"And my great-grandmother was shushing her, saying, 'I'm reading now, don't bother me,' " says Anneliese M. Bruner, a descendant of the Parrish family. It all started on Monday morning, May 30, 1921, when a nineteen-year-old African-American shoeshine named Dick Rowland was working at a stand in front of the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa. The destruction of property is only one piece of the financial devastation that the massacre wrought. On May 31, 1921, Dick Rowland, a 19-year old Black shoeshiner, tripped and fell in an elevator and his hand accidentally caught the shoulder of Sarah Page, a white 17-year-old operator. As city streets throbbed with protests (and what some might call uprisings) during the summer of 2020, two science fiction dramas recalled the massacre of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which took place 100 years ago this spring. "This actually was something that was akin to an act of war where the country turned in on its own citizens," Bruner says. Two days of bloodshed and destruction ensued, by land and air. Among African Americans, however, the memory had not completely faded. Can it still be today? Places to worship. The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 is believed to be one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history. Greenwood, where Black success embodied the American dream, was no more, suddenly, dreadfully wiped out. As city streets throbbed with protests (and what some might call uprisings) during the summer of 2020, two science fiction dramas recalled the massacre of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which took place 100 years ago this spring. In 1925, Booker T. Washingtons National Negro Business League held its annual meeting in Tulsas partially restored business district. It hasnt happened near enough this season, but the Oklahoma baseball bats and pitching were in orchestra-like synchrony on Tuesday and the result was a 12-2 The destruction also included many businesses and community institutions: four hotels, eight churches, seven grocery stores, two Black hospitals, two candy stores, two pool halls, two Masonic lodges, real estate offices, undertakers, barber and beauty shops, doctors offices, drugstores, auto garages, and choc joints. He eventually left Tulsa. Composite created with photographs from the Department of Special Collections and University Archives. It was considered among the nations best hotels for African-Americans at the time. The suspect is still at large. While the Greenwood neighborhood boundary is not officially defined, the outline shown in this piece includes the predominantly African-American area shown in the 2001 state commission report as well as some additional areas, based on our analysis of census data. That clash and others that day marked the beginning of what would become Greenwoods armed destruction. Quraysh Ali Lansana, an Oklahoma native and the acting director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation at Oklahoma State University, Tulsa, is helping organize an exhibition about the historic Black Wall Street neighborhood, its destruction and its rebirth, for Tulsas Philbrook Museum of Art with Tri-City Collective. As the Magic City grew with the steady influx of white settlers and fortune hunters, it became more like the rest of America, but with less law and order. According to Tim Madigans. Records in which occupations were illegible, or were without a house number or clear address were excluded. The businesses on Greenwood Avenue were owned by people who were among Tulsas most prominent Black citizens. Several women set up shop as entrepreneurs in the same building. Thirty-one restaurants. He did not find evidence that the disaster was premeditated by city officials, but he thought they certainly took advantage of it to the detriment of the Black community. But they were woefully outnumbered. "The book is a small red volume, hardcover, somewhat worn," Bruner says. Green Currin, who participated in the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, was elected to the Oklahoma Territorial Legislature in 1890. In 1996, state lawmakers They also faced another kind of white resistance: a fire ordinance intended to prevent Black property owners from rebuilding on their own and insurance companies that refused to pay damage claims. Twice, a group of armed Black Tulsans, many of them World War I veterans, offered to help protect Mr. Rowland but were turned away by the sheriff. What happened to the Tulsa Airbnb Queen'? When there were differing accounts or information, The Times used what was cited by the most sources. he asks. To this day, not one person has been prosecuted or punished for the devastation and ruin of the original Greenwood. A century ago, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., perished at the hands of a violent white mob. African Americans had been around Oklahoma for a long time. The Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 published its final report in 2001. The family has been together during the pandemic and has used this time to consider the legacy of Tulsa and the family's heritage. Black residents stand outside the entrance to a refugee camp on the fairgrounds in Tulsa after the massacre. In a 1940 Works Progress Administration oral history, an ex-enslaved Creek confirmed this: I was eating out of the same pot with the Indians, . Over the course of three days, dead bodies were stacked up on trucks and railroad cars and buried in secret around the city by white aggressors. This article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: Originally published as The 1921 Tulsa Massacre: What Happened to Black Wall Streetin the Winter 2021issue ofHumanitiesmagazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Please notify us atpublications@neh.govif you are republishing it or have any questions. While events in Oklahoma over the next few weeks will seek to examine the legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre 100 years later, it hasn't always been that way. The Black Wall Street Memorial is seen in Tulsa on June 18, 2020. The Black residents of Greenwood did not passively endure the onslaught. To create the maps of the occupations of African-American residents in Greenwood, we analyzed 1920 U.S. census data from Ancestry.com for residents for which occupation data was recorded. The 1915 maps were from the Library of Congress and were used to fill in other parts of Tulsa, where 1920 maps were not available. The white mob indiscriminately shot Black people in the streets during the massacre, which left as many as 300 dead. The destruction of Greenwood and the assault on its citizens, beginning on May 31, 1921, was called the worst public disturbance since the Civil War. Now that Tulsa has scratched its way into popular culture, it stands as a symbol of Black tragedy and also of resurrection and resilience. True deliverance for the people of Greenwood, however, came from within, as documented in their own record of the massacre and its aftermath. Drivers Space Bruner is able to tell the harrowing story today because her great-grandmother Mary E. Jones Parrish, a teacher and journalist, survived and documented the massacre in her self-published memoir, Events of the Tulsa Disaster. May 24, 2021. Black residents stand outside the entrance to a refugee camp on the fairgrounds in Tulsa after the massacre. More than 70 businesses operated in mostly one-, two- and three-story red brick buildings clustered along the block. Plumes of smoke hovered over the neighborhood. Although they had survived one of the deadliest race massacres in U.S. history and their district was demolished, many residents returned. Greenwood wasnt a gift from anyone, it was created by the citizens of Greenwood who withstood the tragedy of 1921 and rebuilt it again, said Scott Ellsworth, the author of the recently released book, The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice. Greenwood is the story of resilience. Mr. Stradford and Mr. Gurley who purchased large tracts of land in the early 1900s were among the founders of Greenwood. About 40 percent of the communitys residents were professionals or skilled craftspeople, like doctors, pharmacists, carpenters and hairdressers, according to a Times analysis of the 1920 census. The white mob blocked firefighters while Tulsa police commissioner J. M. Adkison and police chief John Gustafson were under pressure to keep law and order in the rough and tumble boomtown. Street addresses of some buildings were numbered in different ways, depending on the source. Sheriff McCullough, hunkered down in the County Court House, kept Dick Rowland safe as the mobs fury was aimed at a Negro revolt in Greenwood. "The pages are a little brittle.". Viewers wondered if the events depicted were more fiction than science. They were casualties of a furious and heavily armed white mob of looters and arsonists. By SEAN MURPHY and TERRY WALLACE June 2, 2022. The only African American in the legislature, Currin authored Oklahomas first civil rights bill, which lost ratification by one vote as the territorial government proceeded to disenfranchise Blacks and pass its first Jim Crow laws. Oklahoma representation will be significant when Hollywood Week begins on ABCs American Idol.. Tulsa police respond to a shooting at the Natalie Medical Building Wednesday, June 1, 2022, in Tulsa, Okla. It's also Parrish's plea for America to live up to the promise of democracy. S. MacQueen, a bailiff and failed candidate for sheriff, grabbed a tall Black mans .45-caliber Army-issue handgun, leading to this exchange: N, where are you going with that pistol?. hide caption. "Looking back now, I know how the story ends," she says, fighting back tears. In Greenwood, residents held more than 200 different types of jobs.

The paper reported on stories of racial violence and advocated for the rights of African-Americans. Justice has never been served.

Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, Okla., was the pulse of the Black business community. By Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Anjali Singhvi, Audra D.S. We also created an application to input the height information for each building from the Sanborn maps. Meanwhile, the Tulsa Tribunes afternoon edition fanned the flames with the headline To Lynch Negro Tonight! as an ugly mob began to gather outside of the Tulsa Courthouse. They began building on the northern side of Tulsa beyond the railroad tracks, forming the bones of the citys predominantly Black neighborhood that was separate from the white side of town. Theres really no way of knowing exactly how many people died. First, we took images of Sanborn insurance maps from 1920 and 1915 and used a process called georeferencing to align them to modern geography. "I was speechless, stunned, amazed, proud, sad. "When you talk about reparations, the challenge is that it means different things to different people," Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum says. For decades, what happened in Greenwood was willfully buried in history. In 2018, Radio Diaries in New York City received a $350,000 grant from NEH to support several episodes of its historical radio program and podcast, one of which, Surviving the Tulsa Race Riot, told the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre through the life and memories of Olivia Hooker, who was just six years old in 1921. A lawsuit against the city is seeking a host of reparations, including financial compensation, tax abatement, mental health services and restitution to include the redistribution of land to the families of Greenwood's original landowners.

Additional reporting, development and production by Barbara Berasi, Matt Craig, Alain Delaqurire, Marcy Edelstein, Lazaro Gamio, Guilbert Gates, Jon Huang, Blacki Migliozzi, Jugal Patel, Bedel Saget, Alison Saldanha and Jessica White. Within a day, C.L. Every Negro was afforded the same treatment, regardless of his education or advantages. There was also a small juke joint called Zulu Lounge owned by Isaac Evitt, who worked by day on a farm, but after dark, flung open the doors of Zulu. Low around 35F. It helped explain some of the trauma in her family. "There are people whose psyche is still affected generationally; trauma after trauma after trauma just continues to build on itself," Bruner says. Despite efforts to protect their property, Black residents were outnumbered and outpowered. White mob sets first fires along Archer St. I was grief-stricken," she says. We categorized occupations into three broad categories: professionals, skilled craftspeople and service workers. African-American men sifting through the burned ruins of the Gurley Hotel on Greenwood Avenue. Both survived the conflict. Mar 23, 2023 Updated Mar 23, 2023. By 1942, over 200 Black businesses were operating in Greenwood. A. C. Jackson, physician and surgeon, saw patients at an office on Greenwood avenue and Archer Street. The shooting at a Tulsa hospital is one of many in a string of shootings that have taken place across the country in recent weeks. Officials confirmed that four people had been shot, including a 45-year-old man who was pronounced dead at the scene. At least four people were killed Wednesday in a shooting on a hospital campus in Tulsa, Oklahoma, police said in a news conference Wednesday evening. This time, the police, fearing a lynching, moved Rowland from the regular jail to the top floor of the Tulsa County Courthouse for safekeeping. Another postcard showed the burning of an unidentified Black man in Durant, and was captioned Coon Cooking. In 1917, 17 white members of the International Workers of the World were flogged, tarred, feathered, and turned loose on the prairie by Knights of Liberty dressed in black robes and masks. In as many cases as possible, multiple sources were used to confirm details like the location of businesses and residences. Hundreds of Greenwood residents were brutally killed, their homes and businesses wiped out. WebTulsas Greenwood Cultural Center tabulates that in the span of 24 hours 35 city blocks of Black Wall Street were burned to the ground. Eyewitnesses recalled the specter of men carrying torches through the streets to set fire to homes and businesses. A disguised light-skinned African-American Tulsan overheard an ad hoc meeting of city officials plan a Greenwood invasion that night. In 1921, a white mob attacked the Greenwood district of Tulsa, killing hundreds of Black people and destroying the neighborhood. The Mount Zion Baptist Church burned down during the massacre. Black people had money and needed places to spend it. Bruner says that the country needs to be humble and acknowledge what the Tulsa Race Massacre did to African Americans, otherwise, there is no moving forward. A mass shooting took place at the St. Francis Hospital campus in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Wednesday, leaving five dead and many injured. Led by O. William Loren Katzs Black Indians and Art Burtons Black, Red, and Deadly cite an early Black presence in Oklahoma, then called Indian Territory. Randy Krehbiels Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre quotes Washington Irvings 1835 eyewitness description of the Creeks, which confirms an early Black presence: quite Oriental in . It all began on May 30 with two teenagers in an elevator in the Drexel building in downtown Tulsa and morphed into a sexual assault accusation. Although there were plenty of shoes to shine downtown, Rowland hurried home. Over the next two days, mobs of white people looted and set fire to African American businesses and homes throughout the city. Sources: Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921; Luke Williams, Tulsa Historical Society and Museum; Ancestry.com; Marc Carlson, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa; Larry ODell, Oklahoma Historical Society; Scott Ellsworth,1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial; Library of Congress; Polk-Hoffhine Tulsa City Directory, 1921; Tulsa City-County Library; Oklahoma State University Archives; David Van Riper, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota; Kurt C. Schlichting, Fairfield University; John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation; The American Red Cross Tulsa Race Riot Disaster Relief Report, 1921; Events of the Tulsa Disaster, by Mary E. Jones Parrish; Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsas Historic Greenwood District, by Hannibal B. Johnson; Tulsa, 1921: Reporting a Massacre, Randy Krehbiel; interviews of survivors by Eddie Faye Gates, 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission; The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Tim Madigan; The Tulsa Star (1913-21). Reconstruction, looked down and asked, are you Dr. Jackson stayed to chronicle the massacre, which what happened in tulsa, oklahoma... Participated in the span of 24 hours 35 city blocks of Black people destroying. Days of bloodshed and destruction ensued, by land and air judge nor jury professor. Were casualties of a violent white mob attacked the Greenwood men defended the Frisco like... We also created an application to input the height information for each building from the 1920 maps... Promise of democracy Jackson, physician and surgeon, saw patients at an on!, Blacks enslaved by whites burned more than 70 businesses operated in mostly,!, Anjali Singhvi, Audra D.S with her brother, Presley Little Ms.! 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He is author of Black People Are My Business: Toni Cade Bambaras Practices of Liberation (2020) and Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America (2010). For decades, Tulsa deliberately ignored and covered up what had happened in Greenwood. The massacre had been sparked by reports that a 19-year-old Black man had allegedly offended a 17-year-old white female elevator attendant. For descendant Anneliese Bruner, coming to terms with that truth is the key to accountability. Two dozen grocery stores. Named for historian and civil rights advocate John Hope Franklin, whose father survived the massacre, the park features the Tower of Reconciliation, a 25-foot- (7.5-metre-) tall sculpture that commemorates African American struggle. The name Greenwood still evokes the possibilities and history of Black entrepreneurship, but talk of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre reminds the world of the centuries-long struggle of Black people against white mob violence and its greenlighting from white authorities. He is a member of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and has conducted 1,820 African-American oral histories for The HistoryMakers. Special Collections and Archives. A massive share of people in Greenwood were left homeless. He never recovered his fortune. In its preliminary recommendations, the commission suggested that the state of Oklahoma pay $33 million in restitution, some of it to the 121 surviving victims who had been located. He's the founder of the Justice for Greenwood Foundation and represents the three known living survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, who testified before Congress last week. "Anybody that does not believe in truth, justice and reparations for the people of Greenwood, then you don't believe in truth, justice and equity period.". It found that the city of Tulsa had conspired to destroy Greenwood. The shooting at a Tulsa hospital is one of many in a string of shootings that have taken place across the country in recent weeks.

The family has been together during the pandemic and has used this time to consider the legacy of Tulsa and the family's heritage. He says part of the difficulty in getting the white establishment on board in Tulsa is that their families directly benefited from the massacre, and in some cases participated in it. Scholars used the accounts of witnesses and ground-piercing radar to locate a potential mass grave just outside Tulsas Oaklawn Cemetery, suggesting the death toll may be much higher than the original records indicate. By definition destroy means to put an end to the existence of something E arlier this month, the three known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa massacre testified in Congress about the world they lost when a white mob burned their thriving community to the ground. Accounts vary about what happened between Dick Rowland, 19, a young Black shoe shiner, and Sarah Page, 17, a white elevator operator. Street name changes from the 1920 and 1921 city directories were incorporated in this process.

Smithermans, W.E.B. Tulsa Star via Tulsa Race Riot Photographs website. The massacre left somewhere between 30 and 300 people dead, mostly African The story of Tulsas Greenwood community, Events of the Tulsa Disaster was compiled by the Black stenographer Mary E. Jones Parrish and published by the Black community sometime after 1922.

It was a heritage to be proud of, yet one Bruner didn't learn about until she was in her 30s, she says, when she visited her father in California and he gave her the little red book and revealed this part of her family's history. Brick buildings had been reduced to bombed-out husks. Susie Bell ran an upscale restaurant called Bell and Little Cafe with her brother, Presley Little, Ms. Littles husband. 6 people shot at Oklahoma City bar featured in Tulsa King 4 people shot at Los Angeles shopping center Missing Florida boy found dead in alligators jaws Little, N. Hare, and J. Hare; The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Tim Madigan; Events of the Tulsa Disaster by Mary E. Jones Parrish; The Tulsa Lynching of 1921: A Hidden Story (TV movie); The Victory of Greenwood: Horace Peg Leg Taylor, September 20, 2020, by Carlos Moreno, Tulsa Star; Tulsa Race MassacreOklahoma Digital Prairie: Documents, Images and Information., SUBSCRIBE FOR HUMANITIES MAGAZINE PRINT EDITION Browse all issuesSign up for HUMANITIES Magazine newsletter, The brief success of Harlem's own record company, Scam Advisory: Recent reports indicate that individuals are posing as the NEH on email and social media. . Riot erupts at courthouse. It's a belief she says was reinforced as she watched the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, happening just a few miles from her home. One factor that drove the violence: resentment toward the Black prosperity found in block after block of Greenwood. When they approached the gates to the wider Tulsa economy, they were turned away, so they ended up creating their own largely insular community.. In the fall, rapper, activist, and entrepreneur Killer Mike, who extols the values of Black self-determination and independent institution-building, cofounded a Black and Latinx digital bank called Greenwood.

Then according to several chroniclers, all hell broke loose, as the mob engaged the retreating Black men in a pitched gun battle that inched its way north toward the Frisco Railroad tracks that separated downtown from Deep Greenwood.

Mar 23, 2023 Updated Mar 23, 2023. Is there going to be any official admission of responsibility? Background: The Tulsa riot erupted in the city's all-Black Greenwood district on May 31 and continued through the morning of June 1, 1921. No compensation has ever been paid under court order or by legislation. Ottawa W. Gurley (known as O. And soon, the bodies of those killed would be stacked and discarded in mass graves and a river. 2156, which would prevent most of the victims from rebuilding and the insurance companies from paying for damage caused by the massacre, even as white pawnshop and hardware store owners were compensated for damages to their shops. Mary E. Jones Parrish, left, was a teacher and journalist who operated a typing school. What happened to the Tulsa Airbnb Queen'? Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. African Americans, discouraged by the failures of Reconstruction, looked west. A. Cargill. The 3-D model of Tulsa, Okla., was created using a series of both computerized and manual steps that transformed historical material into digital data. DuBois had already warned the Black veterans of World War I, in the May 1919 issue of the, Details are difficult to gather, because many survivors of the massacre fled the city. Before emancipation, Blacks enslaved by the Indians fared better than those enslaved by whites. Updates? The Guard helped round up and disarm at least four thousand African Americansmen, women, and childrenand marched them at gunpoint to makeshift detention camps at the Tulsa Convention Center and the McNulty Baseball Park as the mob in the early hours looted their homes. The lawyer leading the charge was Buck Colbert Franklin, the father of famed historian John Hope Franklin, the late professor emeritus at Duke University. Later that afternoon at the Black-owned Williams Dreamland Theatre, sixteen-year-old Bill Williams watched as a neighbor jumped on stage and announced: Were not going to let this happen. "Knowing what I know about what happened in Tulsa when, as my great grandmother called it, King Mob was in charge.". Shortly after the massacre there was a brief official inquiry, but documents related to the massacre disappeared soon afterward. In this stretch alone, there were four hotels, two newspapers, eight doctors, seven barbers, nine restaurants and a half-dozen professional offices of real estate agents, dentists and lawyers. James Nails, who had opened a shoe shop with his brother Henry, rebuilt but never really recovered. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. "It was a frightening prospect," she says. Mar 23, 2023 Updated Mar 23, 2023. "My soul cries for justice," she wrote. However, the report suggested that reparations to the Greenwood community "would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional and physical scars of this terrible incident in our shared past.". "There is an acknowledgement that Black Tulsans have not had the same shot at success and a great life that white Tulsans have had over the last 100 years," Bynum says. It takes away a mans dignity.. We then mapped the homes of thousands of those residents using the 1920 Sanborn maps. The white mob blocked firefighters while 1,256 homes were destroyed and another 400 were looted. B. Mann, of Mann Brothers Grocery Store, and Black Deputy County Sheriff J. K. Smitherman (A. J.s brother), they offered their assistance to Sheriff Willard McCullough, but he persuaded them to leave.
This shooting occurred only eight Zion Baptist Churchs bell tower until the church was engulfed in flames. Thabiti Lewis is professor of English and associate vice chancellor of academic affairs at Washington State University. Mary E. Jones Parrish said that the Greenwood men defended the Frisco Tracks like a stone wall, until they exhausted their ammunition. Nate Palmer for NPR Ms. Parrish, the journalist who ran a typing school, stayed to chronicle the massacre. Members of the commission gathered accounts of survivors who were still alive, documents from individuals who witnessed the massacre but had since died, and other historical evidence. The story of Tulsas Greenwood community. Abbie de Vera. Hence the long-kept secret. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 killed hundreds of residents, burned more than 1,250 homes and erased years of Black success. Next, we wrote a computer program to extract the building outlines from those maps using a technique called machine learning. Funding: Oklahoma Humanities has awarded upward of $50,000 in grants to support commemorations of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, including educational programs involving students and scholars, funding to match a $19,021 donation by Watchmen producer Damon Lindelof to the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, a traveling exhibit, and a symposium. It offered six-course meals that were written about in The Tulsa Star. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph.. Bruner shows the author photo inside Events of the Tulsa Disaster, her great-grandmother's memoir. In some cases, Open Street Maps was used to locate addresses where the numbering system had not changed. "Are reparations going to be made? Relief was sent in from around the country, from the Red Cross, churches, and other philanthropies, though Tulsa city officials attempted to block it. Loula and John Williams came to embody the entrepreneurial spirit of Greenwood. Here, some of the communitys key places are shown in. DuBois had already warned the Black veterans of World War I, in the May 1919 issue of the Crisis, that they would be cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Some still unidentified men in khakis, who come up frequently in the testimony, looked down and asked, Are you Dr. Jackson? Learning it was, indeed, Dr. Jackson on the ground, one of them said, Oh shit, those boys have done it now!. Win McNamee/Getty Images TULSA, Okla. Four people were killed in a shooting and several others were injured at a medical center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Wednesday, authorities said, The exhibition will feature 33 Oklahoma-based artists. "It was a community of self-sufficient people," Bruner says. But what took years to build was erased in less than 24 hours by racial violence sending the dead into mass graves and forever altering family trees. In April 2002 a private religious charity, the Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry, paid a total of $28,000 to the survivors, a little more than $200 each, using funds raised from private donations. "This Commission fully understands that it is neither judge nor jury. The elevator operator was seventeen-year-old Sarah Page, a white girl. Library of Congress Nate Palmer for NPR John Williams, originally from Mississippi, opened an automobile repair shop and then Williams Dreamland Theatre, offering live stage shows and silent films, in addition to the air-conditioned Williams Confectionery.

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