What Riot? Act 1
An opera about the Greenwood Massacre by Adam Matlock
Libretto by Brian Francis Slattery
Voice 4: Sarah Golley
Voice 3: Jermaine P. Woodard
Voice 2: Anne Rhodes
Voice 1: Adam Matlock
Program Notes:
It is exciting to reach this point of presentation, knowing full well that the opera is less than halfway complete, and that the existing material will get some revision as well before the finished work appears on stage.
It was about 10 years ago that I first heard about Black Wall Street, as the result of a an image shared on the social media platform Tumblr in its heyday. Eventually people kept resharing the image and filling in a bit more of the history. This led me to Wikipedia and then the library. At that point most of the books written were at least a decade old, reflecting an official story - classifying the events as a riot - which clashed with details seen and heard by surviving members of the community.
It was a few years later that I talked to Brian Slattery about collaborating on this opera. Over the course of the gestation period, a number of new details came out about discovery of mass graves, and attempts at reconciliation. Our conversations changed as these details came out. Brian describes his attitude changing significantly over the course of about 4-5 years as we approached the completion of the draft set to music here. The confluence of the protests for racial justice in 2020 and the centenary of the event in 2021 led to significantly increased awareness - but still many people I know found out about it first from the 2019 TV adaptation of Watchmen.
The choices made for this version reflect my work as a recording and studio musician, which became a major part of my process as this work was gestating. By necessity, these are different choices than would be made for the eventual chamber orchestra that I hope will perform the score in a live setting. Of course the job of that accompaniment, whether in the earliest piano sketches or the heavy rhythmic version you’ll hear today, is to support and ground the vocalists, and I hope this accomplishes that outcome.
Adam Matlock, November 2022
The set
As near to a blank stage as we can get. Use the floor of the stage, if possible—the more scuffed up, dented, scratched, etc., the better. On the stage somehow should be a map of Tulsa’s downtown including landmarks in Greenwood that the actors can walk over/through. Depending on the position of the audience to the stage, this could be done with something as simple as tape on the floor and a couple hastily-drawn paper signs. If the audience can’t really see the floor, there could be flags. At its most elaborate, there might be models of buildings, though these should be made quickly from discarded materials, like delivery boxes and empty bottles and washed out food containers.
The singing parts
Four voices. General idea here is Voice 1 is the skeptic who denies the event even took place. Voice 4 is the one who believes the very most catastrophic version of the story, the one who believes everything passed down from witnesses whether people have found evidence or not. Voice 2 and Voice 3 are in the middle. Voice 2 believes all the parts of the story that there’s evidence for and tries to stick with that. Voice 3 believes all the evidence and is willing to believe the accounts from eyewitnesses, but will always hedge on it in a way that Voice 4 will not.
All the voices could be either female or male. Age doesn’t matter much either. In terms of race, we imagine Voice 1 as white (probably male) and Voice 4 as black (probably female). Voices 2 and 3 could be either black or white; it’s more likely that 2 is white and 3 is black, and people putting this thing on should probably work through exactly what message the piece sends depending on the race and gender balance of the singers. This is an opera about a race riot, after all.
All the voices should be dressed in fairly nondescript, not-too-brightly-colored casual clothes that also read as clothes from the present day. The people playing the voices should act in a natural, animated style, and should range across the stage. They more or less spend the opera arguing with one another; even factual information should be played as making argumentative points, because every fact, and every erasure of fact, is a weapon.
The non-singing parts
They represent the people who were actually there for the Tulsa Riots. It’s possible that the non-singing parts could be played by musicians. It’s necessary that the non-singing parts include a certain diversity of cast. This is an opera about a race riot, after all. The non-singing parts need:
A young black man (Dick Rowland)
Three middle-aged black men (J.B. Stradford, A.W. Gurley, Deputy Cleaver)
Two middle-aged white men (Sheriff McCullough, Chief Gustafson)
A young white woman (Sarah Page)
The people playing these parts should be dressed in more formal clothes, more brightly colored. If possible, they could read as clothes from the early 1920s, though more formal will do. Their mode of acting should be a little stilted, a little awkward; they arrive on stage and don’t move around very much, if at all. They have the story, after all; they were there and know what happened because they saw it. They want the story to burst out of them, but they can’t let it out. They’ve been silenced, by oppression, by shame, and eventually, by death.
Act 1, Scene 1
All: There was a riot.
Voices 2+3: There was a riot
Voice 4: There was a revolution..
Voice 1: That’s a pretty strong word.
Voice 3+4: It wasn’t a riot.
V3: It was a massacre
V4: It was a war.
V1:It was the way things have always been. The way things still are.
V2: Nobody told me.
V3+4: Didn’t you know? About Black Wall Street, Greenwood?
V3: It was a city unto itself. With shops and restaurants and churches and hotels. And houses we owned.
V4: Houses we owned
V1: I can’t believe that you burned all the houses you owned.
V3: Until we were shot.
V4: Until we were bombed.
V1: You weren’t bombed.
V4: We were bombed. I’ve always known we were bombed.
V2: People were shot and killed. Dozens.
V3: Hundreds.
V1: Then where are the bodies?
V4: You tell us. Where are the bodies?
V3: They put them in the ground. They put them in the river. They burned them all to ash.
V4: And we never got our city back.
V3: And to think that it all started—
V2: With a boy and girl.
V1: But what riot?
V4: We’ll tell you what riot. We’ll tell you.
V2: It started.
V3: Like this.
Act 1, Scene 2
V2: We’re in Tulsa. It’s 1921.
V1: And there’s a boy.
V4: A young man.
[Dick Rowland steps into the spotlight and stands in downtown Tulsa at the site of the Drexel Building. The voices should walk sort of around him, not exactly circling him, but kind of circling him.]
V3: A teenager. Nineteen. Dick Rowland. Shined shoes downtown. Made pretty good money if you counted the tips.
V2: They’d just as soon give you a dollar as a dime.
V1: Tulsa was a boom town then. Oil boom. Money just flowing up out of the ground.
V4: Even black people could get some
V3: They say Dick Rowland was a snappy dresser. Shined shoes all day. But this was America in 1921, which meant—
V2: No bathroom for the bootblacks.
V4: So the owner of the shine parlor made a deal. His boys could use the bathroom at the top floor of a building nearby.
V3: The Drexel Building.
V2: Tall enough you needed an elevator to get there. And the girl who operated that elevator was Sarah Page.
[Sarah Page takes the stage and stands next to the young black man at the site of the Drexel Building. The voices continue circling/not circling]
V1: Seventeen years old.
V2: And on Monday, May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland needed to use the bathroom.
V3: So he went to Sarah Page’s elevator. And he stepped inside and—
V2: What happened?
[Pause. Rowland and Page stand absolutely still. They remain on stage for the rest of the scene.]
V3: We don’t know.
V3: A couple of minutes after, Dick Rowland ran back out of that elevator.
V1: He attacked her, that’s what I heard.
V3: I heard they were lovers, and they had a fight.
V1: I heard she was a whore, and he was her pimp.
V4: And I’ll tell you what I heard. That they didn’t know each other before that day. And he stepped on her foot by accident. She almost fell over. Dick Rowland grabbed her arm to catch her, and she screamed.
V1: Then why did he run?
V3: It was America, in 1921, and Dick Rowland was a young black man. Why do you think he ran?
V2: But he ran. And the police got involved. They arrested Dick Rowland on Tuesday.
V3: The next day.
V4: They tried to keep it quiet. They had an investigation to conduct. But the Tulsa Tribune got hold of the story, too. And they ran it in the paper, Tuesday, May 31. And you know how you said Tulsa was a boom town?
V1: Yes.
V4: Well, that’s just it. The town went boom.
[Rowland and Page leave the stage]
Act 1, Scene 3
V4: There’s some things you need to know about Greenwood. The place where the land wasn’t promised; the land was ours.
[Walks over to stand in the neighborhood on the stage; strolls around within the neighborhood. Here V1 should be in downtown Tulsa, outside of Greenwood; the other two voices should stroll between them. Depending on the size of the stage and whether they’re occupied playing music, the non-speaking parts could move around as well, more slowly and strangely. They’re ghosts.]
V3: Black Wall Street. Eight thousand people lived in that neighborhood. It was just north of downtown.
V1 [outside Greenwood]: Little Africa. Across the railroad tracks.
V2: Some of those eight thousand people worked all over Tulsa, but they always came home at night.
V4 [in Greenwood]: We didn’t need to go anywhere else. We had a school and a hospital, groceries and pharmacies. Newspapers.
V1+2: The Tulsa Star. The Black Dispatch.
V3:The Dreamland Theater.
V4: We had our own churches. Mount Zion Baptist on Elgin Street. The finest church in Tulsa.
V2: And hotels. Plenty of hotels.
[J.B. Stradford stops and stands at the site of the Stradford Hotel on the stage]
V2: J.B. Stradford. Owned the hotel on North Greenwood that bore his name. Three years in business, J.B. was living his “fondest hope.” A building of pressed brick and stone slabs. Fifty-four rooms. Chandeliers in the lobby and the banquet hall.
V3: People came from all over to live there. There were freed slaves and their children.
V1+2+4: How free were their children?
V3: Men coming home from the war in Europe. They brought the world to Greenwood. They brought the Harlem Renaissance. They brought jazz. And when the clubs opened up at night, everyone in Tulsa went there.
V1 [vindictive]: Booze, drugs, guns, gambling, and whores.
V3 [smiling]: Bob Wills wrote a song about it.
V4: They say when the music got people moving, in the wash of liquor and Choctaw beer
V3: They say the lines between black and white started breaking down.
V4: The people of Greenwood were talking about equal rights. The rule of law. Money for their schools, the same as whites.
V3: Protection, when the law failed. Protection from mobs. From lynching. What was it Du Bois said?
V2: “When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns.”
V3: And we all know what brought the mobs out the most.
[Rowland and Page return to the site of the Drexel Building, stop, and stand next to each other, where they were at the end of Scene 2. As soon as they stop, everyone else does, too, wherever they are, and looks at them.]
Act 1, Scene 4
Everyone [singing]: Read all about it.
V2: [reading from a newspaper]: From the Tulsa Tribune. “A Negro delivery boy who gave his name to the public as “Diamond Dick” but who has been identified as Dick Rowland, was arrested on South Greenwood Avenue this morning by Officers Carmichael and Pack, charged with attempting to assault the 17-year-old white elevator girl in the Drexel Building early yesterday.”
V3 [reading from a newspaper]: “He entered the elevator she claimed, and attacked her, scratching her hands and face and tearing her clothes.”
V2: The police had known about it the day before.
[Cleaver and McCullough step forward and stand in the middle of the stage. The voices pace around them.]
V1: County Sherriff Willard McCullough. [McCullough nods.]
V4: County Deputy Sherriff Barney Cleaver [Cleaver nods.]
V3: They and the police tried to keep the investigation quiet.
V1: But word got around.
V4: Oh, did word get around.
V2: So they arrested Dick Rowland the next morning.
V3: Maybe the police had to show they meant business.
V2: Or maybe they were trying to protect him.
V4: They had talked to Sarah Page, the girl in the elevator. She’d walked back the accusation. It sounded like she might not press charges.
V3: The sheriffs were now worried about something bigger.
V2: Because after that paper came out—
V1: “Negro assaults a white girl!”
V4: White folks were talking about lynching that afternoon. But Greenwood’s people say they remember.
V1: The police moved Rowland from the city jail to the county jail. From the police chief’s hands to the sheriff's hands.
V2: Where it was easier to protect him.
V3: But people got word. A crowd—
V4:—A white crowd—a mob, the sheriff called it—
V3: —showed up at the courthouse, to get Dick Rowland.
V1: Three men from that mob walked up the steps and demanded to see Diamond Dick.
V2: And the sherriff said: “There’s been talk of lynching, but you might as well go because no one is going to get the Negro.”
V3: But they didn’t go home.
V1: The police chief, John Gustafson—
[Gustafson steps forward]
V1:—kept getting calls.
V2: The mob was still out there at nine o’clock at night.
V3: McCullough thought Dick Rowland was safe in the courthouse. He’d made plans so the mob wouldn’t get him. He thought his plans were enough.
V4: But all through Greenwood, all through black Tulsa, people were talking, too. They’d been down this road too many times. Ten years ago Laura and L.D. Nelson got pulled out of a jail in Okemah and hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River. I won’t repeat what they did to Laura. Just a year before, a mob had come for Roy Belton, pulled him out of the county jail—
V1+2+3: Isn’t that where Dick Rowland was?
V4: —and lynched him. They thought Dick Rowland was going to get lynched, too.
V1+2+3: They thought Dick Rowland had the same thing coming.
V3: And some people decided they were going to do something about it.
Act 1, Scene 5
Everyone [singing]: Read all about it.
V2: When the Tulsa Tribune came out, there was a call to a theater in Greenwood. The call went out, all over the neighborhood. A decision was reached.
V3: “Those men in Greenwood, they had to be men. That’s the way they were, and they just couldn’t let them lynch that young man.”
V4: The things that men do.
[Stradford steps forward.]
V2: “The day a member of our group was mobbed in Tulsa, the streets would be bathed in blood.” J.B. Stradford wrote that.
V4: The younger men started rounding up guns. But the older men took a look around Greenwood, the houses and businesses they owned, and thought about what they had to lose.
[O.W. Gurley steps forward.]
V2: O.W. Gurley. Helped found Greenwood. Maybe the closest thing they had to a real estate tycoon. He had a hotel like Stradford did, on North Greenwood. He went to the courthouse, talked with McCullough. It was four in the afternoon. The mob was already at the steps.
[McCullough steps forward]
V1: “Gurley, there won’t be any lynching as long as I’m sheriff,” McCullough said. “If you keep your folks away from here, there won’t be any trouble.”
[McCullough leaves.]
V3: Gurley went back to his hotel with the news. He tried to convince everyone that the sheriff would keep Rowland safe. J.B. Stradford did, too. So did the editor of the Tulsa Star.
V4: Our newspaper.
V1: But the people didn’t believe them.
V4: Would you?
V2: At 7:30, thirty black men approached the white mob at the courthouse. They were in suits and ties. Some of them had guns.
[Barney Cleaver steps forward, walks and stops at the courthouse, remains there.]
V3: Deputy Cleaver intercepted them. He told them Dick Rowland was safe. He talked them down, and they went back to Greenwood.
V1: But the rumors kept coming.
V2 [whisper]: They’re going to get him.
V3 [whisper]: They’re going to get him!
V4 [whisper]: They’ve got him already!
V2: And at a quarter after nine, another group of armed black men came to the courthouse. They arrived in two cars. Some stood on the running boards.
[McCullough steps forward, stands next to Cleaver. The two stand there. Everyone else begins slowly orbiting them.]
V1: And the sheriff told them. That Dick Rowland wasn’t going to be charged. That Sarah Page was just nervous and scared. That they were just waiting for the judge to sign off, and this whole thing would blow over. That they could not let angry mobs run the town.
V2: He said, “We can’t give in to lawlessness, so go home before trouble starts.”
V3: The black men left.
V4: The white men didn’t.
V2: Some of them did.
V1: They went home to get guns.
V2: They tried to go to the National Guard’s armory to get guns, too.
V3: And then the National Guard knew something was happening in Tulsa.
V1: Two mobs, they said. One white and one black.
V4: We weren’t a mob.
V1: We weren’t either.
V4: Maybe not yet you weren’t. But within three hours, you would be.
V2: 1,500 white men gathered at the courthouse.
V1: And the rumors kept flying.
V2 [whisper]: They’re going to get him.
V3 [whisper]: They’re going to get him!
V4 [whisper]: They’ve got him already!
V3: And at ten after ten, 75 armed black men walked up to that crowd at the courthouse. They passed through it and stopped at the steps.
[McCullough and Cleaver should still be standing there at the courthouse. Everyone else should still be circling them, faster and faster.]
V1: They say some of them had been drinking.
V2: And the sheriff said “violence is easy to start but hard to stop. Go home before a lot of people get shot.”
V3: And the black men began to turn around, again. Head back to Greenwood, the land that was theirs.
V1: But then—and there’s a witness to this—
V2: A white man stepped up to a black man holding a gun, and he said—
V1: “What are you doing with that pistol, ni-?”
V2: Don’t say it!
V3: And the black man said:
V4: “I’m going to use it if I need to.”
V1: “No, you give it to me.”
V4: “Like hell I will.”
V2: They fought. The gun went off.
V3: And then, like the sheriff said:
Everyone: “All hell broke loose.”
Bibliography
Brophy, Alfred L. 2002. Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hirsch, James S. 2002. Riot and Remembrance: America’s Worst Race Riot and Its Legacy. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Keyes, Allison. 2016. “A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.” Smithsonian.com, May 27. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/long-lost-manuscript-contains-searing-eyewitness-account-tulsa-race-massacre-1921-180959251/
Madigan, Tim. 2001. The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. New York: Thomas Dunne Books.