There wasn’t much racial tension in my Northwest Iowa upbringing—maybe a skirmish between a few Angus and Herefords from time to time, but nothing to make front-page news. Blacks, Whites, and Natives co-existed without life-threatening prejudice in my hometown of Sioux City, along the Missouri River at the juncture of Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Was that because the Whites accounted for nearly 90% of the population in the 1950s and 60s? In comparison, the Blacks and American Indians tallied about 6% combined. My high school had a handful of minority students, and until then, I’d had no non-White interactions that I recall. None. Now I know that prejudice ran all around me, more profound than I understood—above my undeveloped conscience as an upper-class, White kid. I never considered there might have been issues between Whites, Indians, or Blacks.

Being a child of the sixties and seventies, I became aware of hideous acts of racial violence. On television, I saw plenty of good people battered and bloodied and killed; some might say acts of genocide. Yet, while I knew what I saw in the news was wrong-spirited, I didn’t fully understand the social underpinnings.

My adult self became aware of past truths and alarming revelations while researching for investigative writing. Analysis brought the gospel truth to the surface; my conscience absorbed undeniable facts that engrained historical horrors into my psyche from the atrocities perpetrated on people who don’t look like me.

I was a general dentist in Tulsa for nearly four decades until June 2010. My focus was to maintain the health of teeth and their supporting structures – gum tissue and bone. First-hand, I saw how a person’s refusal to admit their unhealthy behavior and their refusal to be accountable for the predictable self-damage caused the loss of their teeth. They turned a blind eye to the reality of their declining health, and, little by little, they irreversibly eroded their quality of life. I mention these dental realities to establish clear parallels between the dental apparatus’s decay and social mores’ decay.

The destructive nature of ignoring preventable dental destruction is similar to the mental pathology resulting from self-propagating discrimination, which can change a person’s life forever. Suppose enough people fail to recognize their destructive mindset regarding their fellow man. In that case, it can distort the fabric of our societal foundation. Think about the violent insurrection at our national Capitol in January 2021. Think about the penchant of post-Civil War Whites to lynch Blacks because it was entertaining to them and, often, for the amusement of hundreds of townsfolk. Families gathered with potato salad, lemonade, and homemade ice cream to watch the spectacle and reinforce the conviction of an inferior race within their children. Consider the deaths of innocent Blacks at the hands of Whites in recent years, and you realize that the cliché of history repeating itself has merit. And so, it goes. And so, it continues.

Using rampant gum disease as a metaphor for the buildup of hostile societal conditions is well-grounded. Like an oral disease, racial intolerance bubbles to the surface like a gum infection, becoming abscesses of hatred for the minority that should never have happened in the first place, leading to painful flare-ups that often result in brutality with little or no accountability. Minimized, violent social episodes—like the inevitable flare-ups of dental structures that some people choose to ignore—embolden those whose low regard for other humans hardens their core and heightens their prejudices. Groups of like-minded radicals love to knock the teeth out of engrained societal prejudice. Suppose racial bias is part of their upbringing, left unrecognized and unchecked. In that case, ethnic discrimination can lead to entitled bouts of crimes against minorities, even large-scale massacres.

Bigotry can foment accepted norms by those who embrace them. A loss of bone around teeth causes a loosening of teeth. A loss of integrity bred by low-minded contemporaries or the absence of proper parental guidance about the value of human dignity gives rise to a loosening of community principles and a lowering of a person’s moral compass.

The deadly discrimination of the past and present makes me even more aware that there were and are innocent people traumatized directly and indirectly due to extreme racial intolerance. I believe there must be an understanding of the past to grasp that hope for tomorrow starts today. I will continue to call out those of the past and those in the present who target any group they perceive to be striving to share their privilege. This essay is a story of historical prejudice.

 

**

 

My parents were solid citizens. They led many community projects and organizations, and, without a doubt, they lived within the cultural context of their time. Perhaps that was why, without malice of forethought, my Dad taught me, “Eeny, meeny, miny moe, catch a n____ by the toe.” He thought it was funny. I had no idea what the little rhyme meant as an eight or nine-year-old.

My friends knew the catchy poem, too. We recited it like a choir of innocents, celebrating racial discrimination without knowing it. I didn’t grasp the chant subliminally perpetuated the White prejudice about the low status of minority communities.

It didn’t occur to me that I lived in a White homogeny during my pre-college years. Sure, I knew that Blacks sandwiched themselves into tiny homes between blue-collar, White enclaves in a distressed section on the west side. Visible from a busy street—I was viewing from the safety of my parents’ 1959, White over aqua Chevy station wagon—the collection of dilapidated buildings and Black people sitting on wooden steps leading to the front door made me feel uneasy. Was I frightened? Seeing the unclean, impoverished, a few broken-down cars up on blocks and dirt where grass should grow prompted ungracious looks and, occasionally, some disparaging words fromthe adults in the vehicle. Missed by me at the time was the fact that we were in a functioning car. We never drove deep into that part of town, let alone wandered on foot into any of these areas.

While my parents were not overtly discriminatory, they were biased. Thankfully, they did not brainwash me with a high level of disdain for non-Whites. When left to my own devices in my late teens and early 20s, neither my peer group on athletic teams nor those in my social circles harbored ill feelings towards minorities. Like experiences bonded us. We spent our time navigating college challenges, coping with the deaths of so many people our age in the Vietnam War, and discovering the benefits of the Peace and Love movement.

 

**

 

After completing dental school at the University of Iowa and a short hitch as a dentist in the Navy at the end of the Vietnam conflict, I set up a private practice in Tulsa. During my undergraduate days at Oklahoma State, I occasionally visited Tulsa. The setting of the city’s rolling hills and abundant trees reminded me of my Iowa hometown geography. Even after living in Tulsa for nearly four decades, I had no idea of its racial history until I retired in 2010 and began to write. Part of this Oklahoma city’s history has an ugly complexion, pocked by deception, prejudice, and violence against minorities.

As a White man, I was appalled by the atrocities. As a member of humanity, I was enraged. As a writer, I found my voice lies in working to expose social injustices.

Little of Whites’murderous behavior during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 found its way into textbooks used in Oklahoma classrooms, or any classroom, for that matter. A decade ago, however, the age of transparency and the desperation for racial truths began to illuminate that tragic day in Tulsa’s history. An impromptu yet full-scale ethnic cleansing by Tulsa’s dominant race slowly came to light as writers began to pen articles and dubbed it the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Subsequently, using Riot yielded the more accurate descriptor, Massacre. The Black community clamored for reconciliation and reparations in the early 2000s, and students began to see Massacre accounts in updated textbooks. When I walk down the main thoroughfare of this historical community, Greenwood Avenue, these days, it feels like I am in a dream. Stopping in the ice cream store or having a late breakfast inside Wanda’s releases memories I’ve gained from writing about the treasured area. I imagine the man walking by the plate glass window to be the early Greenwood icon, J.B. Stradford, and that he stops justoutside the entrance to the Tulsa Star office next door.

Writing led me through a learning curve about Greenwood’s development, about the freedoms of former slaves and their descendants, about the formal promenades in the early evenings down Greenwood Avenue, as Tulsa Blacks developed their independent lifestyle and basked in the success of their thriving community that comprised a six-square block of businesses and homes in 1921.

 

**

 

In May of 1921, 10,000⁺ Black citizens had a choice of a dozen grocers, a record shop called the Black Swan, numerous cafes and bars, car shops, a taxi company, several hotels and lumberyards, three newspapers, a handful of gambling establishments, and three entertainment venues like the elegant Dreamland Theatre, which seated 750 patrons and served African-American audiences with musical and theatrical revues, silent films and speeches by notable Black orators. When national Black leaders and musicians stepped off the train in Tulsa, their first footsteps took them into an array of bustling shops and Black people going about their business and into a Black-owned, Black-run neighborhood, which Booker T. Washington declared  “Negro Wall Street,” later massaged to Black Wall Street — the moniker preferred by writers and Tulsa’s Black community. This scene was Greenwood. White Tulsans referred to the area as “Little Africa.”

In March of 1921, the NAACP’s fiery founder fanned the glowing embers of discontent among local Blacks during a Greenwood speech at Dreamland. J.B. Stradford, the attorney, and A. J. Smitherman, the founder and owner of a Greenwood Avenue newspaper, The Tulsa Star, Tulsa’s first Black-owned paper and the first Black daily newspaper in the nation, brought W.E.B. Du Bois, the first Black Harvard Ph.D. to Dreamland to speak. Du Bois lectured the crowd, “The hatred in the White man’s heart is still intense.” The professor sometimes proposed that “the only solution to hate is hate.”

Du Bois argued, “We have suffered and cowered. When the armed lynchers come, we, too, must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with sticks, clubs, and guns.” His words stoked a rising tide of passion in Greenwood. Hangings of Black men had become regular Friday-night entertainment for White-nationalists in Oklahoma towns. They inflamed the emotions of Black men who congregated on Greenwood Avenue. They were ready to defend the promise of equality under the law. The escalation of hatred among the Blacks stirred similar sentiments in the White leaders and their legion of militant followers. However, since many residents in the district had employment with some White business owners and families in large homes south of downtown, Stradford and others lobbied for cooler heads.

In the second decade of the 20^th century, Oklahoma’s future looked bright for Blacks. Led by the vision of Edwin McCabe, founder of the first Black community of Langston in 1890, just a few miles west of Tulsa, the state became a mecca for Black towns and self-­‐reliant communities—fifty by 1920. The commentary was swift and damning: The New York Times warned on March 1, 1890, that “a Negro settlement is a camp of savages.” Nonetheless, McCabe sent recruiters to the South, appealing to racial pride, and hoped to recruit enough Blacks to become the majority race, forcing the Whites to turn over the region to them.

John the Baptist moved to Tulsa in 1899. Named by his Kentucky slave owner, the Stradford family called him J.B.Educated in Ohio at Oberlin College, Stradford received his law degree from Indiana University, practicing in Indianapolis and yearning to influence Black equality. Over his lifetime, he was not afraid to preach the gospel of equal treatment and racial solidarity for Black Americans.

McCabe’s dream of a politically powerful, Black-­‐friendly state lured Stradford to the dirt streets of Tulsa’s undeveloped Greenwood section: a move that became his destiny.

Buying up large tracts of undeveloped land northeast of the tracks that bordered downtown, thethirty-­nine-year-­old J.B. Stradford sold his Greenwood parcels to Blacks only. O.W. Gurley, the acknowledged founder of the new community, did the same. Black Tulsa slowly took shape.

Stradford’swealth and influence grew, and leaders of the local White community yearned for his demise. They would get their chance.

A non-event ignited the Tulsa Massacre on Memorial Day, May 30, 1921 — a trumped-up allegation involving a Black teenager, Dick Roland, who stumbled on an elevator threshold of the Drexel Building downtown and accidentally stepped on the foot of a White girl, Sarah Page. The Editor of the afternoon paper, The Tulsa Tribune, responded with a hurried, misguided story for the afternoon paper, alleging that Roland attempted to rape a White girl. The May 31 front-page headline read: “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.

A Negro delivery boy who gave his name to the public as “Diamond Dick” but was Dick Roland was arrested on South Greenwood Avenue this morning by Officers Carmichael and Pack. The teenager faced the charge of attempting to assault the 17-year-old White elevator girl in the Drexel Building early yesterday.

 

**

In 1910 or thereabouts, Damie Ford moved to Vinita, a small town fifty miles north of Tulsa. She opened a grocery store in her living room. In her only interview on record, she told a Tulsa historian, Ruth Avery, in 1972, shortly before she died, that “A little barefoot,Black boy comes into the store, who is nearly smothered by his only garment, a big man’s shirt. He looked like he was about six years old. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said. “I fixed him a sandwich and gave him some milk.”

He told her his name was Jimmie Jones, and he was an orphan. Damie offered him a chance to work in her store, and Jimmie slept on a pallet in the dining room of her small home. They moved to Tulsa a year later and settled in the Greenwood District. Joined by her parents, Dave and Ollie Roland, in a “bought one-story building,” her father opened a furniture store in the front room and rented rooms—rooms Jimmie cleaned after the tenants moved out. Mostly, he ran around the neighborhood and worked odd jobs to make them extra money.

Out of respect for his grandparents and mother, Jimmie took their surname as his. He started school and registered as Dick Roland “because Dick was his favorite name,” according to Damie. And then his future as Dick Roland took an unexpected turn.

The false claim— fake news of their day—of attempted rape was yellow journalism at its finest. The day after the initial rape article, The Tulsa Tribune editor wrote this text; “Negro Will Be Lynched Tonight.” The article stirred up Klan members and other White vigilantes, creating the first step toward the carnage soon to unfold in the streets above the downtown railroad tracks.

Before nightfall, hundreds of armed Whites lined up along the tracks, where the Tulsa Sheriff deputized them en masse. At dawn on June 1, the sound of an air horn commanded a heavily armed White armada, loaded with Klansmen, to step over the tracks and attack a poorly armed band of Black veterans in their World War I uniforms and Army-issue rifles, intent on defending their families and homes. Within hours, scores died—the actual number is unknown; reports range between 65 and 300 Black deaths. All homes and businesses were looted and burned. Historians agree that nine Whites died in the melee.

A few Oklahoma guardsmen mounted a machine gun on the back of a flatbed truck and motored into Greenwood during the chaos. Mary E. Jones Parrish, a witness, described the lethal altercation during the early morning hours in her book Events of the Tulsa Disaster.

After watching guardsmen unload on First Street, where we could see them from our (house) windows, we heard such a buzzing noise that on running to the door to get a better view of what was going on, the sights our eyes beheld made our poor hearts stand still for a moment. There was a great shadow in the sky, and upon second look, we discerned that this cloud was caused by fast-approaching enemy airplanes. It then dawned on us that the enemy had organized in the night and was invading our district the same as the Germans invaded France and Belgium. People were seen to flee from their burning homes, some with babes in their arms and leading crying and excited children by the hand; others, old and feeble, all fleeing to safety. I walked as one in a horrible dream. By this time, my little girl was up and dressed, but I made her lie on the fold so that the bullets must penetrate it before reaching her. By this time, a machine gun rained bullets down on our section.

Law enforcement herded thousands of Black Tulsans into detention. More than six thousand men, women, and children marched down neighborhood streets for internment in several locations; White families lined the streets to witness the spectacle. Within sight of the detention areas, the remainder of Greenwood burned.

Where was Jimmie Jones/Dick Roland? Tulsa law enforcement claimed the youngster was not in Tulsa on that dark day. The police chief told his mother he was escorted to a Kansas City, MO house to stay with Sara’s friends. According to the Black Dispatch newspaper in Oklahoma City, police put him into an empty railroad car headed north. Or, was he hung in the makeshift gallows in his cell block and his body taken from the alley door of the jail to an unknown destination? Damie claimed he was a longshoreman on the docks in Portland and that he sent her letters never shown to anyone. To this day, this is no evidence to support what happened to the scapegoat of the Massacre. Dick Roland is still an enigma.

June 1, 1921, the Tulsa Tribune wrote: “A motley procession of negroes wended its way down Main Street to the baseball park with hands held high above their heads, their hats in one hand, a token of their submission to the White man’s authority.” The reporter continued, “They will return, not to their homes, but heaps of ashes, the angry reprisal for the wrongs inflicted on us (the Whites) by the inferior race.

 

              

In the days after the Massacre, Mayor Evans unequivocally blamed Black Tulsans for the Riot and inferred that the “destruction of most of Black Tulsa during the riot might have been a good thing for the city.”

Even as buildings smoldered, White opportunists swooped in to claim the land and build businesses that benefitted from their proximity to Tulsa’s train depot. The Massacre’s existence had been hidden from the community for decades by the local Chamber of Commerce—declared bad for business. And yet, the continued disenfranchisement of their race, the slaughter of innocents, and the fiery demolition of Greenwood set the curve for insurrections against the Black community throughout American cities at that time.

Stradford lost more than money in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. He lost his Black sense of place. He fled Greenwood, charged with inciting a riot, which could put a person in prison for life or on death row. In his unpublished memoirs, he wrote, “It is incredible to believe in this civilized age that a White man could be so void of humanity.” He continued, “My soul cried for revenge and prayed for the day to come when I could personally avenge the wrongs which had been perpetrated against me.” Still on the run 14 years later, he died in 1935 at seventy-­‐four. Sixty years later, in 1995, family members extracted his atonement by a formal dismissal of his charge of inciting a riot. Stradford was the first charged and the last exonerated.

When I arrived in Tulsa in 1975, the Greenwood District showed no pulse even though post-Massacre, the district rebuilt and became “the region’s leading center for Black business and Jazz music,” home to a mix of White landlords and 600 Black-owned enterprises by 1941. As part of 1960s urban renewal, the city built a six-lane highway through the heart of Greenwood, effectively disrupting the continuity and the future of the once-bustling neighborhood. Greenwood became a ghost town. Driving over that stretch of elevated concrete above the former district, I feel sad.

 

**

 

  I recall a group of fathers talking at a multi-family cookout during my adolescence. They whined about the Indians. “A bunch of drunks,” they grumbled, “sleeping by the railroad tracks behind Batcheller’s Farm Store”—an area close to the stockyards. Smiling at each other, they laughed, gave another turn of the charcoaling hamburgers, and took another pull on their beers. “They should stay on their reservations — stay on the other side of the tracks.” These were the fathers of my buddies. I thought, “So, that is what Indians are.” I still see that image and am embarrassed by their comments and cores.

As a youth, I learned that the Lewis and Clark Expedition in the early 1800s — sent by President Jefferson to explore the western expanse for a water connection to the Pacific Coast — passed by the future Sioux City during their three-year journey. In school, we learned that these explorers and the indigenous people mainly interacted peacefully. The Sioux Indians were the dominant Tribe in the region. The frontiersmen preceded past the future home of  the most crucial Indian diplomat on this stretch of the Missouri River. War Eagle arrived at Yankton with his new bride, Mazakirawin. She joined the Yankton Sioux around 1830 in the southeast corner of the future South Dakota.

War Eagle was a peacemaker during troubled times. The ingress of White men from the East changed the peaceful practicing of native rituals, their reliance on and respect for buffalo, and how they revered the bounty of the earth and the heavens. White hunters slaughtered whole herds of buffalo, brought missionaries to convert the Indians into Christians, and plowed up the soil for crops without regard for holy burial or spiritually significant Indian lands. All across Indian Territories, pioneers squatted where they liked, took what they wanted, and used violence to reinforce their intentions.

Despite overwhelming challenges, the legacy of War Eagle is one of promoting peace. I know now he took great chances by orchestrating his Native people into cordial, working relationships with the aggressive White explorers, who believed in their Manifest Destiny and the right to develop and utilize all the resources west of the Mississippi, resources identified and mapped by the earlier Lewis and Clark Expedition, lands that had belonged to the Natives for centuries. The opposite way we’ve chosen to remember these men is starkly apparent.

During my early teen years, my mother, a thorough American history student, took me to see Chief War Eagle’s grave; placed at the end of an unmaintained dirt road, it rested on the top of a vast, earthen wall overlooking the Missouri River. The water erosion of the two-hundred-foot drop-off brought the small marker of the Chief closer to the edge with each rainstorm. Vandals collapsed the fence. Why Mom took me to the gravesite has escaped my memory? Likely, I read about the Chief in school, and she thought a site visit might enhance my reading knowledge. Standing next to the forlorn marker did not result in Mom pointing out how this great man faced racial prejudice or the plight of Indians in general. Bad things were not allowed as discussion points.

As a late-developing historian, recent reading about War Eagle has answered a question of mine. Given the hundreds of battles between White men and some of the Sioux, why would the Sioux City citizenry consider a memorial to such a man? Likely, War Eagle’s commitment to peace fostered a brotherhood with Whites and acted as a calming force amidst warring adjacent states. His death in 1851 left a heritage appreciated by all peoples, one hallowed by all humanity of the region. Although his Indian name might suggest otherwise, he was not a warrior. He was a peacemaker. He fostered harmony rather than violence.

War Eagle lived along the Missouri River banks in Yankton, South Dakota, sixty miles northwest of Sioux City. Multiple accounts reveal that the leader took his family to the Sioux and Missouri Rivers’ confluence because he admired the beauty seen from the bluffs looking over the Missouri Valley. War Eagle directed that he and his two daughters rest at that point above the rivers, an elevated plot that looks west over South Dakota and is home to so many of his Native brothers and sisters. However, the simple marker and fragile metal fence surrounding it paled to one nearby that celebrates a White explorer.

A few miles downstream, another park overlooks the Missouri River. Beautiful, well-manicured grounds lead to the 100-foot obelisk constructed in 1901—think of a miniature version of Lincoln’s, the first registered national historic landmark in the United States marks the grave of Sergeant Charles Floyd, Jr.; a White man who died of appendicitis in 1804, early in Lewis & Clark’s journey.

Sergeant. Floyd Monument, Sioux City, Iowa

This symbol of the White man’s first adventure into Indian Country stands proudly above a 23-acre park. Lit up at night, the majestic marker is evident to me as I enter my hometown on the interstate below. In my childhood, Boy Scout troops proudly marched around the grounds while families laid out picnic dinners. The setting is still a grand venue that leads visitors up a paved drive to a concession stand with outdoor seating, a visitor’s center where travelers can take home their very own Sgt. Floyd monument replica.

 

**

 

In the late 1600s, the Cheyenne Tribe lived along the Mississippi River headwaters in the central portion of the region that became Minnesota in 1858. Sioux war dogs—preeminently young warriors, arrogant and defiant, and armed to the teeth with revolvers and bows—chased the band of Cheyenne natives southwest to the Black Hills and onto the plains of the future South Dakota in the 1700s. Their new land provided many grassland animals—buffalo, wolf, coyote, jackrabbit, and antelope. The Tribe turned from raising crops to hunting buffalo herds on horses acquired from tribes to the South. The Lewis and Clark Expedition encountered the Cheyenne in 1804 in the Black Hills.

My family vacationed in the Black Hills and visited Mount Rushmore, the famous monument with prominent American presidents chiseled into the fine-grained granite. Any Cheyenne or Lakota Sioux chiefs were missing from the memorial despite their influence on the region. As a ten-year-old, I didn’t know that the Cheyenne and Sioux had christened the area as the Black Hills (Paha Sapa – “Hills that are Black”). I didn’t understand that the Lakota Sioux Nation and the Cheyenne considered this locale their place of origin, hundreds of years earlier, the center of their world, where Wakan-Tanka resides, “the Mysterious One …The Great Spirit.” I couldn’t know Plains Indians came to this sacred spot to pray. They believed that this is where…

the morning star and the dawn which comes with it,
the moon of night and the stars of the heavens are all brought together.

As a child, I didn’t appreciate the influence of the American Indian culture on America’s destiny. Standing at that observation point, marveling at the carvings of four United States presidents, we were in the heart of Indian country. I doubt my parents told me about the importance of Native Americans. There is a chance their opinion was not favorable, and they chose to avoid the subject.

Now I know the Cheyenne considered the Black Hills their Holy Land, a place for reflection, where the Tribe received their spiritual inspiration to take their “vision quests in isolation.” I have learned traditional enemy tribes of Oglala Sioux forced the Cheyenne further west through future Nebraska and migrated along the North and South Platte rivers in 1832.The Cheyenne split into two groups along the Platte River near the Black Hills, and another contingency clustered further south in 1832. Many settled the latter waterway and onto the rolling topography of Eastern Colorado, north of the Arkansas River, the territorial boundary of another adversary, the Kiowa-Apache Tribe.

Approximately 3,000 Cheyenne were free to practice their religious beliefs on this barren plain, including the sun dance and buffalo worship rituals. In this place, the bond between the Cheyenne and Arapaho, who fled to the region earlier, grew strong through shared commerce, shared camps, and shared families.

 

                                                    **

In earlier years, great Native American leaders had warred against the unrelenting incursion of White settlers. One Chief saw the big picture that Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo didn’t. Born in 1801, Chief Black Kettle—a Cheyenne and a kindred spirit of the great Sioux Chief War Eagle—accepted that many more of his brightest and best would fall if they did not concede that, in the fast-approaching end, the White man would win and continue to punish the red man.

Before becoming a leader, Black Kettle was a newborn in a lodge on the plains. His father, Swift Hawk Lying Down, and mother, Sparrow Hawk Woman, gave birth to two more boys and one girl. Though the year of his birth varies, the most reliable source, his son-in-law’s memoirs, lists 1801 as the start date. His dried umbilical cord was folded into a turtle’s shape and tied to his cradleboard to keep away evil spirits.

At about twelve, Black Kettle started his formal learning of hunting and the bravery required for battles. He also learned the importance of humility and harmony with his fellow Cheyenne. He took to heart the counsel given to be brave, honest, virtuous, generous, and not quarrel. If Black Kettle took this advice, his elders assured him, “You will grow up to be a good man, and you will amount to something.” As his leadership skills developed, Black Kettle became a Chief of the Cheyenne.

As a grown warrior and afraid of the extinction of his Tribe, the Native leader adopted the tack of opting for peace to stop the Army insurgents’ bloodshed. As the Principal Chief of the Cheyenne, Chief Black Kettle made treaties with the Whites that did not last. Yet, he remained vigilant in this peace doctrine, posting a tall flagpole with Old Glory waving above the White flag of peace outside his teepee. Black Kettle became the pacifist chief who gallantly rode into legions of Army soldiers to break up skirmishes and save the slaughter of their men, heroic actions that met with death threats from his people. And still, he persisted.

Those Natives aligned with Black Kettle’s approach elevated the battered leader to visionary status. He led his legions back and forth over the great plains, seeking shelter in treed areas in winter and hunting grounds above the Arkansas River in the summer. The Cheyenne’s nomadic life found them trailing behind the wanderings of their principal meat source, the buffalo. They packed up their bleached White, buffalo-hide lodges. They roamedbehind the herd whose migration pattern was ritual, returning to areas with abundant grasses each spring, land that produced new sources of vegetables for the Tribe, land that was free of the White man, land that allowed the ritualistic Cheyenne to lead a structured, spiritual life. Black Kettle was the peace broker at several council meetings with the Army. During one meeting with Army negotiators, Black Kettle provided this eloquent oral statement.

“This White man is not here to laugh at us, nor does he regard us as children, but on the contrary, unlike the balance of his race, he comes with confidence in the pledges given the Redman. He has not come with a forked tongue or with two hearts, but his words are straight, and his heart single. Had this White soldier come to us with crooked words, I would have despised him and asked whether he thought we were fools, that he could sing sweet words into our ears and laugh at us when we believed them. But he has come truthfully, and I have confidence in the pledges.”

By the late 1850s, Black Kettle’s People enjoyed over two decades of relative peace. At the same time, the Colorado Territory evolved into an organized government. Some thirty-thousand Whites, primarily men, who ravaged packs of buffalo, threatened the lifeline of the Cheyenne-Arapaho and panned for gold along the South Platte River. Thousands of White squatters settled wherever they wanted on land promised to the Indians. The White community’s population rocketed from an estimated 4,000, primarily males, to 34,277 by 1860. They demanded statehood and saluted the Treaty of Fort Wise (1861), signed by Governor Gilpin and enforced by the new Governor, John Evans. The Indian Chiefs—only ten of thirty-four attended—agreed all Cheyenne-Arapaho must move further south and East to a much smaller reserve between the Sandy and Arkansas Rivers, forcing them closer yet to enemy tribes. The Principal Cheyenne-Arapaho Chief, Black Kettle, preached peace at the Treaty talks. His voice of reason and his dedication to his People placed him in a position of high respect. Many of his People accepted the results of the Treaty of Fort Wise. Yet, there was significant pushback among the majority of Cheyenne, who was not represented at the negotiations and learned of the attending leaders’ general puzzlement to the proceedings, who were confused by the language barrier and swayed by Gilpin’s successful bribery.

Further, the non-signing Chiefs were suspicious of the Government’s claim that the dislocation would move the tribes into an area where their troops could protect the Indians from violence with the settlers and the calvary’s retaliation. Additionally, reliance on the White man’s history of promises—mostly unfulfilled—spelled doom to the Treaty that the optimistic Black Kettle had welcomed as a chance for peace, and he moved his followers to a section below the Arkansas River. Some of the Cheyenne-Arapaho refused the Treaty’s agreements, while most transitioned to the new parcel of land. And there were good reasons for the concerns of those who stayed behind.

The new, smaller reservation lacked water and timber. It hemmed in infuriated tribe members, most of whom had no say about the terms of the agreement. The upside, however, was the promise of U.S. Army protection and peaceful existence, a safe haven. However, accepting the Governor’s veiled olive branch ended the Cheyennes’ nomadic lifestyle. No longer buffalo hunters, the plains culture was now corralled into a triangular tract of undesirable turf. The combination of sequestering historically potent Indian warriors and Evan’s turning a blind eye to an exploding White population in former Cheyenne-Arapaho lands brewed deception, like the Trojan horse.

The peace-minded Chief War Eagle, faced with the same options as like-minded Chief Black Kettle to dislocate for a promised armistice and economic provisions, would likely have made the same decision to give his People freedom from constant danger and use the promised infrastructure to set up their economy. 

Governor Evans formed a group of Indian “runners” to run throughout eastern Colorado to seek out all the chiefs who disagreed with the Camp Wise Treaty and convince them to attenda council meeting and accept thenew reservation borders. Such a runner, Gerald Gerry, located a large band of Cheyenne, but its leader, Chief Bull Bear, and his cohorts refused the summons and the mandate. It was a standoff.

“Does the Great Father want us to live like White men?…”

“Yes,” said Gerry. “That is what he wants.”

“You tell White chief,” was the scornful answer, “Indians maybe not so low yet.”

Meanwhile, fair-skinned poachers steadily grabbed land, butchered the buffalo, and sold whiskey to young braves. As I learned from letters between Evans and his Indian commissioners, the antagonists’ violent interactions were small-scale until 1864, when the Governor promoted a conspiracy theory that all the tribes of Eastern Colorado agreed to a “war pipe.” He armed a militia of frontiersmen to prepare for a mythical assault. Recognizing a political opportunity, Evans bowed to the dominant White population’s opinion that all the Indian tribes were plotting an imminent attack and created a militia hedid not have the authority to form.

Editorials in the frontier press, including the Denver Commonwealth and Republican and the Kansas Historical Quarterly, nurtured the ruse of war. Citizens read that “thousands of screaming savages could fill the military void of the plains.”

Acts of retaliation for the White community’s stance on Indian behavior were valid. Aggressive tribespeople continued cutting telegraph lines, which affected the delivery of goods from the East, diminished inventories in Denver, and tripled the price of flour, for instance. The New York Times reported the “Rebel Indians have swept like a hurricane, driving livestock, plundering and destroying to the value of at least a quarter of a million dollars. They have murdered two hundred White persons, among them women and children.” Continued promotion of these incidents produced an explosive atmosphere.

**

In June 1864, Governor Evans finally succeeded in moving Black Kettle’s friendly bands of Indians to sanctuaries via the Camp Wise Treaty that promised a Blacksmith, a grist mill, farming instructions, and the assurance of funding for these enterprises, none of which materialized. Yet, away from the hostile Natives and the active militiamen, the tribes felt safer.

As I read resources, it became apparent that Black Kettle and his loyal People suffered Government grifts several times. I could see it coming; the good guys broker peace. The bad guys disguise themselves behind White hats and maintain their interest in helping the Indian minority create safer sovereignty. Praying for true peace was over the next ridge, the Cheyenne-Arapaho leadership always accepted. And so, it proceeded. Black Kettle attempted to reach a binding peace agreement by exchanging prisoners at an emergency meeting at Camp Weld near Denver in September 1864 with Evans, Colonel John Chivington, and a handful of Chiefs. The offer failed. To which Black Kettle stated, “All we ask is that we may live in peace with the Whites; we want to hold your hand. You are our Father. We want to take good tidings home to our people. I have not come here with a little bark but have come here to talk plain with you.”

Unimpressed, Evans ended the meeting with a nasty comment, “You, so far, have had the advantage; my time is coming,” Satisfied and in good spirits that they had bowed low enough to the White Fathers to warrant peace and a supply of rations, the naïve Indians rode away without a complete understanding of Evan’s menacing statement made at the Camp Weld council. The Tribe representatives did not know Evans and Chivington hatched a murderous plan before the Indians were allowed into the room. Neither was impressed with the appearance of the Indians, and both felt that despite Black Kettle’s assurance otherwise, no peace was possible until all the “guilty parties were punished.” They intended to mislead the Indians in the meeting. Chivington’s large self-image was now overbearing.

Black Kettle and the others were satisfied that the promises of food and other necessities would be distributed to them by the nearby Fort Lyon. The Cheyenne-Arapaho agreed with Major Wynkoop of Fort Lyon to move again, even closer to the fort, for better security and more supplies. A reassured Black Kettle moved his village of tents further south into ridge country along the Sand Creek. He sent out word for hundreds more of his Tribe to make the trek to their new land.

In October, at the request of a new post commander, 113 lodges of Arapaho joined Black Kettle’s more significant contingency after receiving provisions at Fort Lyon. They trekked the forty miles northeast to the ridge country of Sand Creek. The atmosphere was jubilant as the new arrivals settled it.

The Government provided food as promised, and Sand Creek appeared to offer a refuge for non-hostile Indians. Blind to moves behind the scenes, Chief Black Kettle directed more Cheyenne to the Sand Creek encampment in early November. The move to a new reservation was only a chess move with dire consequences for the human pawns. Once arrivals settled in Sand Creek, the new commander cut off all subsistence to the settlement. Facing starvation, the vigorous young men and warriors left to forage for food. Despite mounting disappointment and resentment among the village, they were grateful for their safety from physical harm.

 

**

 

Black Kettle did not know that a few weeks before Camp Weld, Governor Evans made some damning statements about his real feelings for the Indians. The Governor outlined his strategy for handling the Native’s incursion. “There is no dependence to be placed in any of them,” he wrote. “I have done everything in my power to keep the peace. I now think a little powder and lead is the best for them.”

Also, before the Camp Weld meeting, Evans made a law-binding proclamation, undisclosed to the Tribes. On August 11, 1864, Evans issued a Proclamation—still on Colorado’s books— that sealed many Natives’ fate. Still unfazed that he had no official power to summon a militia, the political aspirant entitled each citizen to an open hunting season.

…either individually or in such parties as they may organize, to go in pursuit of all hostile Indians on the plains; also, to kill and destroy enemies of the country wherever they may be found, all such hostile Indians; further, as the only reward I am authorized to offer for such services, I hereby empower such citizens, or parties of citizens, to take captive of said hostile Indians that they may capture, and receive all stolen property recovered from said Indians such reward as may be deemed proper and just therefore…

Anybody could kill all Indians if they wanted to assume they were hostile and take all their possessions as their payment, as their “reward.” It was open season for the indigenous minority.

 

**

He was contemptuous of legal, ethical, or military authority. He behaved as if he could do whatever he pleased without being accountable to anyone. He was unyielding in his opinion that the Indians had declared war. Accused as a war criminal, the U.S. Congress conducted hearings on Chivington’s Sand Creek behavior. His reprimand was a slap on the hand. Years later, he died alone and broken.

Amid the clamoring of the citizenry to “give the tribes a good whipping,” Chivington feared there would be political repercussions if he returned the militia to their communities without a fight. On November 28, Colonel Chivington and his command of 800 troops left Fort Lyon. They marched nearly to the reservation of the Cheyenne and Arapaho camps at Sand Creek. After setting up camp that night, the soldiers and the militia drank heavily and celebrated the anticipated fight.

The colonel bragged about the subsequent Sand Creek encounter in his November 19, 1864, report to Evans.

After a march of forty miles last night, I, at daylight this morning, attacked a Cheyenne village of one hundred and thirty lodges, from nine hundred to one thousand warriors strong. We killed chiefs Black Kettle, White Antelope, and Little Robe, and between four and five hundred other Indians; captured between four and five hundred ponies and mules. Our loss is nine killed and thirty-eight wounded. All did nobly.

At daybreak, Colonel Chivington revved up his charges with a pep talk, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians …Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”

Chief Black Kettle slept in his tepee, comforted by the silent sound of peace. The American flag and the White flag of truce fluttered in the morning breeze. Chivington ignored the symbol of non-violence and surrender, raised his arm for the attack, and his killing machine lurched forward. The furious soldiers charged down the hill and into the Indian community, hunting down men, women, and children, shooting and mutilating them unmercifully. Private parts of their bodies became war souvenirs.

Chivington’s attack at Sand Creek surprised Black Kettle and his boss, Brigadier General Curtis, at the Army headquarters in Kansas. Perhaps, thinking Curtis may disagree, Chivington would not risk that decision.

 

**

 

Were the Tulsa and Sand Creek offensive attacks that the two minorities unleashed upon the majority in a quest to take their land, wipe out hundreds of innocent non-combatants, pillage their goods, and drive them from their legal patches of dirt? Huh-uh. In both situations, the victorious White brigades of the other side started the devastation.

Chivington’s White majority declared the Indians at Sand Creek were hostile, evidenced by the presence of one White man’s scalp in a chief’s lodge, taken as a prize after the onslaught. Regarding Tulsa, the Greenwood Blacks congregated at the County Courthouse to keep Dick Roland from a public hanging. The protectors became the imagined hostiles, initiated by one accidental shot from a Black man’s World War I gun, triggered by a White man during a shoving match created by Klanners and young White revelers.

In both Sand Creek and Tulsa, the groups lived in designated areas and felt safe. Black Kettle’s People believed diplomats in D.C., and Colorado guaranteed that the United States military protected their new community of Sand Creek against invaders. Greenwood residents emigrated to Tulsa to form the most successful Black community in America, dubbed Black Wall Street by newspapers nationwide. They had Black cops and lived in peace for nearly three decades.

Still, both endured unthinkable bloodbaths. The large contingency of Cheyenne-Arapaho found themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered by militia raiders. Chivington’s report does not mentionany prisoners—allmen, women, and children who could not flee died. To my thinking, they were murdered and left for local animals.

Greenwood’s residents became urban games for heavily armed fair-skinned marauders who set houses on fire and shot the innocents who emerged from the flames, like an arcade game. Different from Sand Creek, thousands of Blacks were removed from their homes and herded to containment areas, as their dead friends were slung onto flatbed trucks and dumped in unknown places.

In both, once the dwellings emptied, the aggressors took bounties from the domiciles as rewards for work well done. In Colorado, they filched beads and pots, severed body parts from the dead, wore them on necklaces or over their heads, and burned down the teepees. In Tulsa, citizens were ordered from their homes and businesses and into the streets, watched their furniture removed, and placed in trucks by vigilantes. Families watched their possessions disappear down the road and witnessed coal oil poured on their wooden homes, then set on fire.

In both, people ran for their lives in all directions, separated from neighbors whose fates were grim, separated from their loved ones, not knowing if they survived or if they would ever be reunited.

In both, the law enforcement on the scene participated in the carnage. Hundreds of hastily deputized White hoodlums along the railroad tracks in the early morning rushed, wild-eyed, into Greenwood to combat a handful of World War I soldiers. The entire band of Chivington’s renegades was official members of the U.S. military or citizens organized and legitimized by Governor Evans to kill any Indian.

These two supposed legal assaults carry forward to today. Prejudice against blacks and Indians continue by large numbers of White Americans. Large-scale one-on-one armed battles between Whites and minorities like Greenwood and Sand Creek are no longer part of the landscape. Yet, the battles rage, mostly between law enforcement and primarily innocent minorities.

In 1968, The militant American Indian Movement (AIM) formed in response to a host of urban Indian grievances, notably, lack of accountability of police brutality throughout the 1960s and the law’s specific brutality against Clyde Bellencourt—a co-founder of AIM—when he railed against the “genocidal treatment of American Indians in the United States, including the breaking of countless treaties.” Bellencourt served time for participating in the 71-day takeover of Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973. The day after the Tulsa Massacre, J.B. Stradford, the wealthiest Black and a committed community leader of Greenwood, was arrested briefly. Escaping on a train headed north, he left his sense of place, seeking refuge as the first charged for inciting a riot. He fled to Chicago and died in 1935 at the age of seventy-five. The fight for dismissing his charge ended in 1996 when Tulsa DA Bill LaFortune presented a motion to dismiss, and Judge Jesse Harris accepted it. After forty-five years, he was the last person exonerated in the Tulsa Race Massacre. The AIM actions half a century ago still inspire their active movement today. Black Lives Matter and other Black advocacy groups continue their fight for equality, decency, and respect.

Like J.B. Stradford and his wife, though contrary to Chivington’s widely published report, Black Kettle and his wife did escape, only to die in the Platte River Massacre several months later in 1864.

 

**

 

Social and racial injustice does not have a calendar. No end date is circled on an almanac that declares the final day of discrimination. Historically, I know some empowered people resort to violence towards those who do not look like them, resort to intimidation towards those perceived to be weaker and resort to destruction of property, public and private, as a way to manifest their anger and prove their point, if only to themselves.

The repeated drums of violent and nonviolent discrimination throughout history upset my soul. While the chance of White marauders overrunning minority communities is less likely today, we must teach our children the lessons of accepting those who do not look like us and break the generational chain of recurring intolerance.

I hope my words put flesh on the bones of historically relevant tragedies and the people in them. Integrating these truths promotes an understanding of those who commit the wrongs and uplifts those who endure continued injustices.

More than ever in February of 2021, there is open hatred by substantial pockets of Whites against all minorities and, to a more minor degree, vice versa. Fueled by social media podcasts and websites, as well as a few television stations, we see that lies, broken promises, untenable conspiracy theories, and small-mindedness have created a force of entitled White nationalist groups hell-bent on terrorizing minorities and jeopardizing our democratic fabric.

Hate darkens the sky of hope for the equality we all deserve. Hope for conciliation powers the fight against such oppression. Remember, tomorrow starts today — “Hohou/Nie’she/” in Cheyenne — by taking action against any form of discrimination.

It is on us. It is up to us.

 

 

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