From 1913 to his death in 1948, Ellis Walker Woods you can only say, more than triumphed in his position as the first Principal of Booker T. Washington High School, the first high school for Black students in the growing metropolis of Tulsa.  A graduate of Rust College in Mississippi, a teacher, if true that Woods took a six-year journey, walking and riding the rails from Memphis, stopping for work along the way, by the time he made it to Sapulpa in 1911, the haven he'd set foot for, Indian Territory, was gone. Ellis Walker Woods found himself not in the land of his dreams, but, in dramatically altered circumstances. Oklahoma.

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The new state's first laws were openly hostile to Native Americans on their own lands and to Blacks, many who had arrived almost 100 years earlier with the Nations from the South and who had built over 100 Black towns and communities of their own by 1907.  Mexicans, adjacent to their own lands, and new immigrants also were heeded to wake up from their dreams.  Five years earlier, Whites had been the "foreigners" for nearly a century; though, in the last couple of decades, trespassers had been "Booming" their way, illegally, into the Territory. By the time Woods arrived, the US Congress had hatched a plan turning control of almost the entire territory to Boomers and Sooners.

 

By the time Woods arrived, the state's first lawmakers had created a hierarchy that placed anyone who was not a White male, and therefore Woods, himself, a young Black man, outside of the coming oil boom. Having just arrived wasn't the problem. Oklahoma was decades away from electing its first Oklahoma-born governor. the result was the real oil fortunes would build great cities in the east and in Texas. Woods could forget any plans for commerce or safety.

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Or so it seemed. Woods' title after being hired by First Baptist Church North Tulsa is misleading. Principals in Black high schools in 1913 had the status of college Presidents.

Ellis Walker Woods and S. E. Williams, the legendary Athletic Director, would help create HBCU athletics. Surrounded by like-minded educators, entrepreneurs and financiers, they took on the limitations placed upon them, bonding with other majority Black communities, universities and high schools within cities across the nation.

 

Early BTW football championships were National Championships.

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BTW is North Tulsa's first high school, and though it was the only high schools the parents, grandparents and great-grands of today's Central, McLain, Kipp and Crossover students would have and could have attended in Tulsa, the school's history predates all Tulsa high schools. BTW , from an earlier school started in 1905 by Jake Dillard, a Black businessman and the venerable Black congregation of First Baptist Church North Tulsa. The church, itself, was founded in 1899 by four men and two women. Its first formal meeting place was located where the BOK tower sits in Downtown Tulsa, today.   The first six-room schoolhouse would be located farther North, as soon would be the entire community.

 

The Dawes Commission (1893-1914), created to separate Native Americans from lucrative lands built upon oil, had deeded tens of thousands of acres, nearly all of the land West to the Glen Pool, East to what's now Memorial, to what's now Admiral as the Northern border, in short, nearly all of what is today South Tulsa, already bordered on the south by the Black town of Alsuma, to Black Muskogee Nation Freedmen and to Muskogee infants.

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Southeast, in what is now the Union district, was Black-owned farmland. 

The Sells family owned the land that's now Jenks, Oklahoma.

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This scope of the potential of this Black Mecca explains why men like McCabe and Eagleston,  gave up prestigious state appointments in Kansas; why entire towns in Louisiana picked up and moved to Indian Territory; and why a 20-something young man like EW Woods was motivated to walk hundreds of miles.

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The mystery of how the population, in a few short years, went from owning tens of thousands of acres, to being squeezed onto a, relatively, small strip north onto Cherokee land purchased from Mary Turley by O. W Gurley, J. B. Stradford and others, doubtless lies in court records and other documents. What is known is that the thirst for oil was a double-edged sword that would create significant trials for Tulsa's Black citizens. Residual income from the boom along with segregation, left most North Tulsans to take the only {by law} available employment as housemaids, chauffeurs, porters, cooks, couriers, mechanics and equivalent jobs regardless of previous professions or training, education or skills. Most North Tulsans, refusing to be stifled from providing for their families and community, worked often exhausting hours at whatever jobs they could, but many people created their own enterprises on the side, as well.

 

The situation wasn't ideal, it wasn't heaven. Long hours didn't mean high pay. Salaries from the available jobs didn't lead to a community that could build skyscrapers. Many of the parents of the students whose names appear on the Memorial, to save the dime that a daily bus ride would cost, walked the miles it took to get to work and back home from jobs across the railroad tracks. Still, even by 1913, North Tulsa's major church buildings rivaled any in the state. The Stradford Hotel was said to provide the finest accommodations outside of Europe. One chandelier in its lobby was valued at $50,000. The BOK Center of its time, the Williams Dreamland Theater, owned and managed by Loula Williams, was the training ground for young entertainers who were taking Harlem by storm. With soe headed for African, Asian, European and Central and South America stages, as well. Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway would leave Greenwood and take American culture to the entire world.

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Mr. Williams, Loula Williams' husband, John, made a fortune as an engineer/mechanic...cars, trains, industrial machinery. He built a two story garage at the corner of Greenwood and Archer across the street from the family's three story home, built twice...both before and after a massacre destroyed the original in 1921.  The 1922 home, a replica of the first home, still stands at the corner of Greenwood and Archer. Their son, Willie, a graduate of the BTW Class of 1921, would write his Masters Thesis at the University of Denver on ways of modernizing the business class at a Black high school. He would teach at BTW into the 1970s. 

 

Carrie Neeley, who received her degree from Northwestern's Conservatory of Music, ended a whirlwind international career as a concert pianist and began teaching music at BTW. Teaching, in the 1920s, may have been, hands down, the most revered career in America. Neeley would remain at the school for several decades. She would write the School Song.

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Women like Madame C.J. Walker turned North Tulsa into prime territory, giving young women business opportunities related to beauty and hair care.  Black physicians could only, by law, treat Black patients, Black professionals, lawyers, teachers were all constrained to work only with and for the Black community.  With the exception of major school projects where the community had to pool its money with the county and the state, the iconic commercial buildings and homes of North Tulsa were designed and built by Black architects and builders.

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Women opened their own dress shops, a typing school, there were furniture stores, haberdasheries, tailors, pharmacies, dentists, realtors, rooming houses, laundries, law offices-all Black owned. The men and women of North Tulsa found themselves running a shadow city demanded by, but not totally disrupted by segregation. By 1921, Horth Tulsans had built a massive business community filled with churches, lodges, , theaters, hotels, a skating rink, restaurants, grocery stores, schools, sports teams, and other early institutions, and of course, thousands of homes.

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1921.  Less than a decade after his arrival Ellis Walker Woods and his loyal staff, students and a laser- focused community would be defending themselves from the deadliest attack on US soil by US citizens in the 20th century. When the Dunns, Richard Gipson and other BTW alum, at a backyard BBQ in Los Angeles, came up with the idea to honor their extraordinary Principal, it probably had not escaped them that for this reason alone these families, who are the parents, grandparents, great-grandparents of most North Tulsans today, deserved a monument not only to skills, to education, and to city building, but, to their courage.

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At the end of a day and a half of guns, machine guns and aerial bombing raids from 13 JN-Jennys, refurbished aircraft used in WWI, barely half of nearly 12,000 North Tulsans could be accounted for after June,1921. Over 100 businesses and 1200 homes were destroyed and another 300 made uninhabitable. E. W. Woods and the North Tulsans who survived barely batted eyes. With their school, miraculously, one of the few buildings remaining within the areas of direct fire, Woods and North Tulsa began rebuilding immediately after their release from internment.

 

In the final hours, they hadn't had to fight alone. With all lines of communication shut off in Tulsa, Sheriff W. M. McCullough sent a brave Deputy to Sand Springs to alert Oklahoma Governor James B. A. Robertson who deployed the Oklahoma National Guard to stop the massacre. In the confusion, aggravated by the presence of the Tulsa Home Guard on the opposing side, the Oklahoma National Guard took fire from all sides. However, the Commander and his troops took the war-like scene in hand within hours. Thankfully, the Oklahoma National Guard had arrived in time to give backup to the remaining thousands of North Tulsans still alive to fight for their lives, those who couldn't or wouldn't flee, using every ounce of strength available to save their city within a city. For almost another equal number of men, women and children, over 100 years has never produced the letters, phone calls or family lore that would indicate they survived.

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Within days of North Tusans' return to demolished homes and bombed out offices and shops, a local newspaper posted their lands up for sale.  Klansmen who had bullied local authorities, infiltrated government and had been the muscle for "running the Negro out of Tulsa" or attempting to murder the entire population, were met with resistance. Attorneys Franklin and Spears gave North Tulsans the assurance they would sue every interloper. They did. Eventually winning justice in the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

 

According to a University of Tulsa Masters Thesis written two decades later by Loren Gill,  the bloodbath had gone too far beyond the imaginations of even those who had sanctioned it.  The land on and surrounding Greenwood Avenue was not sold. 

 

From those awful days Into the 1980s, dozens of Black developers had begun rebuilding homes and adding new communities. Rebuilding hadn't taken even that long. By the 1960s, over 600 Black businesses were flourishing. This was the legacy of the leadership of the men and women named on the Ellis Walker Woods Memorial.

 

Unfortunately, the slow death of this progress was in planning. With a federal project called Urban Renewal, highways placed through Black communities near lucrative downtown property led to the demolition of Black-owned commercial districts nationwide. North Tulsa's Greenwood district was no exception. By the mid-1980s, all but one block of the once majestic mile, Greenwood Avenue, was gone. A second, even newer business district, the mile-long Cameron Street is now a highway underpass.

 

But, the most lethal blow, which at first seemed innocuous, and maybe even heroic, was the curious implementation of federal orders for the state to, at last, follow desegregation laws in education. Tulsa chose to desegregate most of its public schools by teachers and, in only selected high schools, with a quota of students. North Tulsa's major, historic Black junior high school was closed.  BTW was threatened with closing. The community fought back, opening their own "Freedom Schools."  First Baptist Church North Tulsa took on students from Carver Junior High School for two years after the school was shuttered.

 

The price was far too high for North Tulsa. According to Julius Pegues, the Project Manager on the Memorial and confirmed by the Oklahoma Black Educators Hall of Fame, over 400 Black teachers were fired in Tulsa, alone. In short, nearly all of North Tulsa's teachers were fired.  Through one act, the majority of Black students never again had a Black teacher, or more importantly, a teacher who knew their parents and grandparents and the students themselves, past elementary school ever again after the 1960s and 1970s.   Critically, the firing of over 400 Black teachers gutted North Tulsa's spending power, buying power and building power. Almost overnight, but, hidden in plain sight, the prospects for future development of Black-owned business in Tulsa had been eliminated. Unlike previous generations, parents began telling children headed to law schools and medical schools, to Langston, Fisk, Howard, Columbia and Northwestern, everywhere...not to return. 

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Visit the Ellis Walker Woods Memorial on the Tulsa campus of Oklahoma State University.

There are 15 columns, with 60 panels, each guiding you through North Tulsa history.

Mr. Dunn and Robert Littlejohn were, after all, founders of the North Tulsa Historical Society. And, look carefully, there's a panel dedicated to the Dunns.

On one panel, Mrs. Dunn guides you through 1950s Geenwood/Pine/Lansing/Archer.

Click on the photos below for examples of why Captola and Albert Dunn and their classmates believed Mr. Woods and North Tulsa's earliest teachers and students should be heralded.

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Services for CAPTOLA (CAP) DUNN will be held

Saturday, March 1, 2025, 11am at Metropolitan Baptist Church,

Dr. Ray A. Owens, Pastor 

The service will be live-streamed @ https://www.youtube.com/@Metropolitanbc

The Met is located at 1228 West Apache Street 74127