Tulsa Tribune Building

"The Tulsa Tribune decided otherwise. The next day, the afternoon newspaper ran an inflammatory front-page article claiming that Rowland had attempted to rape Page. More ominously, in a now lost editorial, the paper may have claimed that Rowland, who was now in police custody, would be lynched by whites that evening. The May 31, 1921, edition of the Tulsa Tribune rolled off the presses by three o’clock. Within an hour, there was—once again— lynch talk on the streets of Tulsa." Hill, K The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre (pg 262)

Rowland’s arrest the next morning was reported in a front-page story in that afternoon’s Tulsa Tribune. Headlined “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” the somewhat sensational account reported, accurately if perhaps imprudently, that Rowland was to be charged with attempted assault. It said Rowland scratched Page and tore her clothes.

The mere suggestion of attempted assault, when it involved a white woman, had in the past triggered gruesome lynchings from Duluth, Minn., to the Florida swamps.

This building was built in 1924. In October 1919 Richard Lloyd Jones, Sr., an Illinois native and former editor of Collier's and Cosmopolitan magazines and of the Wisconsin State Journal (Madison), purchased the Tulsa Democrat newspaper. Jones renamed it the Tulsa Tribune-Democrat on December 6, 1919, before finally titling it the Tulsa Tribune on January 1, 1920. The Tulsa Democrat, which was first published on September 27, 1904, had been preceded by the New Era begun in 1895. Tulsa business leaders, dissatisfied with the sensational reporting of the Indian Chief, had initiated the New Era to report positive news and the progress of Tulsa as a leading town in Indian Territory. In 1920 Tulsa's population stood at 72,075. The Democrat had 21,682 subscribers in November 1919. The daily evening newspaper was located in the Tribune Building at 20 East Archer Street until the 1940s. The newspaper then moved to the World Building at 315 South Boulder Avenue.

The only known copies of the May 31, 1921, Tribune were an early “state” edition – essentially a reprint of the previous day’s last edition, and therefore of no use – and a microfilm image of a file copy, made in the 1940s. The front page arrest story had been torn from this paper and part of the back page – the editorial page – was missing. This has led to speculation that the inflammatory editorial was torn out along with the arrest story.

The Tribune’s three loudest critics of the time – the rival Tulsa World, the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch and the NAACP – never mentioned an editorial in their attacks on the newspaper.

Tulsa World File

The Tribune was also known for its opposition to Oklahoma Governor Jack C. Walton, who in 1923 declared martial law as part of his efforts to investigate the Ku Klux Klan. Walton later placed a censor at the Tribune offices after it ran an advertisement encouraging Klan members to resist his declaration. Walton was ultimately impeached and removed from office for his declaration of absolute martial law, which forgo habeas corpus, illegal in the Oklahoma constitution

The NAACP’s Walter White blamed the Tribune’s use of the word “assault.” The Black Dispatch reprinted the May 31 arrest story under the headline “The False Story which set Tulsa on Fire.” The World, on June 1, tweaked the Tribune for its “colored account” of the elevator incident.

Larry O'Dell, "Walton, John Calloway (1881-1949)" Archived 2014-12-16 at the Wayback Machine at Oklahoma Historical Society Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture Archived 2008-12-21 at the Wayback Machine (retrieved September 16, 2009).