1939-03-03 — Page 21

THE CHINA MAIL FRIDAY SUPPLEMENT, MARCH 3, 1939

Oklahoma Race-Riot

Continued from Fago 1)",

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He thought maybe if he put on his uniform and they saw it He put it on, and started out to work. Some one shot him at the corner. Fanny could see h

him lying there. She didn't dare go out to get him, the mob was so close. She called Mally

But while she was talking they broke... In and tore the telephone out of her hands

Breakfast, served by a silent Mally, was somehow an awkward meal.

We found Fanny the next day, all right. They didn't shoot many

women.

Cara began to drive slowly along our street. Cars driven by the sort of men who wear their caps backward, the visors down their necks. Probably not to in- terfere with their rifle gaze. “Any niggers in these houses?" they would shout. The gaping chil- dren were called in hastily from the kerbs. It didn't seem a very educational sight. Nor m vory safe one. After the first car or so people sent their servants down in the cellar, or up in the attic. And waited.

Nobody knew just what to do. Around eight b'clock the train came in with the militia, Riot call. They detrained and marched up the street in splendid military form. They made preparations for breakfast. One citizen who

had served with the Marines in Haiti got a little impatient then. He was from Maine, and had a feeling that the militia should cut their breakfast a trifle short. He searched out the commander and said as much. If they'd give him a squad of men he'd go over and stop this thing. Didn't the militia 'realise that shooting and looting were still going on? People were being robbed and killed while they were getting ready to have their coffee..

The commandant had him gaol- ed. Martial law. Something was said about nigger lovers. He was bailed out later in the day.

Finally, having eaten, the troops got into nigger town and stopped the shooting. It had more or less stopped itself by then.. The shooters had been out all night, and were sort of tired. There was still some desultory sniping, though. One man stood on a down- town corner and got his sight on the stair windows of an

office building. The coloured janitor was walking up those stairs. When he appeared at the fourth- floor window a very · neat shot picked him off.

› Lots of negroes" never turned up at their homes or their jobs again. Some of them probably simply kept going, once they were out of town that night. And others.

There was the son of a cook in our street, for example. Around nine o'clock the man he worked for came and asked for Hatty. He was in a car, with some other men. It seemed that the boy, like Fanny's uncle, thought he ought to get to his job. Before he knew it he had been caught in the fight- ing around the railroad tracks, and crawled under a freight car to hide. Some one went in after him, and shot him with a platol.

Now that things were quieting down a little he was lying in the town-hall, where the militia were- assembling the black. But his émployer wad-afraid he wouldn't five many hours. If Hatty wanted to see the boy he would take hor down, and look out for her. But aho was, "afraid to go. You

Idn't blame her, really, Some

.

hause negroes who had al- lowed themselves to be put in those wandering cars and escort- ed to the safety of the town-hall had been shot at as they drove through the streets. It wasn't a ride an old woman wanted to dertake, even to see her boy alive. The boy's boss understood. "He went back himself, and stayed with the boy until he died. you

Either because the militia was efficient or because the game was played out after such a very active night, things were fairly peaceful by afternoon. Most of the black population was herded in the town-hall. It was easier to protect them there, But there had been difficulties in getting them concentrated. The look of the men who were escorting the blacks to the town hall hadn't inspired con- fidence,

Housewife after housewife re- fused to surrender servants to their dubious protection. Several small dramas took place in our street, when a woman with three or four terrified negroes in, her kitchen déclined entrance to those amateur deputies with shot-guns,

On the second day any black whose employer would vouch

for him or her was released, wearing a yellow arm-band. The arm-band was to indicate that the wearer was harmless, No attempt was made, of course, to indicate which members of the mob had now re- turned to sanity.

Those yellow-banded people wandered dazed and disconsolate through the still smoking ruins of nigger town, subdued to apathy. Twisted iron and cinders marked their homes. Broken trunks and bureaux, caked with sodden ashes, gaped empty as the looters had left them. A

With the help of the Red Cross. an attempt was made to reunite scattered families, Largely, one might state, with the sole help of the Red Cross. Except for its professional services only ten white women worked at the relief station.

There was the problem of scat- tered families, missing children, fathers, mothers; of trying to coax fugitives back in from their retreats. Airplanes would locate a little huddled group off in the country a mile or so. But when they sent cars after them the groups would melt away, running like rabbits. White men in cars didn't strike them as healthy con- tacts.

And there was the problem of getting these houses rebuilt. The Red Cross took voluminous dé- positions of losses. But wherever these depositions were filed they probably still remain. Almost no houses were insured. Blacks are bad riot risks. The whole affair drifted into comfortable oblivion surprisingly soon. At least on the white side of the tracks.

Eventually, of course, houses did struggle up out of the ashes, and the black people repossessed their part of the town. Most of them had jobs they could go on with. House or no house, missing family or not, you can still cook or wash, or dig, or drive mules..

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Visitors to the charity, bazaar at King's College examining one the oddities on display.

then, and had begun again.

This time he had lost his brick house and office, his drug store, 'his equipment, his operating table, his automobile, his instruments, and his daughter's new

half-paid-for piano. He didn't, he said, think he would try again,

Things like that made for in- dignant talk for a few months, among certain people.

Those

same people thought that the

But there were a few who didn't pick up the threads 80 easily,

groy-haired negro doctor who worked tirelessly at the Red Cross centre said, cour- teously, that there was no use his taking up their time alling dot að list of his losket.” It was, he Bald, the second time he had been burned out. The first time, In another State, he had lost his house, his instruments, his horno Sole Agent for Sant “and (buggy, éche 928 työlinger 4 emess

photographs of riot victims in the more dramatic poses of vio- lent death, enterprisingly print- ed on postcards, and sold sur- reptitiously, in the manner of naughty postals in Paris, were not very nice. The opinion that a race riot now and then kept the niggers in their place was hotly contested.

But even that talk finally died down. No one really knew what to do about such things.

"I can tell

WHITE

HORSE blindfold

it's equalto a fine liqueur"

JARDINS MATHESON AND COMPANY TI