William C Phillips - Murder In The Streets: A White Choctaw Witness To The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Murder In The Streets

A White Choctaw Witness To The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

By William C. Choc Phillips

Copyright 2021 By The Estate of William C. Phillips Published By Eakin Press An Imprint of Wild Horse Media Group P.O. Box 331779 Fort Worth, Texas 76163 1-817-344-7036 www.EakinPress.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Paperback ISBN 978-1-68179-225-5 Hardback ISBN 978-1-68179-252-1 eBook ISBN 978-1-68179-253-8

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, except for brief passages included in a review appearing in a newspaper or magazine.

Contents

PROLOGUE: Hannibal B. Johnson

God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water, the fire next time

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

Eyewitness. White witness. Cooperating witness.

Seer. Sayer. Storyteller.

William C. Choc Phillips, born December 1, 1901, in Greer County in southwest Oklahoma as the oldest of eight children, arrived in Tulsa in 1918. Although a Choctaw Indian by birth, one-eighth by blood, he lived his life as a white man in a white world.

At the time of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Phillips worked as an usher in the Royal Theatre at 402 South Main Street, an 800-seat venue managed by Arthur G. Ellis. An untrained but talented baritone, he and a few friends were harmonizing even as the disaster unfolded. Phillips later sang in and managed vaudeville shows.

In 1938, Phillips joined the Tulsa Police Department where, as a founding member of the Barbershop Quartet Singing Society, he toured the country touting Tulsa. Conscripted into the military, he did two years in the United States Coast Guard (1942 1944) as a shore patrolman stationed in St. Louis during World War II, and then returned to his civilian policing post.

Phillips served the City of Tulsa as a police officer for twenty-six years, at one point helming the Fraternal Order of Police. He blazed trails during his decades-long stint with the Tulsa Police Department. He formed the inaugural school crossing guard program for Tulsa Public Schools. He launched a police department retirement program that became a national model.

Phillips retired from the Tulsa Police Department in 1966. He transitioned to the life of a cattle rancher, relocating to Leonard, Okla.. There, his life ended on December 10, 1991.

Phillips, this white Choctaw, bore witness to an act of anti-Blackness that defined a period commonly known as the nadir of race relations in America. He compiled a manuscript later in his life, but it remained unpublished.

Phillips lived to tell his fly-on-the-wall tale, but, until now, post-mortem, never addressed an audience of more than one. He sought outlets for his massacre memoir, only to be rebuffed by publishers fearful of a racial reckoning. Here, Phillips story is resurrected, and told in his words and on his time.

This is a first-person perspective on what happened in Tulsa in 1921 and why. It is one mans account, a subjective rendering with the advantage of vantagewith subtlety and nuance born of that perspective. It is a rare white telling of a horrific white taking (i.e., a massacre perpetrated by a white mob), unfiltered, unadorned, and unvarnished.

Phillips, possessed of a photographic memory according to his son, Larry, vividly described what he variously refers to as a conflagration, a holocaust, and a calamity: The rioting and burning mob rushed in and scattered over the Negro section of Tulsa like locusts attacking a field of grain, only it was more destructive. No tornado, earthquake, or other phenomena of nature ever destroyed a city in the USA so completely.

Most of the direct accounts of the massacre come from Black survivors. Seldom do the voices of white Tulsans emerge, and when they do, they mostly whisper. Phillips bellows. His words add to the whole, helping paint a fuller, richer portrait of what transpired, why, and to what end.

Phillips original manuscript and the typewriter on which he composed it in the late 1960s and early 1970s are housed at Greenwood Rising, the new (2021), world-class Black Wall Street history center that sits on the southeast corner of Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street at the gateway to Tulsas Historic Greenwood District.

Greenwood Rising offers four primary content galleries: (1) The Greenwood Spirit; (2) Systems of Anti-Blackness; and (3) Changing Fortunes; and (4) The Journey to Reconciliation. The primary goal of the facility is to immerse patrons in compelling history, stimulate them to think critically about that history and its relevance nationwide, and galvanize individuals into actioninto being change agents for a more equitable, just, and humane world. The manuscript informs all these galleries, spanning some six decades of Tulsa history.

It is impossible to appreciate the scope and significance of the massacre without understanding what it destroyed and how those impacted responded. What was this Greenwood Districtthis Black Wall Street?

Early in the twentieth century, the African American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, emerged as a nationally renowned center of black entrepreneurship. Legal segregation at the time limited the commercial options of African Americans. This economic detourthis diversion of dollarsspurred business development and economic prosperity in the black community. A talented cadre of African American businesspersons and entrepreneurs emerged.

Statesman and educator Booker T. Washington reportedly dubbed Greenwood Avenue, the nerve center of Tulsas historic African American community, the Negro Wall Street for its proliferation of black businesses and the bustling business climate. Later in the twentieth century, Black replaced the then-dated term Negro, and this storied community became known as Black Wall Street.

On May 30, 1921, an elevator encounter between two teenagers, one black, the other white, in downtown Tulsa, lit the fuse that set Tulsas African American community, the Greenwood District, ablaze.

Tulsaalready a tinderbox; a powder kegreflected the national context of racial strife and anti-Blackness. The rising tide of Ku Klux Klan engagement signaled and cemented white supremacy as the prevailing human relations philosophy.

Black successes and the material trappings thereofhome ownership, relative economic independence, and the objective manifestations of wealth (e.g., automobile ownership, fashion, and leisure time activities) caused cognitive dissonance for segments of the white community who felt themselves congenitally superior, and thus entitled to better lives than those of their Black contemporaries.

Even the land on which the Greenwood District set became the target of land lusta desire by corporate and industrial types to seize the land for what they considered higher and better uses.

The media stoked racial discord. The Tulsa Tribune