Dick Rowland facts for kids
Dick Rowland or Roland (aka "Diamond Dick Rowland", born c. 1902 — 1960s?) was an African-American teenage shoeshiner whose arrest for assault in May 1921 was the impetus for the Tulsa Race Massacre. Rowland was 19 years old at the time. The alleged victim of the assault was a white, 17-year-old, elevator operator Sarah Page. She had declined to prosecute. According to conflicting reports, the arrest was prompted after Rowland tripped in Page's elevator on his way to a segregated bathroom, and a white store clerk reported the incident as an "assault".
Early life
Rowland's birth name was Jimmie Jones. 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 Rolands. Eventually, Jones took Roland as his last name, which was later reported as "Rowland." He selected his favorite first name, Dick, as his own. Rowland attended the city's segregated schools, including Booker T. Washington High School.
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.
Subsequent developments
Most historians agree that Rowland escaped Tulsa after the massacre. Several reports say that Tulsa Sheriff Willard McCullough took Rowland to Kansas City, although he may have secretly returned to Tulsa in the fall of 1921. Rowland may have been killed in a wharf explosion in Oregon in the 1960s, although his name does not appear on the list of people killed in the explosion.
Dick Rowland is remembered in an opera about the Tulsa race massacre composed in 2004 by Lindsay Davidson.
See also
In Spanish: Dick Rowland para niños
