Stuff You Should Know - The Tulsa 'Race Riots'

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

In reality, the Tulsa "race riots" of 1921 was more like a massacre. Yet it was almost lost to history until 1997, and still not widely known outside of Oklahoma until HBO's The Watchmen put it on the cultural map. Learn all about this dark chapter in American history today.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there.

There's Jerry over here. We have all come together in the year 2020, where our silver jumpsuits, as always. I know, right? And talk about a buried, overlooked, blemish in the history of the United States. Are we not gonna recount anything about this past year? No.

Talk about this being the first recording of the new year. Nope. All right. We've had a break here. I said no. I'm gonna push forward. We've been off for a couple of weeks, which was pretty glorious to not have to

just over text my brain, but it was also nice to get back in here into the stank of this room. This room, I don't think this room stinks. Well, right now it smells like your caramel vanilla frappalope. This is just black coffee. This happens to be flavored black coffee.

It's really, I mean, it smells great. I think a green mountain or something, caramel vanilla coffee pod. Man, it is super fragrant. Yeah. It's nice. In a great way. It makes me, it smells like an ice cream sundae.

It's pleasant. It is very pleasant. But it's not doing the job. Like I'm still, I'm a little tired, a little groggy. You know, I had a four shot latte earlier. Oh yeah. And so I'm kind of. Gotcha.

Maybe that's what I need. I'm zippy and go downstairs to, I know you don't like to pay for coffee, but. Yeah. Go downstairs to Spiller Park. Okay. Hugh Atchison's place. A four shot latte.

Yes. Okay. That has me going. Well, I give it about a half hour before a choke crashes everybody. Yeah, seriously. Anyway, I'm glad to be back. Well, I'm glad you're back too.

You know, I've been here the whole time waiting. This is where you spent Christmas and New Year's. Yes, both. In this room. And Thanksgiving. And I guess you, me, and Momo slept over there in the corner. They come to visit sometimes.

They say, please, please come on. Please stop working. I say, I can't. They slide the food tray through the slot. You know where I got this idea. And I know you haven't watched it, but the Watchmen. I came across mention of that. I was like, why is everybody talking about the Watchmen

with the Tulsa race riot? Or more appropriately, why is everyone all of a sudden talking about the Tulsa massacre? Yeah, yeah. Because the Watchmen really put it on the map in a big way. Yeah, that's great. Utilized it quite well in the storyline. And I have a recommendation for everyone,

even though it is a marketing piece. There's a thing in the Atlantic called the massacre of Black Wall Street, paid for by HBO. But it tells the story in comic book form. In the Atlantic. It's very cool. And I didn't notice it was a marketing piece until afterward, but I'm like, oh well, it's still good.

Sure, as long as the content's good. Yeah, it's cool and very well done. So this is like, it's great that the Watchmen have brought attention to this. Because it wasn't until about 2001, maybe the late 90s really, that people started talking about this. I know.

And this event that we're gonna talk about happened in 1921. And almost the week after, basically the week after, everyone said, don't talk about this. Just forget it ever happened. We're just moving forward, and we're gonna bury the past. Literally, buried people, the evidence,

all the stuff that was buried. And people just acted like nothing happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma for like 80 years. And when you hear what we're about to talk about, it's astounding that the community, both Black and White, agreed to just basically pretend this never happened, at least publicly or civically.

Yeah, and it's hard to find some information still on some of the key events, and definitely some of the key players. It's because a lot of them died of old age, without ever having been interviewed. Yeah, no follow-ups, like, I mean, we'll get to it, but a couple of the most key players is like, this is kind of all we know.

Right, I looked them up too, and I was like, what do you mean you have no idea? Even who this guy was, let alone what became of him, or what do you mean, like, you just, no one kept track? But that's how complete and total this cover-up was. It was a cover-up. So let's talk about it. First, let's talk about Greenwood,

which I was not familiar with. But Greenwood was an affluent, I guess almost suburb, adjacent to Tulsa, just north of Tulsa. And what was odd about the fact that it was affluent is that it was an all-Black community in the turn of the last century, and yet it was one of the most affluent communities in the entire United States.

Yeah, I mean, now it's just part of Tulsa, like a neighborhood, but back then, just sort of like my neighborhood would have been a suburb of Atlanta in the 1920s, even though I'm, you know, five miles from downtown. Right, exactly. But in 1921, it was, like you said, super affluent. They had a lot of, I think there were 10,000

Black residents there, it was called the Black Wall Street, like I mentioned. And 600 businesses, there were 15 African-American millionaires living in this district. 15 Black millionaires in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Yeah, and it wasn't, I mean, the whole area was very well-to-do. There was like indoor plumbing.

The public schools there were like top notch. And in many cases, Greenwood had a lot to boast about that like the white areas in Tulsa, just over the railroad tracks, literally on the other side of the tracks, didn't have, like this was far better off than some parts of white Tulsa. Yeah, including one of the top African-American surgeons,

if not the top in the country, endorsed by the Dr. Mayo himself. The Mayo brothers. Yeah, this guy was Dr. A.C. Jackson, and he was one of the people murdered in this massacre. Yeah, I was gonna say as a spoiler, but I guess we've already kind of mentioned there's a massacre coming, right?

Yeah. So just to take a step back even further, so it's pretty impressive to think of like, this is the Jim Crow era United States. Yes. We're talking about, this massacre took place in 1921. That's, you know, 50 years after the end of the Civil War. In many ways, the Jim Crow era was just as bad

as the antebellum slavery era. But so the idea to us today looking back at this time of, well, there's a black community in Oklahoma that was one of the most affluent areas in the country. It's kind of mind-boggling, but if you dig even deeper into how it was formed, it almost, you develop like a sense of pride in this that these people came together under these conditions

and not only like survived, but like thrived and carved out a place for themselves where like being black was celebrated and where you could be proud and you took pride in your home, in your children, in your children's education and the healthcare that they were getting and the bus service and the quality of the theater that you went to.

The confectionary, the soda fountain, like that's where you went to go like propose marriage. Like there was this incredibly developed community. And one of the ways that it was able to flourish and was able to kind of grow like this is because the first thing that Oklahoma did when it became a state, remember it was originally a territory for forced relocation of Native Americans

and their African slaves to this area. When it became a state, when the white settlers came in and said, no, we want this instead. We're gonna take this territory we gave you away and turn it into a state. The first piece of legislation they passed was that black people have to stay in their own area. They can't marry outside of their race.

They can't frequent white owned businesses. They have to stay over here. And so the people of Greenwood said, fine with us, we're gonna pass a covenant that says you have to be a black person to own land here or to even rent a place here, to own a business here. There's a covenant restricted community. And we're gonna take a tremendous amount of pride

in circulating our currency, our hard earned money that we're making by working for these white businesses that we're not allowed to patronize. We're gonna go make our own businesses over here and we're going to support them with our community. Not only because we can't spend our money elsewhere but because we have a lot of pride in the businesses that we've built over here.

And so in this way, Greenwood flourished because of and in spite of these Jim Crow era laws that black people had to deal with in Oklahoma at the time. Yeah, and this was Dave Ruse helped put this together. And some of the research he got was from the book, The Burning Colon, Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Ride of 1921 by Tim Madigan. And various suitly points out that this was,

this happened in Oklahoma, of course, but this kind of thing was happening all over the country. Not just in the South or the whatever you call Oklahoma, I guess the West. Midwest. Yeah, but not Midwest. I don't know. I think you just call it Oklahoma.

It's interesting. Some people there identify with the South, but if you're from Georgia, Oklahoma. It's not the South. Might as well be, you know, Montana. I think of Oklahoma as like Native America. Yeah. It says on the license plate.

Maybe. It says middle of the country with a little apostrophe. And there's a picture of the Mountain Dew logo. But this was happening everywhere. There were, in 1919, there were two dozen race riots in places like Chicago, Washington, DC, St. Louis. And between the end of the Civil War and World War II, there were more than 4,000 lynchings in the United States,

which is, you know, it's important to point that out because what, and we'll get into the story here, but a lynching is what was the aim of the white people of Oklahoma on this night. Right. But I have seen also, one of the reasons I went to so much lengths to explain Greenwood, in part was to show what was lost here,

but also to show there are a lot of people who consider this massacre to have been carried out or fueled in part by envy. Right. Because the people of Greenwood were so much better off in some instances than the white people who were, you know, carrying out this massacre. All right, maybe we should take a break.

No. And then we'll come back, oh man, we gotta start 2020 with an argument over a break. Yeah, let's do it. All right, let's take a break, we'll come back and talk a little bit about the beginnings of what would end up being the Tulsa Massacre. ["Tulsa Massacre"]

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we should talk about the key player here, or players, and in this case, it is Diamond Dick Rowland. One of the greatest names I've ever heard in my life.

It's pretty good. He was a shoeshine boy in Tulsa, and by all accounts, he was smart, and he was a handsome young guy, and he was sort of a man about town. He was popular with the ladies. Had the world on a string. Yeah, pretty much. And there was a girl named Sarah Page,

who ran an elevator at the Drexel Building, a building that I have walked past with my own two feet. Oh, wow. Right? And she was white. She was white, and Dick thought she was cute, and he would go down there, and basically kind of make up excuses

to ride her elevator. Okay, I saw something different in that. Oh, yeah? I saw that he was on the elevator because he could use the segregated bathroom on the top floor of the Drexel Building only. So he had to ride up the elevator, up and down, to get to the bathroom, the closest bathroom for him

to be able to use. That's what I saw. So you're saying he didn't fancy Sarah Page at all? I don't know. I don't know, but I also saw a different explanation for why he would have been on the elevator as often as he supposedly was. All right.

Maybe it was both. Yeah. Maybe he went to the bathroom a little more often than he had to because he did think Sarah Page was cute. Who knows? I'm not saying they necessarily contradict each other. I'm just saying I've seen other explanations as well. I got you.

That sounded very lawyerly for some reason, didn't it? Man, maybe this is the new you in 2020. Matlock? George Clark Esquire. Yeah. Esprit. That's different than Esquire. So at any rate, we should probably also

point out that mixed-race couples still get sideways looks in some parts of America today. But certainly in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the idea of a black man fancying a white woman was. Even looking at a white woman. Yeah. It was not only untoward, but like a threat worthy of a lynching. It was still that time in America

where if you made any advances, that was sort of the biggest fear for some white men was black men coming in and taking quote unquote their women. Yeah, which is characterized or popularized thanks to Birth of a Nation, which depicts the clan coming to the aid of white women who were about to be raped by maniacal black men who just couldn't help themselves. They were just so in love with white women

that they just had to rape. That was just what black guys did. That was the view of black guys at the time, that that's just how it was. So to white people, you kept an eye out for that. Like when you saw a black man, there's a white woman over there. You wanted to make sure that he wasn't going to rape her. That was the mentality that people were walking around

with back then. Yeah, that movie was actually partially shot in my old neighborhood in LA. You have a lot to do with this episode. Well, it's just weird to think about Birth of a Nation being shot in Los Feliz, which is this very hip community on the east side of Hollywood. But anyway, on May 30, 1921, Dick Roland

went into that elevator to either flirt or use the restroom or both. And what I saw was that it was well known that the third floor landing did not land flush with the threshold. And supposedly, this is why, as the story goes, Dick Roland tripped when he was getting onto the elevator. So maybe if that bathroom was on the third floor,

that could make sense. I heard top floor. I don't know how many floors the duck floored. I don't remember, actually. Is it more than three? I don't know. I don't remember, actually. I don't think they call a building the something building

if it only has three floors. You know what I mean? You're probably right. It's like an eight plus floor moniker. I think you're probably right. But at any rate, he gets on the elevator as the story goes, stumbles, getting on, and kind of falls forward and grabs her arm, which was kind of the first thing

that he could get a hold of to keep from falling. As the story goes, she started beating him over the head with her purse, because I guess it's an old Looney Tunes cartoon. And she didn't have a rolling pin. And the elevator opened on the ground floor. People see this sort of scuffle going on, or what appears to be a scuffle.

She allegedly cries out that she had been assaulted. And people on the first floor call the police as Dick flees on foot. Right. Just takes off. Yeah, and no one knows exactly how this all went down. No one even knows exactly who Diamond Dick Rowland was. Or Sarah Page.

Yeah. For that matter. In that bazaar? Yeah. All we found out was that she was an orphan. She could have been a young as 16. I've seen reports of 17. And was working to pay her way through business college.

And that's what the Tulsa Tribune reported like the day after. Yeah. And I saw that elsewhere. But I also saw like literally nothing else about her. Yeah. I couldn't find anything. And then Dick Rowland, they think that he might have possibly been named Jimmy Jones.

Right. I saw that too. He was raised by his grandparents whose last name was Rowland. So he took their name. And there is a guy who would have matched his birth date. Name Jimmy Jones that they found buried in Tulsa. But he died like two months before these events took place. So it couldn't have possibly been him.

Yeah. There were a few years apart too I think. Oh, was it? Yeah. Okay. But it's unbelievable that so much of this is lost to history. Yeah. These two people who set off this one of the most despicable events

that has ever taken place in this country's history just vanish almost after this point. It's just, you guys played your role now. Yeah. Everyone else is going to step in. So Dick goes home. His mom, I guess he tells his mom what happened. And she obviously was pretty scared right away because she knew probably what this meant. But for that night at least, nothing really happened.

The next day he goes out to meet up with some friends and the Tulsa police pull up and take him in basically on an assault charge. Right. Which is, I don't know why they didn't go pick him up at home or whatever, but they, I also read somewhere that they had arrested him on the spot. But what you're recounting matches what I've seen most. Right. Right.

Yeah. But that's history, especially suppressed history, right? Some person writes and then somebody else reports and then enough people report it and then that's fact. Exactly. That's the story. But so either way, he came into police custody. We know that is the way it is.

And then this is like a white sheriff named William Sullivan, I think, right? William McCullough. McCullough. I was very close. Yeah. And when you're starting to read the story, you hear about this, you know, white mustache sheriff and immediately think, oh boy, this guy's in trouble. Well, this guy had replaced the last guy that he had.

He was trouble. Right. Yeah. Who had allowed a white mob to take an arrested black man out of his custody and lynch him. Oh, it says here was a white person. Is that not true? I think that's wrong. Oh, okay.

Either way, he'd let somebody be lynched by an angry mob. Yeah. Which I thought for sure Sheriff McCullough was going to do, but apparently McCullough was intent on kind of going by the book. He followed the hectate school of sheriffing. How do you know what that means? From Tequila Mockingbird. Oh, right, right.

Which was, hey, let's let the law play out. Let's give him a stay in court. There will be no lynchings on my watch. Right. So he took Diamond Dick up to a room on the upper floor. The only way to get there was this one staircase. So he basically strategically hit him out, went down to this white crowd and said, there's not going to be any lynching today, like Chuck said.

The thing is we've left out a really important point here. Yeah. Like why was there a white crowd to begin with? Right. Yeah. There is a newspaper that was called the Tulsa Tribune that ran an article about Sarah Page being assaulted. This is a news article and the headline for said news article was nabbed Negro for attacking

girl in elevator, not people might nab Negro for attacking girl in elevator, police worried white mob might nab. It's nab. Like go do this. Yes. That was the headline for the article. The editorial took it even a step further and this is the day after this event took place.

Yeah. The editorial was to lynch Negro tonight and I got to say whoever's writing these headlines, it's inflammatory of course, but they also don't make much sense. Yeah. They're of poor construction. They're very poor construction and I went to try and find the microfilm of this and I think the first one is available but blurry. The second one, the only copy of that paper they have is a front page with an article

cut out that's scanned in and everyone's like, this must have been that editorial. I literally couldn't find any, because I was kind of curious to read just how poor of a writer this person was and get probably what would not have been accurate details. No. No. They basically reported in the first one in the actual article that her clothes had been torn at. Yeah.

They really characterized it like he attacked her. Like a sexual assault. Right. Exactly. And then the second one is just basically like an all out editorial calling for Dick Rowland's lynching. Yeah. This is in the paper.

So the local newspaper has inflamed the white citizenry into basically calling them to action to go do something about this and they all show up at the courthouse to demand that Sheriff McCullough hand over Dick Rowland to them so they can go lynch him and he says, no. Back off, no. So before, I think he tells them like, no, I'm not doing that like you said, but before the crowd disperses, a second group comes and it's actually a group of World War I veterans from Greenwood who had found out that this white mob was going to lynch Dick Rowland and they were like, no, no, they're not.

We're going to go see to it. That doesn't happen. Yeah, I mean, there were hundreds of WWI veterans, black veterans in Greenwood. They were people who fought for this country and it's sort of that familiar, despicable story, shed blood on European soil, come back home to America and you're still a second class citizen. They had petitioned to, and this is just sort of a sidebar, they had petitioned to walk in the Memorial Day Parade for many years and were always refused and May 30th was Memorial

Day and that same year, they had once again said, can we participate in the Memorial Day Parade as veterans? They say, no, we're only going to honor the white veterans. No, I think they wanted to be integrated in the parade with the white veterans just as World War I veterans marching together and they said, no, white's only, you can march by yourself. Oh, really? And when they did march, they were taunted and jeered at.

Oh, gotcha. They were the people who were watching the parade. So these are the people that got guns and came down there and said, not on our watch, we're not going to let this happen and it kind of plays out as a film, you know, from the sounds of it is like these cars pull in and part the crowd and these black veterans get out with their guns and they're like, no, you're not taking this kid, this is not going to happen. So apparently Sheriff McCullough was able to convince the Greenwood World War I veterans

who'd showed up that he wasn't going to hand over Dick Roll and that he's going to protect Dick Roll and then they should probably just go, he's going to get rid of this white crowd too, but don't worry, I'm not like the old sheriff. And there's about 75 armed men just to drive it home like how many people? I read that there were, I saw a thousand somewhere of white people at the courthouse, like it was just this calling for a lynching. Yeah, it was, they were heavily outmanned. Yeah, but 75, these 75 black veterans showed up in the midst of this, let's even say it's

just a thousand. Let's even say it's like 500 people calling for a lynching and your 75 black men showing up armed saying like, no, it's not happening, just pretty courageous stuff, right? So before they can leave or as they're leaving, it's actually not clear what this event's name, gets its name from happens, what you would call a race riot. Yeah, I mean, it looked like it might have been on the way to being a scene that the sheriff managed successfully. They might have been on the way out, that white crowd might have dispersed if not for

this one incident. And even if we did know, just beat by beat the history of this, you still wouldn't be able to say what would have happened, but that is a possible outcome. There was an older white man who demanded that one of these black veterans give him his gun and the black veteran said, no, I'm not gonna do that. And the old white man went to go grab it and the gun went off and both sides just started shooting at one another. Yeah, that's what triggered it.

It was chaos, there was a hail of bullets, people on both sides just started dropping dead from the bullets flying and it became a full-on war scene basically for the next couple of days. Right. Okay, so at that point, the black veterans are like, we really should get out of here. They leave... Toward Greenwood. Toward Greenwood, which is their home, they're going back to their homes.

And along the way, some of them kind of drop back and stake out positions and start sniping at the white rioters who are coming after them. And at that point, they go further back into Greenwood and by this time, it's like the early morning hours of, I believe, June 1st, right? I don't think it was the early morning at that point. Oh, it was like midnight, I mean, like midnight one, something like that. Yeah, it's during the nighttime and this is when the white people started breaking into the hardware stores and looting businesses to get weapons.

Yeah, because here's the thing, so that Sheriff McCullough, who you're kind of like, oh, okay, as far as this whole story goes, that's not so bad, like he at least tried. Now, the moment this race riot happened and the black veterans took off back for Greenwood, he started deputizing white rioters handing out guns and ammunition and basically saying, go get them, go get those guys. And rather than saying like, this is not your job, this is my responsibility, you all go home, I'm going to go handle this, he enlisted the help of these people who were involved in this riot on the white side.

And at that point, any semblance of what you would call a race riot ended and what became a revenge massacre just started. So people call this the Tulsa Race Riot and I think maybe a tenth of it qualifies as a race riot and the rest, it just should be called the Tulsa Massacre. Yeah, so what happens is, like you said, some of these veterans get staked out in strategic positions on rooftops and behind houses, behind cars, the white army, for lack of a better word, is advancing into Greenwood. They start setting fires at these strategic locations to flush out these snipers and then

they just start burning everything basically. Setting fire to every house and every business to burn down Greenwood. Well, I think also for about four or five hours from the time where they managed to flush the snipers out until about five in the morning, they were quietly taking up positions inside Greenwood and then a whistle blew at about 5 a.m. and all of them just came out from their positions and then they just went berserk. It was a charge, a full on like military charge. They did assault on Greenwood and so this assault involved driving people out of their

homes at gunpoint, any resistance that people were shot on site. Apparently, there were people who were not offering resistance. There was a story about an elderly couple who were kneeling in their house praying and they were both executed by these white mobsters in their homes. People were burned alive, houses and people doused with kerosene and burned alive. It was another story of a blind beggar who was tied to a car and dragged through the streets. I mean, it was just bedlam and Watchman actually gets pretty graphic in how they depict this

even though it's an alternate history show just like the movie in the graphic novel or they I think they did pretty decent justice. They didn't follow the origin story of how it started, but it just placed heavily into the plotline. Right. Yeah. Let's take another break. Sure.

All right. Let's take another break and we'll tell you what happened from here. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when

the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay.

So we actually took a commercial break in the midst of a massacre. So the, the, the thing is like people are being driven out of their houses and shot in some cases, but more often than not, they're being like just flushed out, but no house no building, no business, no, nothing was spared. They're the intent of these, um, these white terrorists. There's really no other name for them was to burn down Greenwood. Yeah. The firefighters were kept at bay.

Yeah. They said, do not come in here. Yeah. Like the, the, the, the rioters will kill you. Yeah. Do you just stay away? They burned Greenwood to the ground, 35 blocks, 35 blocks. Do you know how many blocks that is?

That's a lot of blocks. Think about how many blocks is 35 blocks and then add like 10, because I guarantee your conception is less than actually 35 blocks. That is a lot of blocks of buildings burned to the ground. People killed in their front yards, including a Dr. Andrew C. Jackson, the famous surgeon shot like a dog in his own front yard in the chest. There's a picture of him. 1200 homes, uh, churches, schools, hospital, library.

Uh, I think I mentioned there were 600 businesses total. Right. They were all torched. Just torched. There were six people who owned airplanes. They were that wealthy in Greenwood. Yeah. Their airplanes were stolen by the rioters and used to drop bombs, dynamite, nitroglycerin,

fire. And then there was also accusations that the National Guard was helping coordinate this too. Yeah. The National Guard was called in. Uh, and when they got there by all accounts, they did not try to help quell the riot. They more acted as, uh, helping to arrest black men. Um, well, that's just historical fact.

Oh yeah. They were, they were bringing in, I mean, they were killing people for sure, but they were also arresting black men. The women and children, uh, fled, uh, I think 6,000 people were arrested and the women and children fled toward the woods basically, like leaving behind everything they owned. Who are homeless. There is, there is 10,000 people who lived in Greenwood at the time. And after this one night, this orgy of like violence, the, the, um, there were like 9,000

left homeless and hundreds dead. Yeah. And apparently back to the, uh, National Guard, they said that they brought in planes just to spot fires and coordinate ground security. But there are reports from people there, uh, that said that no, they were actually shooting at people on the ground. Say that that's a rumor. Yeah.

They're setting that aside, the National Guard didn't come in and quell anything. They just started arresting and detaining the victims of this massacre. That was the role that they played in this, in this situation. That's right. So, uh, the whole thing culminates with, um, I mean, in the end, it's really hard to get the amount of people killed. I think the official report says 35 black people. It's certainly way more than that.

I've seen all the way up to 300. That's what I saw is almost across the board is 300. Yeah. That again, might be one of those things that everyone just sort of settled on a, on a number, but it was not 35 people to be sure. No, definitely not. And so like as the, the sun comes up the day after, I think June 1st, um, Greenwood burned to the ground.

There's people hiding in the woods, thousands and thousands of former affluent residents of this black community are now homeless. Well, no, they're not homeless because the National Guard has very kindly put them in detention centers at the fairgrounds. That doesn't qualify as a home. Right. That's my point. Yeah.

Is that it's not a home. Right. They're kept detained at the fairgrounds for months. I saw that in some cases, most of them had to, um, endure the winter. This happened in May. Yeah. These people were still, a lot of them kept in detention camps at the fairgrounds through the winter.

Yeah. Tulsa winters and summers are both tough. They were kept in detention camps because white rioters burn their town to the ground. Yeah. And this was in June. So right. Right. So, right.

So, um, yeah, it was June. I guess it was the end of May. So, um, the way that you got out of these detention centers was your white employer came and vouched for you. And so this person works for me. I need them back. Yeah. Please let them go.

That's how you got out. Yeah. So, uh, in the aftermath, no one was arrested. There were no prosecutions. No, no, I'm sorry, Chuck. There was a grand jury that was sat or convened. They indicted 20 people. All of them were black.

Well, no more white. Yeah. That's, I meant on the white side. Okay. Uh, there were in today's dollars between $50 and $100 million worth of damage, um, everywhere I looked said the only organization that really helped and they really helped was the American Red Cross. Yeah.

Uh, super brave and did a whole lot. And I also saw where, um, you know, it wasn't the entire city of Tulsa. Apparently there were some white communities that reached out in the aftermath to help with the recovery efforts, to take people in. Yeah. Um, so we don't want to paint the entire town, uh, as doing the wrong thing. Apparently some people did step up. Sure.

I mean, just nothing is that literally black and white. Yeah. You know, like there's always shades of gray in that situation, in any situation. Yeah. But Greenwood, uh, came back they, it's probably not a surprise, but, uh, the insurance companies had it classified very quickly as a riot instead of just a violent massacre because that mean they wouldn't have to compensate people for their homes being, businesses being burned to the ground.

Right. Because if they were rioting, then they were culpable for that damage in the insurance company. Exactly. Just despicable. Yeah. So also despicable, the county commission said, no, we're not accepting any outside donations. We'll take care of our own and then didn't, didn't follow through on that at all.

So there were no funds paid to the Greenwood people. And people were trying to. Right. Yeah. As reparations or to even help them rebuild. Um, and the county commission, I guess, proposed at one point that they would handle this by buying the land for like a fraction of its market value and then auctioning it off to the highest bidder.

Yeah. That was one proposal. That old, that old scam. And they also said, well, you know what, just to make sure that this doesn't happen again, we're going to establish a new building code for Greenwood. No building can be rebuilt unless it's built with fireproof bricks. And then they went to the fireproof brick producers and said, do not sell any materials to the black people of Greenwood.

So despite this, they managed to rebuild in about five years. Yeah. Astoundingly, the people whose houses in town was burned to the ground, came back and rebuilt. And from just about everything I read, Greenwood was actually better, more prosperous and more affluent from the second time around than it was even the first. And it was pretty affluent the first time. And Chuck, we said like hundreds of people were, were killed, right? Yes.

So get this, funerals were forbidden. Like you weren't allowed to have a funeral. That's how, how, how covered up this thing became. And one of the reasons we'll never know how many people were killed is because the people who were killed were taken off and dumped in the river or stashed in coal mines or buried in mass unmarked graves. Well they think they found two of those like a month ago. Yeah.

They were archeologists in Tulsa and this was from Time Magazine, from Jasmine, Aguilera. They have identified two sites that they thought were, that they think now are mass graves. And they've been looking since I think 2001 because they knew people, you know, there were reports of mass graves and so archeologists have been looking. And in 2018, they started like a legit investigation and they think that they have found one, at least one, maybe two of these sites. But even like... Which is in the cemetery ironically.

Yeah. I saw that. But even this whole thing is like fairly new. It wasn't like until the late nineties that people even started talking about this, right? Yeah. And it was when the state of Oklahoma introduced a bill and this was after just not talking about it. No.

In the black community, they would talk about it in stories and whispers. The white community just buried it and the state of Oklahoma just didn't acknowledge it. Yeah. The last thing I saw about it was the Tulsa Tribune ran another editorial on like June 4th, a few days after basically saying like... Lynching failed. Thank you.

No. The police and all the white citizens who cleaned up Tulsa by getting rid of green wood. It was... It's actually way worse than what I just depicted, but I couldn't possibly bring myself to read it verbatim. Yeah. It's just vile. Yeah.

What it says. It's really bad. But in 97, this is when they introduced a bill for reparations and creation of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission and that report was released in 2001. And it did hold police and public officials to blame, but it didn't do anything basically. There were no reparations. As for Dick Roland, the case was... The actual case, remember the case of the assault?

That was dismissed in September. Apparently, Sarah Page didn't want to press forward with charges and she's lost the time. He supposedly immediately moved to Kansas City, maybe, and no one else really knows anything else about him. It's just so surprising, you know? And if not for the watchman coming out, this might still be a fairly buried story outside of Oklahoma. Yeah, right.

It's really brought a lot of attention to it. Yeah, and good for them for doing that. So one of the things that I saw about green wood itself is that it kept prospering and flourishing for decades after this until about the 60s. And one of the reasons I saw that explained why, not just green wood, but a lot of black areas started to decline in the 60s, was a byproduct of integration was that you could, as a black person in America, spend your black dollar at a white-owned business now. And they didn't teach us that in public school.

This was a byproduct of it, but as a result, these black-owned businesses started to decline more and more and more. And so green wood wasn't as prosperous as it was before, but the death blow, the death blow is that, remember in our interstates episode, where in a lot of the poorer areas, a lot of the areas of color, that that's where they built the highways. I saw that. They built I-244 right through green wood. Yeah.

Tulsa is an interesting place. I spent a few weeks there a few years ago, and it's interesting because it's got this old oil money neighborhoods, some of the most like amazing estates and houses I've ever seen. It's got some very poor communities, a lot of meth problems. It's an interesting place. Sounds like it. Yeah.

Well, that's Tulsa for you. And you know what? I spent a few weeks there in this neighborhood, and I didn't know anything about it. Maybe there is a memorial or something, but I didn't notice it. I'm not saying there isn't one, but I didn't see it. So you know Desmond Tutu, who helped bring about the change over from apartheid to reconciliation? I love his work. Yeah, a big fan.

He came to Tulsa and basically said, you guys are sitting on a powder cake here. When was this? Not very long ago. I think maybe in the 90s, maybe even in the 2000s. Just basically saying, how could you possibly heal when you still have bodies in on-mark graves and no one's talking about this still? I believe there is a park that they found, like a reconciliation park or something like that, but it sounds like there's still a ways to go.

Yeah. I want to be ironic that it was Watchman that basically is forcing this issue to be discussed. Be pretty ironic. Yeah. The power of comic books. Right. Well, not even TV, I guess. Of graphic novels.

Yes. So if you want to know more about the Tulsa Massacre, also known as the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, there's a lot for you to go read, thankfully, and you should just type that into your favorite search bar. Since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Hey, guys. This email is mostly for Chuck. I need to get something off my chest and clear some things up about my involvement with your

pronunciation of Carrie Elwys Elvis Elvis. Sometime over the summer, I made a comment in the Corrections Corner thread of Movie Crush on the Facebook page where you were pronouncing Carrie Elwys Elwys. I posted, I had read on a read at AMA, his name sounds like Elvis, but what I meant to say was it rhymes with Elvis. Is that why you said Carrie Elvis? Like on the... Yeah.

It's because of Eli. Why don't you? He says this, when I finally heard my name pop up in the podcast, I was thrilled and couldn't wait to hear your reaction. Not only did my comment get understandably misunderstood, but I've heard you reference the comment two or three times now and continue to correct yourself saying Elvis most recently on the Andre the Giant Live episode. Parenthetical.

Josh said it right. I tried to issue another comment immediately afterward to clear the air, but it was too late. You discontinued Corrections Corner. I did. I was going to do that on Movie Crush and it just became like, you said this wrong and you're inflection. And I was like, you said Kubrick was great.

He was very great. Yeah, I was a minute as like Movie Corrections, but you know how it goes. So I just said, no more of this. You don't understand how something like this, something as small as been tearing me apart inside every time I hear you reference it. There's one thing worse than giving someone bad information and having them proliferate that information out in the world, in this case to millions of, well, not millions of people.

Trillions. I just want to apologize officially for correcting you on something so silly. In any way you want to say the name is fine by me as long as it's, what do you say? Elvis. Elvis. I think Elvis. Thanks for the decade. I don't know now.

Eli's gotten in my head too. Thanks for the decade of great content. I'll see you both in January and Seattle for my third live show. Nice. All the best, Eli. It's Eli's third live show birthday. And I think it's pronounced Eli. Oh, it could be Eli.

Could be. Yeah, we're just going to go with Eli though. I think Eli's ELLI. It could be. I think Ellie Golding is something different than that, isn't it? I don't know. Who was that? Or does she pronounce her name Eli?

I don't know who that is. You do too. You've heard her pop songs before when you're working out. Okay. If you want to get in touch with us like Eli did to let us know we're saying something wrong because of you, well, you can get in touch with us by going on to stuffyoushouldknow.com. And you can also send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.