Tulsa Race Riot

On August 21, 1920, Nida was driving two white men and one white woman to a dance in Red Fork. While driving Nida notice something unusual about his passenger. Just before Red Fork, as Scott Ellsworth writes that Nida was clubbed on the head by on of the men with a revolver (30). They got outside of Red Fork were Nida was then shot in the stomach by one of the men in the car. Roy Belton a white former telephone company worker took a ride from Tulsa to Nowata; another passenger read aloud the newspaper's accounts of the crime. As Ellsworth says, "Belton remarked that he knew who the woman was in the Nida's cab" (30). He was then arrested for shooting Homer Nida. When Belton was in the courthouse, thousand of white citizens of Tulsa waited outside for Belton so that justice could be server for the kill of Homer Nida. When Belton came out of the courthouse onlookers cheered as his captors shouted, "We got him boys. We've got him." Belton was then taken to the Jenks road were he then was lynched by the white mob.
             White supremacy in Tulsa during 1917 to 1921 was soaring, white citizen of Tulsa thought with events of bombing a wealthy oilman home to the killing of a taxi cab driver that they should have take the law into their own hands. African Americans were terrified in the white citizens actions. African Americans felt that they would not get equal justice with the law, so African Americans had to stand together against white supremacy and challenge their authority. Which leads into the events that start of the Tulsa race riot. Dick Rowland work as a shoe shiner on Main Street. There were no toilet facilities for the boot shiners, so the owner of the shine parlor where Rowland worked arranged for the employees to use the restroom across the street on the top floor. So the morning of "May 31, 1921" Rowland went across the street to us the bathroom. Dick Rowland got onto the elevator to go to the top floor of the building.