Dick Rowland

Dick Rowland (born c. 1902) was an African-American teen-age shoeshiner whose arrest in May 1921 was the impetus for the Tulsa Race Riot. When he was arrested for attempted assault, Rowland was 19 years old. The white teenager, who was supposed to have been the victim, declined to prosecute. According to some reports, the arrest was prompted after Rowland tripped in an elevator on his way to a segregated bathroom, and a white store clerk misconstrued the incident as an "assault."

Biography

Rowland's birth name was Jimmie Jones.^[1] It is not known where he was born, but by 1908 he and two sisters were orphans living in Vinita, Oklahoma. Jones was informally adopted by Damie Ford, an African-American woman. In approximately 1909 Ford and Jones moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to join Ford's family, the Rowlands. Eventually, Jones took Rowland as his last name, and selected his favorite first name, Dick, as his own. Rowland attended the city's segregated schools, including Booker T. Washington High School.^[2]

He dropped out of high school to take a job shining shoes in a white-owned and white-patronized shine parlor on Main Street in downtown Tulsa. As Tulsa was a segregated city where Jim Crow practices were in effect, black people were not allowed to use toilet facilities used by white people. There was no separate facility for blacks at the shine parlor where Rowland worked and the owner had arranged for black employees to use a segregated "Colored" restroom on the top floor of the nearby Drexel Building at 319 S. Main Street.

On May 30, 1921, Rowland attempted to enter the Drexel building elevator and, although the exact facts are either unknown or in dispute, according to the most accepted accounts, he tripped and, trying to save himself from falling, grabbed the first thing he could, which happened to be the arm of the elevator operator, Sarah Page, then 17 years old. Startled, the elevator operator screamed and a white clerk in a first-floor store called police to report seeing Rowland flee from the elevator and the building. The white clerk on the first floor reported the incident as an attempted assault.

Rowland was arrested the following day, on May 31, 1921. Subsequent actions by white citizens in an apparent attempt to lynch him, and by black citizens to protect him, sparked a riot that lasted 16 hours and caused the destruction by fire of 35 city blocks and 1,256 residences in Tulsa's prosperous African American neighborhood of Greenwood, and over 800 injuries and the deaths of 300 blacks and 13 whites.^[3]

The case against Dick Rowland was dismissed at the end of September 1921. The dismissal followed the receipt of a letter by the County Attorney from Sarah Page in which she stated that she did not wish to prosecute the case.

According to Damie Ford, once Rowland was exonerated he immediately left Tulsa, and went to Kansas City.^[1] Little else is publicly known about the remainder of his life.

References