The Ground Breaking

Description

Housatonic Book Award Winner

Longlisted for the National Book Award and Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction

Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and Stowe Prize

One of The New York Times’ “11 New Books We Recommend This Week” | One of Oprah Daily’s “20 of the Best Books to Pick Up This May” | One of The Oklahoman‘s “15 Books to Help You Learn About the Tulsa Race Massacre as the 100-Year Anniversary Approaches” |A The Week book of the week

As seen in documentaries on the History Channel, CNN, and Lebron James’s SpringHill Productions

And then they were gone.

More than one thousand homes and businesses. Restaurants and movie theaters, churches and doctors’ offices, a hospital, a public library, a post office. Looted, burned, and bombed from the air. 
 
Over the course of less than twenty-four hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map—and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than fifty years. But there were some secrets that would not die.
 
A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre. It also unearths the lost history of how the massacre was covered up, and of the courageous individuals who fought to keep the story alive. Most important, it recounts the ongoing archaeological saga and the search for the unmarked graves of the victims of the massacre, and of the fight to win restitution for the survivors and their families.
 
Both a forgotten chronicle from the nation’s past and a story ripped from today’s headlines, The Ground Breaking is a page-turning reflection on how we, as Americans, must wrestle with the parts of our history that have been buried for far too long.Praise for The Ground Breaking:
“A skillful narrative of excavating the truth about the Tulsa race massacre. . . . Candid and self-aware. . . . Part of what makes this book so riveting is Ellsworth’s skillful narration, his impeccable sense for when to reveal a piece of information and when to hold something back.”—The New York Times  

“A moving and humane portrait of the massacre . . . The Ground Breaking sends a powerful message at this 100th anniversary: that reconciliation is possible only when we directly confront the truth of a painful past and take concrete steps to redress it.”—The Washington Post

“A stunning narrative.”—NPR’s Code Switch

“The Ground Breaking documents Ellsworth’s dogged pursuit to excavate the details of what occurred on those days a hundred years ago, since facts about what transpired were intentionally suppressed for decades. . . . By weaving in his personal history and conversations with Tulsa survivors and other natives, Ellsworth combines his gift for storytelling with a historian’s dogged persistence to not only track the latest information on the existence and locations of those mass graves but to offer essential insights as to why the Tulsa race massacre is emblematic of why American racial inequality persists and how we need to reckon with it so we can begin to seek true reconciliation. . . . Ellsworth—whose previous book on the massacre, published in 1982, was entitled Death in a Promised Land—with his latest masterful work of history, illuminates the hard, never-finished work of unlearning racism and nurturing truth. He also prompts us to question how many other American stories and voices remain buried, waiting for dedicated historians with Ellsworth’s persistence and passion to uncover them.”—OprahDaily.com

“A thoughtful exploration of the importance of collective memory. It is particularly poignant as 2021 marks the centennial of the massacre. A must-read for all who are interested in how history continues to impact the present.”—Rebekah Kati, Library Journal (starred review)

“Historian Ellsworth (Death in a Promised Land) delivers a riveting investigation into the origins and aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. . . . Interviews with survivors and reflections on the debate over reparations and the social, economic, and racial divisions of modern-day Tulsa add depth to Ellsworth’s portrait of a community attempting to heal from an unimaginable injustice. This eloquent, deeply moving history isn’t to be missed.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Immensely readable and thoroughly engaging, The Ground Breaking is a remarkable blend of history and memoir that could not be more timely and informative. Taut, tense, and meticulously composed, Scott Ellsworth’s elegant narrative is both mesmerizing and enlightening.”—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove

“This is a book that fuses history and memory with the unresolved search for justice for the victims of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. It is also a searing story of Ellsworth’s personal journey as he struggles to unearth and come to terms with these events, and the journey of a community as it moves through forgetting, denial, and finally some grudging acceptance of what happened. The horrific events of 1921 have been called a riot, a disaster, a pogrom, and finally a race massacre. Ellsworth shows how each renaming is a direct result of the persistent efforts of those who would dig up what had been carefully and deliberately hidden. This book should be essential reading for anyone interested in an honest grappling with our racial past and with the task of moving forward.”—Kenneth W. Mack, professor of law, Harvard University

“The persistence, empathy, and painstaking research of The Ground Breaking move us much closer to the justice that the victims of Greenwood, and the people of America, deserve. Heartbreaking and inspiring.”—Beto O’Rourke

“In a time marked by raw nativism, gangster capitalism, and white supremacy off its leash, well-funded mobs, winked at from above, committed racially driven mass terror against Black citizens and American democracy. Those who found themselves mystified when America’s white power movement stormed the US Capitol in 2021 need to take a good look back at Tulsa, Oklahoma, a century ago. The talking heads chant ‘This is not who we are’ because they are wholly in the dark about who we have been. Scott Ellsworth not only tells the gripping story of one of America’s worst racial atrocities but shows us how we can uncover our past and come to grips with our future. His literally groundbreaking research and engaging prose pull us toward the call of justice today.”—Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair, Poor People’s Campaign, and author of The Third Reconstruction

“America cannot address the crisis in which we find ourselves because we are unwilling to acknowledge the road that brought us here. We are determined to look away, as if hiding the empty cake plate will help us lose weight. What we stand to lose instead is the hope of our democratic heritage. Scott Ellsworth is willing to dig and willing to help us to see who we have been in hopes that we will rise to who we must be. The Tulsa massacre of 1921 is one of the most significant and revealing episodes of American history, and one we must confront in order to find our way. The Ground Breaking will rattle you, and it should. It will move you toward a harder wisdom, and it must.”—Tim Tyson, senior research scholar, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, author of The Blood of Emmett Till, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, and Blood Done Sign My Name

“A vital history of a racially motivated mass murder a century ago . . . An essential historical record surrounding heinous events that have yet to be answered with racial justice.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 

“Scott Ellsworth’s absolutely riveting book does more than chronicle the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 and its literal exhumation. With a stunning combination of objectivity and empathy, it demonstrates how even in polarized times we can come together in pursuit of truth. Though concerned with past events, it explores every stratum of the American city now—from city hall to dive bars to homeless encampments to the living rooms of the wealthy and the poor, regardless of color or creed. Anyone interested in America’s future should read it as a template for the reconciliation that lies ahead.”—Tim Blake Nelson, actor, Watchmen and Just Mercy, and Tulsa native

“There is no more scholarly or elegant telling of this uniquely American story—the horrible hours a century ago when Tulsa’s Black community was obliterated by a white mob; the breathtaking conspiracy of silence that followed; the long coda to the tragedy that is still being written. But this book is also a memoir, and it is Ellsworth’s story that has found its way most deeply into my bones. He was the white Tulsa boy changed by an early experience of virulent racism. He was the scholar who dedicated his life to unearthing what happened. He became a truthteller and an example for us all. I believe that the path of true racial reconciliation runs through millions of American whites, whose hearts would be changed if they only knew our history. To those people I would simply say this: Please read this book.”—Tim Madigan, award-winning author of The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

“This has been the life’s work of Tulsa native historian Scott Ellsworth, who has spent nearly fifty years working on uncovering what really happened and then what happened to the bodies of what is the biggest unsolved crime in state history. . . . His book is a must-read for every Tulsan and for those who want a better understanding of what America was like in the years following the first World War.”—Tim Landes

“In this centennial year, which has been marked by racial unrest and uprisings, Ellsworth recounts how survivors, researchers, and historians following the 1982 publication of his seminal book on the massacre served as essential catalysts in breaking long-held silences around an American tragedy with the aim of modeling what racial healing could look like.”—OprahDaily.com, 20 of the Best Books to Pick Up This May

“Long awaited.”—Smithsonian Magazine

“Indispensable . . . impeccable . . . Scott Ellsworth has produced a much-needed book that acts like a mirror. Though documenting a particular place and time, it helps us understand the race-based and sectarian turmoil that is so pervasive today. . . . Fast-paced but nuanced, it’s an impeccably researched update of [his] literary debut.”—The Guardian

“[One of] fifteen books to help you learn about the Tulsa race massacre as the hundred-year anniversary approaches.”—The Oklahoman

“Ellsworth’s book presents a riveting, painful-to-read account of a mass crime that, to our everlasting shame as Americans, has avoided justice. . . . [The Ground Breaking] presents us with a clear history of the Tulsa massacre and, with that rendering, a chance for atonement of one of our darkest hours as a nation. Readers of this book will fervently hope we take that opportunity.”—Associated Press

“This is the kind of book that, once you start it, makes the hours disappear. It’s an emotional one that’ll make you skip dinner and lock the door so you can just read. For sure, The Ground Breaking will shake you up.”—TheTimesWeekly.com

“If one of the public historian’s greatest tasks is to make people care, Ellsworth succeeds spectacularly. His character-driven narrative is clear and compelling. . . . The detail with which he recounts Tulsans’ lives is rich and effective. . . . What Ellsworth is ultimately making the case for is what some scholars and policymakers have called ‘transitional justice’—or a way for societies to redress abuses and atrocities so severe the normal justice system can’t handle them. . . . Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of The Ground Breaking is that it understands the limitations of the historian’s and the media’s roles in that project, acknowledging that more political action is needed to sustain a movement that’s only just begun.”—Foreign Policy

“Superb . . . A century after the Tulsa massacre, The Ground Breaking is beautifully written, instantly engrossing, and deeply empathetic. It never flinches from a horrifying story, although in places that horror is unbearable, unearthing a cruel secret that America tried for decades to suppress. In the wake of Trump’s America and as the United States struggles to come to terms with its living legacy of slavery, brutality, and institutionalized racism, The Ground Breaking is an essential read.”—Donal O’Keeffe, Irish ExaminerScott Ellsworth is the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Game, winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He has written about American history for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, he is also the author of The World Beneath Their Feet and Death in a Promised Land, his groundbreaking account of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Scott lives in Ann Arbor, where he teaches in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Chapter 1

1921

Close your eyes and you can almost hear them.

It’s a Thursday afternoon on a long-ago spring day. In the alleys and on the back porches it is still jacket weather. For even though the dogwoods and redbuds are in bloom, and bursts of sparrows explode out of the trees and bushes, in the shadows there’s a lingering coolness in the air. Only they don’t care. For today is the maids’ day off and they’ve congregated, in twos and threes and fours, to stop and gossip along the sidewalks and storefronts. Gone are their uniforms, the long white aprons and striped dresses and peaked caps. Gone are the mops and the dust rags, the yes ma’ams and the no sirs, and the lye soap, starch, and bluing. In their place are smiles and laughter, felt hats and bobbed hair. Today is a day to exhale.

They aren’t the only ones out and about. Up and down Greenwood Avenue, a small parade of humanity can be seen. There are ditchdiggers and shop owners, a mother with young children, an old man-born a slave-with ancient eyes and an ash-gray beard. Preachers and hustlers, doctors and dishwashers, a newspaper reporter, a uniformed messenger, and a deputy sheriff can all be found within a five-block radius. Some are getting off work, others are shopping. From a window up above drifts the sound of a Victrola. Maybe it’s Mamie Smith, the Harlem singing sensation, belting out “Crazy Blues.” Or maybe it’s a rag or a Mozart piano sonata. In a second-floor office in the Williams Building, a dentist carefully sets a burr into his drill. Two doors down, an attorney inks one last contract for the day and hands it to his secretary.

Welcome to Greenwood. Spring, 1921.

We are in Tulsa’s African American district, home to fourteen churches, two schools, a hospital, a post office substation, four hotels, two newspapers, and at least ten thousand residents, with the number swelling each week. A dozen physicians and surgeons live and work in Greenwood, as do lawyers, insurance agents, real estate salesmen, and pharmacists. In the shops you can buy dresses and three-piece suits, straw hats and bench-made shoes, pipe tobacco and household goods, tools and typewriter ribbon, perfume, eyeglasses, and bottles of patent medicine. There are ten tailors, four shoe repair shops, one filling station, and one feed store. Nor does the district lack opportunities for entertainment. The Dixie Theater seats more than a thousand, while the Dreamland has seating for 750. Both offer motion pictures, musical performances, lectures, and vaudeville acts. Nearby are pool halls and speakeasies.

This is no food desert. There are thirty-eight grocery stores, fruit and vegetable stands, and meat markets. Thirty restaurants serve everything from sandwiches and plate lunches to steaks and chops with all the trimmings. There’s the Red Wing CafŽ and Kelley’s Lunch Counter, the Waffle House and Doc’s Beanery, as well a slew of double-named eateries-Bell & Little, Grace & Warren, Hardy & Hardy, Newman & Howard, White & Black, White & Brown, Wright & Davidson-where ditchdiggers and dentists, chauffeurs and custodians all sidle up to the counter and place their orders. Afterward, diners can pick up some smokes at the Oquawka Cigar Store, or a bag of sweets or some ice cream at Loula Williams’s confectionery.

It is said that in Greenwood, a dollar bill will change hands a dozen times before it ever leaves the district. But equally important, its residents need not face the indignities heaped upon them at the white-owned shops downtown-the sighs and furrowed brows of the impatient white clerks, the ones who follow you down the aisles, then won’t let you try on clothes beforehand. Here in Deep Greenwood, as the main commercial blocks are called, African American shoppers can purchase clothes at Black-owned stores, drop off their dry cleaning and laundry at Black-owned cleaners, and have their portraits taken in a Black-owned photography studio. Here, there are Black doctors and Black nurses, Black teachers and a Black principal, Black plumbers and Black house carpenters. Whites sneeringly call the district “Little Africa,” or worse.

In Greenwood, there are African American men and women who own stores, hotels, and two- and three-story red brick office buildings. They pay property taxes, conduct business transactions with buyers and jobbers across the country, and live in newly built homes furnished with mahogany sideboards, cut-glass chandeliers, and carports. Their daughters take piano lessons and learn poise and elocution, while their sons dream of glory on the gridiron or baseball diamond. Women entrepreneurs are far from uncommon. Elizabeth Sawyer and Dora Wells operate their own dressmaking establishments. Other women manage real estate and run their own restaurants and shops.

Armed with grit, gumption, business acumen, hard work, and sometimes a bit of luck, the leading Black merchants of Tulsa have flourished. They read the Bible, newspapers, and novels, go to church on Sunday, and dress for dinner. The white bankers downtown know who they are, as do the shipping clerks and freight agents at the railway terminals. And while the overwhelming majority of African Americans in Tulsa live far more modestly, in rented rooms and shacks without running water, for those who have pulled ahead, Greenwood is a wonder, a living and breathing Black edition of the American Dream.

But Greenwood is far more than just a land of fat wallets and bulging coin purses.

It is also a mindset, a bearing, a way of engaging with the world. In an age when people of color are constantly being told that they are lesser beings, here is a community who knows that they are just as good as anyone. Nationally known African American leaders, such as Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, have visited Tulsa to see what all the fuss is about. Jazz bands from Kansas City and Chicago will regularly come to Greenwood to play the latest, genre-busting sounds of a music that is fast capturing the attention of the world. Ideas flourish here as well. In classrooms and living rooms, across shop counters and in columns in the Tulsa Star and the Oklahoma Sun, they take root and cross-pollinate, are weighed and debated. There are political clubs, reading circles, and missionary societies. Hemmed in by a white world that values only their labor, Greenwood is an outpost of vitality, achievement, and pride

The evidence is everywhere.

You can see it in the women who drape themselves in pearls and fur for a show at the Dreamland or the Dixie. It’s there, as well, in the steely gaze and set jaws of the neighborhood’s World War veterans, who gather for reunions on Armistice Day. You can sense it in the comportment of the women and men who run their own businesses. And you can feel it in the presence of independent craftsmen who never, ever have to approach a white man with their hats in their hands. But it is there, as well, in those who take in laundry and scrub floors and wash dishes. For there is a frontier mindset here, an ironclad self-confidence and a can-do spirit. Greenwood isn’t a gift from anyone. It is something they have built. It is their own.

By five o’clock, most of the merchants are closing up for the day and locking their doors. The maids are long gone, while the last of the shoppers make their final purchases and start to head home. As the shadows lengthen and wheel across Greenwood Avenue, and the afternoon sun glances off the top floor of the Stradford Hotel, there is once again a slight chill in the air. And while they do not know it yet, the people of Greenwood are on a collision course with the unimaginable.

Memorial Day, Monday, May 30, 1921.

An African American teenager walks along a downtown sidewalk. His name is Dick Rowland. Nineteen years old, a former football player at Booker T. Washington High School, he lives with his mother, Damie, in Greenwood, but works during the day in a white-owned and patronized shoeshine parlor located downtown on Main Street. When done correctly, a proper shoeshine takes more skill than meets the eye. Seated on a short-legged wooden stool in front of the thronelike chairs where the customers sit, Rowland will use a stiff horsehair brush and a soft rag to remove any caked-on dirt and grime. Then, with a cotton ball stuck on the end of a twisted length of wire, he will daub edge dressing, ink-black and smelling of alcohol, along the outer edges of the sole and heel. As that dries, he will dip a second rag into a tin of shoe paste and expertly apply it to the uppers, paying special attention to the cracks and creases of well-worn brogans and cap-toe oxfords, and to the delicate drilled patterns on the collars and facings of wing tips. Then he will buff and polish each pair to a glimmering shine.

There are no toilet facilities in the shine parlor for Dick Rowland and the other African American bootblacks. So the white owner has arranged for his employees to use the “Colored” restroom on the top floor of the Drexel Building, a block away on Main Street. This is where Rowland is headed now. To get to the washroom, he must ride the elevator located in the back of the building. The elevator is operated by Sarah Page, a white seventeen-year-old who, it is said, is saving her money to attend night school. At the very least, Sarah knows Dick and all the other shoeshiners by sight, as she carries them up to the fourth floor and back down again practically every day.

Only today is not like all the others.

Shortly after Dick enters the Drexel Building, Sarah screams.

And Dick is seen running away.

The police are summoned. Two detectives arrive and speak with Sarah. But they do not appear to be overly concerned. No all-points bulletin is issued, no squads of armed officers are dispatched on a manhunt. For whatever happened or did not happen in the elevator, Sarah Page will not press any charges. A white clerk in RenbergÕs, a high-quality clothing store located on the ground floor of the Drexel Building, however, is convinced that he knows just as plain as day what occurred between Rowland and Page. And while he did not actually witness anything, he talks to anyone who will listen.

The next morning, police officers arrive at Damie Rowland’s home in Greenwood.

They don’t stay long.

Dick Rowland is arrested and is taken downtown. He’s booked at police headquarters and then, pending arraignment, is locked inside a jail cell located on the top floor of the county courthouse.

By late afternoon, there is lynch talk on the streets of white Tulsa.

But in Greenwood, there is talk of a different kind. At the Dreamland Theatre, an angry veteran jumps up onstage. “We’re not going to let this happen,” he shouts. “We’re going to go downtown and stop this lynching. Close this place down.”

Tuesday evening, May 31, around 7:00.

By now, more than three hundred white men, women, and children are gathered outside the Tulsa County Court House, a handsome Greek revival edifice located at Sixth Street and Boulder Avenue, along the southern edge of downtown. In the soft spring twilight, with the sky slowly turning pink and gold, they pack the nearby sidewalks and have spilled out into the streets. The women are wearing straw hats and light summer dresses, the men in overalls, suits, or dress shirts and ties. Groups of twos and threes and fours are talking and smoking, some sitting on the grass in the front yards of nearby houses. The mood is light and celebratory, with mockingbirds and chickadees chattering in the nearby oaks and elms. But the crowd is also determined, and expecting action.

Only nine months earlier, a large crowd of whites had gathered on these same streets and sidewalks. They had come to demand the release, into their custody, of a white eighteen-year-old former telephone company worker named Roy Belton, who had been charged with the cold-blooded murder of a white Tulsa taxicab driver. Belton had been arrested and was being held in a jail cell on the top floor of the courthouse when the crowd gathered and pressed its demand. At first, the sheriff refused. “Let the law take its course,” he said. “The electric chair will get him before long.” But it was all a show. When a handful of armed men wearing masks appeared at the courthouse door, the sheriff willingly handed over his prisoner. “We got him, boys! We got him!” the men shouted as they led Belton out of the courthouse. Within a half hour, Roy Belton was lynched a few miles outside town. Tulsa police officers directed traffic.

“It is my honest opinion,” the police chief was quoted a couple of days later, “that the lynching of Belton will prove of real benefit to Tulsa.” The sheriff agreed, stating that “it shows to the criminal that the men of Tulsa mean business.” So did the Tulsa World, the city’s morning newspaper. “There was not a vestige of the mob spirit in the act of Saturday night,” it argued. “It was citizenship, outraged by government inefficiency and a too tender regard for the professional criminal.”

Now, one year later, they have come for Dick Rowland.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7500 × 5.4700 × 8.1600 in
Imprint	Dutton
ISBN-13	09780593182994
ISBN-10	0593182995
Author	Scott Ellsworth
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	SOC031000, HIS036060
Subjects	history gifts, on juneteenth, tulsa race massacre book, oklahoma history, best seller books for men, african american history books, black history books for adults, history teacher gifts, history buff gifts, historical books, gifts for history buffs, united states history, black history books, tulsa, history book, history, dad gifts, American history books, us history, hospital, history books, black history month books, books on racism, african american history, black history, social justice, american history, SOC031000, HIS036060