara there are lettuce, cauliflowers, artichokes, apples, prunes, and apricots. North of San Francisco the produce is of grapes, deciduous fruits and hops. The Sacramento Valley needs masses of migrants for its asparagus, its walnuts, peaches, prunes, etc. These great valleys with their intensive farming make their seasonal demands on migrant labor.

A short time, then, before the actual picking begins, there is the scurrying on the highways, the families in open cars hurrying to the ready crops and hurrying to be first at work. For it has been the habit of the growers associations of the state to provide by importation, twice as much labor as was necessary, so that wages might remain low.

Hence the hurry, for if the migrant is a little late the places may all be filled and he will have taken his trip for nothing. And there are many things that may happen even if he is in time. The crop may be late, or there may occur one of those situations like that at Nipomo last year when twelve hundred workers arrived to pick the pea crop only to find it spoiled by rain.

All resources having been used to get to the field, the migrants could not move on; they stayed and starved until government aid tardily was found for them.

And so they move, frantically, with starvation close behind them. And in this series of articles we shall try to see how they live and what kind of people they are, what their living standard is, what is done for them and to them, and what their problems and needs are. For while California has been successful in its use of migrant labor, it is gradually building a human structure which will certainly change the State, and may, if handled with the inhumanity and stupidity that have characterized the past, destroy the present system of agricultural economics.

Here is a house built by a family who has tried to maintain neatness. The house is about 10 feet by 10 feet, and it is built completely of corrugated paper. The roof is peaked; the walls are tacked to a wooden frame. The dirt floor is swept clean, and along the irrigation ditch or in the muddy river the wife of the family scrubs clothes without soap and tries to rinse out the mud in muddy water. The spirit of this family is not quite broken, for the children, three of them, still have clothes, and the family possesses three old quilts and a soggy, lumpy mattress. But the money so needed for food cannot be used for soap nor for clothes.

With the first rain the carefully built house will slop down into a brown, pulpy mush; in a few months the clothes will fray off the children's bodies while the lack of nourishing food will subject the whole family to pneumonia when the first cold comes.

Five years ago this family had fifty acres of land and a thousand dollars in the bank. The wife belonged to a sewing circle and the man was a member of the grange. They raised chickens, pigs, pigeons and vegetables and fruit for their own use; and their land produced the tall corn of the middle west. Now they have nothing.

If the husband hits every harvest without delay and works the maximum time, he may make four hundred dollars this year. But if anything happens, if his old car breaks down, if he is late and misses a harvest or two, he will have to feed his whole family on as little as one hundred and fifty.

But there is still pride in this family. Wherever they stop they try to put the children in school. It may be that the children will be in a school for as much as a month before they are moved to another locality.

Here, in the faces of the husband and his wife, you begin to see an expression you will notice on every face; not worry, but absolute terror of the starvation that crowds in against the borders of the camp. This man has tried to make a toilet by digging a hole in the ground near his paper house and surrounding it with an old piece of burlap. But he will only do things like that this year.

He is a newcomer and his spirit and decency and his sense of his own dignity have not been quite wiped out. Next year he will be like his next-door neighbor.

This is a family of six; a man, his wife and four children. They live in a tent the color of the ground. Rot has set in on the canvas so that the flaps and the sides hang in tatters and are held together with bits of rusty baling wire. There is one bed in the family and that is a big tick lying on the ground inside the tent.

They have one quilt and a piece of canvas for bedding. The sleeping arrangement is clever. Mother and father lie down together and two children lie between them. Then, heading the other way; the other two children lie, the littler ones. If the mother and father sleep with their legs spread wide, there is room for the legs of the children.

There is more filth here. The tent is full of flies clinging to the apple box that is the dinner table, buzzing about the foul clothes of the children, particularly the baby; who has not been bathed nor cleaned for several days.

This family has been on the road longer than the builder of the paper house. There is no toilet here, but there is a clump of willows nearby where human feces lie exposed to the flies—the same flies that are in the tent.

Two weeks ago there was another child, a four-year-old boy. For a few weeks they had noticed that he was kind of lackadaisical, that his eyes had been feverish.

They had given him the best place in the bed, between father and mother. But one night he went into convulsions and died, and the next morning the coroner's wagon took him away. It was one step down.

They know pretty well that it was a diet of fresh fruit, beans and little else that caused his death. He had no milk for months. With this death there came a change of mind in his family. The father and mother now feel that paralyzed dullness with which the mind protects itself against too much sorrow and too much pain.

And this father will not be able to make a maximum of four hundred dollars a year any more because he is no longer alert; he isn't quick at piece-work, and he is not able to fight clear of the dullness that has settled on him. His spirit is losing caste rapidly.

The dullness shows in the faces of this family, and in addition there is a sullenness that makes them taciturn. Sometimes they still start the older children off to school, but the ragged little things will not go; they hide in ditches or wander off by themselves until it is time to go back to the tent, because they are scorned in the school.

The better-dressed children shout and jeer, the teachers are quite often impatient with these additions to their duties, and the parents of the "nice" children do not want to have disease carriers in the schools.

The father of this family once had a little grocery store and his family lived in back of it so that even the children could wait on the counter. When the drought set in there was no trade for the store any more.

This is the middle class of the squatters' camp. In a few months this family will slip down to the lower class.

Dignity is all gone, and spirit has turned to sullen anger before it dies.

The next door neighbor family of man, wife and three children of from three to nine years of age, have built a house by driving willow branches into the ground and wattling weeds, tin, old paper and strips of carpet against them.

A few branches are placed over the top to keep out the noonday sun. It would not turn water at all. There is no bed.

Somewhere the family has found a big piece of old carpet. It is on the ground. To go to bed the members of the family lie on the ground and fold the carpet up over them.

The three-year-old child has a gunnysack tied about his middle for clothing. He has the swollen belly caused by malnutrition.

He sits on the ground in the sun in front of the house, and the little black fruit flies buzz in circles and land on his closed eyes and crawl up his nose until he weakly brushes them away.

They try to get at the mucous in the eye-corners. This child seems to have the reactions of a baby much younger. The first year he had a little milk, but he has had none since.

He will die in a very short time. The older children may survive. Four nights ago the mother had a baby in the tent, on the dirty carpet. It was born dead, which was just as well because she could not have fed it at the breast; her own diet will not produce milk.

After it was born and she had seen that it was dead, the mother rolled over and lay still for two days. She is up today, tottering around. The last baby, born less than a year ago, lived a week. This woman's eyes have the glazed, far-away look of a sleepwalker's eyes.

She does not wash clothes any more. The drive that makes for cleanliness has been drained out of her and she hasn't the energy. The husband was a sharecropper once, but he couldn't make it go. Now he has lost even the desire to talk.

He will not look directly at you for that requires will, and will needs strength. He is a bad field worker for the same reason. It takes him a long time to make up his mind, so he is always late in moving and late in arriving in the fields. His top wage, when he can find work now; which isn't often, is a dollar a day.

The children do not even go to the willow clump any more. They squat where they are and kick a little dirt. The father is vaguely aware that there is a culture of hookworm in the mud along the riverbank. He knows the children will get it on their bare feet.

But he hasn't the will nor the energy to resist. Too many things have happened to him. This is the lower class of the camp.

This is what the man in the tent will be in six months; what the man in the paper house with its peaked roof will be in a year, after his house has washed down and his children have sickened or died, after the loss of dignity and spirit have cut him down to a kind of sub-humanity.

Helpful strangers are not well received in this camp. The local sheriff makes a raid now and then for a wanted man, and if there is labor trouble the vigilantes may burn the poor houses. Social workers, survey workers have taken case histories.

They are filed and open for inspection. These families have been questioned over and over about their origins, number of children living and dead.

The information is taken down and filed. That is that. It has been done so often and so little has come of it.

And there is another way for them to get attention. Let an epidemic break out, say typhoid or scarlet fever, and the country doctor will come to the camp and hurry the infected cases to the pest house. But malnutrition is not infectious, nor is dysentery, which is almost the rule among the children.

The county hospital has no room for measles, mumps, and whooping cough; and yet these are often deadly to hunger-weakened children. And although we hear much about the free clinics for the poor, these people do not know how to get the aid and they do not get it. Also, since most of their dealings with authority are painful to them, they prefer not to take the chance.

This is the squatters' camp. Some are a little better, some much worse. I have described three typical families. In some of the camps there are as many as three hundred families like these. Some are so far from water that it must be bought at five cents a bucket.

And if these men steal, if there is developing among them a suspicion and hatred of well-dressed, satisfied people, the reason is not to be sought in their origin nor in any tendency to weakness in their character.