Ralph Ellison: Coming of Age During the Rise of the KKK

During WWI, black soldiers boarding trains to leave Okla­homa City held banners that read, DO NOT LYNCH OUR RELATIVES WHILE WE ARE GONE. This was a reasonable fear. Despite all of Ros­coe Dunjee’s fighting—through the pages of his newspaper, the Black Dispatch—the city’s white power structure held its grip.

In the summer of 1920, Oklahoma City was rocked by a lynching. A white mob arrived at the county jail, broke in with suspicious ease, and pulled out an 18-year-old black prisoner—the lone survivor of a bootlegging raid in which two police officers had been killed. The mob took the young man into the countryside, hanged him from an elm tree, and shot him twice in the forehead. The prisoner never should have been held in Oklahoma City in the first place—he was brought there, illegally, by the county attorney, who feared that a largely black jury in the neighboring county might acquit. The attorney was known to be af­filiated with the Ku Klux Klan; he made the prisoner’s whereabouts known and left the jail unprotected.

In the outrage that followed the lynching, the Oklahoman reported rather credulously on the attor­ney’s relationship to the crime: “O. A. Cargill, when asked if he had a statement to make about the abduction of the negro last night, said that he had not, except that he was glad that he was at home and in bed when it happened.”

“NEGROES URGED TO STAY HOME,” read the paper’s front page.

Dunjee’s Black Dispatch, by contrast, raged. “The most dastardly and hellish crime that has or can ever stain the fair name of the State of Oklahoma was staged at the County Jail,” it began, and it pro­ceeded to report on the desperate scramble that night on the East Side, where 1,000 people had gathered on Second Street to try to figure out how to help the abducted prisoner before it was too late. Fifty policemen, along with the mayor himself, came out to the East to monitor and constrain the crowd. The police sent the Deep Deuce search party in the wrong direction, so that by the time they found the abducted prisoner, dumped in the tall grass out in the country, he had already been dead for hours. The Black Dispatch did not flinch from describing the “ghastly sight” of his body: “his tongue had been choked out and hung limp over his lower lip. His right eye was wide open while the left was closed.” Although the dead man had not lived in OKC, his body was brought back to Second Street, where huge crowds came through to mourn.

Roscoe Dunjee ruthlessly mocked law enforcement’s official ac­count of the crime. “Three men overpowered the jailor,” he wrote,

tied him, cut his telephone wires and light, HIS TELEPHONE WIRES, OVER WHICH THE EDITOR OF THIS PAPER HELD A CONVERSATION WITH THAT SAME JAILOR AN HOUR LATER. . . . THINK OF IT, IN five minutes, un­known men can come to the jail, tie the jailor, cut the wires and then find the man whom they seek, from among the many cells, they can do all of this without any information or assis­tance from the inside. THE PUBLIC IS ASKED TO BELIEVE THIS.

Well, WE DON’T BELIEVE IT.

Thus the story circulated through Oklahoma City, the official ver­sion and the alternate, the story and the story underneath—the real­ity of the East Side versus the reality everywhere else. In the streets of Oklahoma City, children walked around selling these stories, holler­ing out competing newspapers’ headlines in their tiny voices.

In Deep Deuce, one of those voices belonged to Ralph Ellison. He grew up so thoroughly immersed in the world of the Black Dispatch that he later recalled selling it when he was “just out of diapers.” Long before he had any idea that he would become a writer himself, Elli­son would visit Dunjee in his office among the jazz clubs of Second Street. Ellison’s father had died when Ralph was only two—a large block of ice he was delivering slipped and gored him in the stomach, and he was buried in the black section of Fairlawn Cemetery, not far from the graves of William Couch and his Boomers, not far from Red Kelley and Officer Burnett.

Shortly after the infamous lynching, in the spring of 1921, Elli­son’s mother decided that there was no future for her sons in Okla­homa City. The place was too brutal. She couldn’t take them to the zoo or to a decent public park. There was not even a proper library for Ralph, an eager reader who had to make do with the discarded books and magazines his mother managed to scrounge from the houses up­town where she worked as a maid. So she quit her job, sold all the family’s furniture, and set off with her boys for Gary, Indiana, where her brother worked in a steel mill. On their way north, the Ellisons stopped to visit a cousin in Tulsa. He lived in a neighborhood called Greenwood, and his OKC visitors would have been impressed by a zone of black life so different from Deep Deuce: solid brick homes and shops, lawyers and doctors, wealth from the city’s endless oil booms. Ellison’s cousin had luxurious furniture and a baby grand piano. Tulsa was still brutally segregated, but at least its black resi­dents had managed to make something grand in their patch.

Gary, by contrast, turned out to be horrible. The steel industry crashed just after the family arrived, and Ellison’s mother couldn’t find work; they were reduced to eating actual garbage. Before long, they gave up and decided to head back south. Although Oklahoma City was amazingly, maddeningly flawed, it was still home.

On their return trip, the Ellisons passed once more through Tulsa.

This time, Greenwood was gone.

During the family’s brief stay in Indiana, a race riot had raged through their cousin’s formerly quiet neighborhood. It had been set off by a mysterious incident in an elevator downtown—an alleged as­sault on a white girl’s innocence—and in response a lynch mob had gathered at the jail, and a counter-mob had gathered to hold them off, and in the chaos somebody fired a shot. The apocalypse ensued. For two days, white mobs went to war on Greenwood, burning every­thing the Ellisons had admired—its churches, shops, hospitals, and houses. Residents trying to escape were mowed down with machine guns. There were eyewitness reports of airplanes circling and drop­ping incendiary bombs onto the roofs of buildings, burning them from the top down. In the end, 35 city blocks were reduced to smoking rubble. Ten thousand residents were left homeless. Hun­dreds of people slept in tents in the wreckage. No one could even say for sure how many people had been killed. When the Ellisons passed through in the aftermath, the whole ruined neighborhood smelled like death.

“Eventually, Ralph Ellison reached the same conclusion his mother once had. A future in Oklahoma City, for someone like him, did not exist.”

Meanwhile, back in Oklahoma City, the KKK was ascendant. By 1923, the organization had grown so powerful that the governor, Jack Walton, declared literal war against it, imposing martial law and mounting machine guns on the roof of the county courthouse. Chamber of Commerce president Stanley Draper disapproved of the conflict, worrying that such vis­ible strife would reflect poorly on OKC’s growing national reputa­tion as a business destination. The governor was impeached. A few months later, ostensibly in celebration of George Washington’s birth­day, the KKK took over downtown. Nearly 5,000 Klansmen marched with torches, American flags, and burning crosses. Brass bands played, and an airplane swooped festively overhead. Klans­women rode along the parade route in 100 cars. Although it was a cold February day, more than 30,000 citizens came out to watch the parade circle the segregated downtown. It looped past the nine-story Colcord, a giant in the skyline that Ellison’s fa­ther had helped build.

The Oklahoman covered the parade with a lighthearted front-page story—“KROWD ‘KNOCKED KOLD’ BY KU KLUX”—as well as multiple playful articles describing the festivities. “The faces of youth, fresh with the animation and excitement of the event, appeared beside the faces of age, lined with the kares of many events, stern and steady in their rigid turning toward the kross at the head of the kolumn. . . . Haze of mist and smoke could not hide an almost hysterical woman, who, after watching the passing of the first fiery cross, rushed to the line of marchers, and seizing the nearest klansman, kissed him repeatedly, krying, ‘Thank God!’”

Not long after this parade, Ralph Ellison turned ten. O. A. Cargill, the county attorney who had presided over the infamous lynching three years before, was elected mayor. The Ellisons settled back into life in Deep Deuce. As a teenager, Ralph took up the trumpet, and the noise of him practicing out of his open window became part of the soundtrack of the community. Every morning, he played reveille—the quick, peppy notes of the military camp song hopped and echoed between the buildings, waking the neighborhood up. Every evening he played taps, a mournful end to the community’s day.

In 1930, when Ralph Ellison was 16, Oklahoma City released its first comprehensive plan. It was explicit about black citizens’ so­cial position.

Oklahoma City is primarily a city of native born white Ameri­cans. This points to the necessity of developing a city to meet the high standards of American living and working condi­tions. As in most of the cities of the Central and Southern states, the principal racial problem centers about the Negroes. They are a necessary and useful element in the population and proper provision should be made for their living facilities. While it is an advantage of each race that living areas be segre­gated, the white race should be much interested in the welfare of the Negroes because of the close contact resulting from the employment of the Negroes as servants in various capacities.

Roscoe Dunjee would have read this, of course, with level-headed rage. In the Black Dispatch, he railed against the Klan and called the state’s new governor, Alfalfa Bill Murray, a demagogue. As OKC con­tinued to expand under the organizing influence of Stanley Draper, as housing developments spread north along freshly poured high­ways, a white group called the East Side Civic League mobilized to keep black homeowners in their place. Dunjee fought them in his traditional style, pushing the black frontier methodically forward, block by stubborn block, sending homeowners now all the way up to Eighth Street, bailing them out when they were jailed. Alfalfa Bill Murray, outraged, issued an executive order declaring martial law in the East. But it was too late. Dunjee’s new housing case was already in the system, and it climbed the legal ladder all the way to the Okla­homa Supreme Court, where Dunjee himself testified on the stand for more than five hours. The court ruled in his favor. Housing segre­gation was now, once again, illegal in Oklahoma City. Black develop­ments began to spread farther up the East Side.

Based on such victories, Dunjee became nationally known as a civil rights fighter. But he was realistic about the depths of Oklaho­ma’s problems. He had a theory, for instance, about the Tulsa race riots. It sounded like a conspiracy theory, but it also made perfect sense. The riots weren’t simply the result of a racist mob, Dunjee ar­gued. It was deeper than that—more chillingly rational. The destruc­tion of Greenwood had solved a long-standing problem for Tulsa’s white city planners. After all the recent oil booms, downtown Tulsa wanted desperately to expand. But that expansion was blocked by Greenwood. The neighborhood could not have been easily cleared, as a slum might have been, in the name of civic improvement. Green­wood was affluent and solid. These were not tenants but homeowners. It was the American dream. The riots might have started with primal racial hatred, Dunjee believed, but they soon turned into something else: an opportunistic, strategic, city-sanctioned campaign to clear the land. When Tulsa’s black neighborhood was rebuilt, sure enough, it was farther from the city center. The white downtown was finally able to expand.

Eventually, Ralph Ellison reached the same conclusion his mother once had. A future in Oklahoma City, for someone like him, did not exist. In the summer of 1933, at age 19, after graduating from high school, Ralph Ellison left. He snuck into one of OKC’s many railyards and hopped a Rock Island train. There was no direct route to where he was going, so he rode north, east, and south, through St. Louis and Alabama. He got beat up viciously by white railroad guards. Eventually he reached the Tuskegee Institute, where he would study music and literature and begin to turn himself into the world’s writer. Oklahoma City had already taught Ralph Ellison everything he needed to know about invisibility. Before he could begin to make a name for himself, he was gone.

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From Boom Town by Sam Anderson. Used with permission of Crown. Copyright © 2018 by Sam Anderson.