A post that my colleague, Grace
Cooper, wrote about the Ukraine War, its impact on mental health
got me thinking about the consequential role of leadership while I was on a
recent trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma. From Vladimir Putin to Vladimir Zelensky to the
Chief of Police during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 there are instructive
lessons about why leadership matters.
My visit to streets the Greenwood District, where the 1921 Tulsa
Race Massacre occurred, left me even more convinced that the role of who we select
as our leaders may be even more important than cultural shifts that occur.
On May 31,
1921, a 19-year-old black shoe shiner named Dick Roland was accused of
assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white operator of an elevator in the
Drexel Building, which was just around the corner from the Hyatt Regency Hotel
that our conference was in. Page did not complain but a white clerk in the
building called the police. The police interviewed Page and determined that it
was not an assault and that Roland had accidentally stepped on her foot. In
fact, Roland moved to Kansas City later and so did Page, and Roland’s letters
to his mother suggest Page and Roland stayed in touch. But on the day of the
incident, Roland fled after being released by police to his mother’s house in
the Greenwood District because African American men accused of assaulting white
women were often prime targets of lynch mobs.
At 3 p.m.,
the Tulsa Tribune broke the story the next day with
the headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator” and
published an editorial in the same edition headlined “To Lynch a Negro
Tonight.”
And all
hell broke loose.
More than
1,000 whites gathered at the courthouse. And blacks gathered in a hotel on the
foot of Greenwood Avenue in the Greenwood District, a black neighborhood in
Tulsa that was known as Black Wall Street for the accumulation of black wealth
in the area.
What
happened next is disputed, but what is not in contention is that rolling
gunfire was landing on Greenwood Avenue near Archer Street and it was followed
by lighted oil rags that started fires that burned down buildings owned by
blacks, blacks being gunned down on the streets and attacks by air that dropped
firebombs made of turpentine on buildings, homes and fleeing families. The
police, who disputed that there was an assault, said a dozen planes were
provided for reconnaissance to prevent a “Negro Uprising.”
By 9:30
a.m. the next morning, 120 soldiers from the Oklahoma National Guard had
arrived by train but paused to eat breakfast because they were told they could
not intervene until the Adjunct General had contacted all the local
authorities, including Mayor T.D. Evans, Sherriff William M. McCullough and
Police Chief John Gustafson. By Noon, the soldiers had suppressed the violence.
In the
end, somewhere between 150 and 300 residents were dead and buried in a mass
grave, more than 4,000 black residents were displaced and many others were
detained.
It was the
worst terrorist attack on the United States at the time.
Despite
his officers declaring that there was no crime in the interaction between
Roland and Page and pleading from many white people in Tulsa, investigators
believed that Chief Gustafson cared less about the truth and more about finding
an excuse for a lynching.
Only a
year after the massacre, Chief Gustafson, who was eventually charged with
corruption in an automobile theft scheme, faced accusations that neither he
“nor any of the policemen under his supervision and control attempted to
intercept or prevent” the torching and leveling of Greenwood. Instead of
calming whites who were afraid of a “Negro Uprising” and blacks who were
concerned about the lynching of Roland, Chief Gustafson is believed to have
mislead The Tribune by making it appear as if there was a sexual assault.
Among the charges Gustafson faced was “failure to take action
during the race riots.”
In 1997, Oklahoma created the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission to
investigate the events. Gustafson’s blood thirst was not limited to African
Americans. In 1920, the commission found that he had encouraged the lynching of
a white man accused of murder by not intervening and appaulded the lynching.
“It is my honest opinion that the lynching of Roy
Belton will prove of real ben e fit to Tulsa and the vicinity,” the
commission quoted Gustafson as saying at the time. “It was an object lesson
to the hijackers and auto thieves.”
Today, Gustafson is known for deputizing 400 “special
deputies” during the Tulsa Race Massacre and for having armed at least 250 of
the group that would terrorize Greenwood.
Twenty years later, Adjunct General Charles Barrett, who lead
the Oklahoma guard soliders who arrived in Tulsa, wrote
that “they became as deputies the most dangerous part of the mob” and were the
heart of destruction of Greenwood.
I visited site of the massacre, the Vernon A.M.E. Church, the
foundation of which is the only structure remaining from Black Wall Street; the
site of the Drexel Building where the elevator incident happened and a site
where white snipers shot down black residents. As I walked around Tulsa, I
could not help but think about leadership and how those of us who focus on
helping leaders spend too much time focused on strengths and too little time
focused on the dark side.
As Sigmund Freud pointed out, leaders have distinct
personalities and they powerfully shape history. One only need to look to
revolutionary leaders like Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin and
Chief Gustafson to see how this can be deliberate.
Nigel Nicholson captures the concept in The “I” of
Leadership: Strategies for Seeing, Being and Doing. “When leaders evoke such
visceral feelings in followers, we are in territory of pure animal instinct,”
Nicholson writes. “The leaders know what they are doing – they get a deep
animal satisifcation from their dominance – Hilter, Pol Pot, Gaddafi, Idi Amin,
Saddam Hussein, Stalin and many more …”
Anthropologists believe that in early history we selected our
leaders, but that as we became less nomadic and warlords could accumulate wealth,
leaders began to seize control. Somewhere along the way that changed again to
the position we are now in where followers and groups like boards of directors
and shareholders have a say in the selection of their leaders.
For all the focus we put on cultural, it is easy underestimate
the impact of who we select as leaders.
“In the 20th century, 167
million people were killed for political reasons, 30 million people were killed
by invading armies, 137 million people were killed by their own
government,” Robert Hogan, a personality psychologist who focuses on
leadership, told The Business Times Weekend in 2011. “So it
really matters who’s in charge. I mean, if you get the wrong people in charge,
they’ll kill you.”
