Tulsa 1921: May 2021 Archives

Stage for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission's cancelled "Remember & Rise" commemorative event, set up in the middle of ONEOK Field. May 28, 2021. Copyright 2021 Michael D. Bates. All rights reserved.

Omar Villafranca of CBS News reports this morning that the cancellation of Monday's "Remember and Rise" concert, organized by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, was due to demands made by lawyers representing the three living survivors and descendants of departed survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre:

CBS News has learned the event was canceled after a lawyer representing survivors and their heirs made demands that the organizing commission considered unreasonable.

A commission source showed CBS News an e-mail listing demands that was sent by the lawyer Sunday.

It includes $1 million each for survivors of the massacre and a non-negotiable $50 million pledge to a fund for survivors and descendants.

(National Geographic magazine estimates that the attack on Greenwood destroyed property that, had it accrued to the present day, would be worth approximately $600 million dollars, according to a statement made by historian Scott Ellsworth during his presentation yesterday at the John Hope Franklin Symposium.)

The source told CBS News the commission and lawyer had already agreed on financial terms, but the new demands couldn't be met, at least in time for Monday's commemoration.

The lawyer claimed to CBS News that the commission hasn't been negotiating in good faith for months, and he maintained that the survivors never agreed to participate in the event.

The story is also available on the KOTV News on 6 website.

Last night, when the cancellation was announced, the News on 6, Tulsa's CBS affiliate, reported, "News On 6 had a number of sources reach out citing specific reasons why the Remember & Rise event was canceled, but at this time, we have not been able to get anyone on the record."

That initial story quoted the Commission's news release: "due to unexpected circumstances with entertainers and speakers, the Centennial Commission is unable to fulfill our high expectations for Monday afternoon's commemoration event and has determined not to move forward with the event at this time." My suspicion was that Stacey Abrams and John Legend were made aware of the strife between the Commission and the community and were concerned about damage to their reputations if they participated in an event that was disavowed by massacre survivors and descendants. The statement could also be read as indicating that the Commission was unable to secure the participation of the survivors and did not want to go forward without it. There is also the unspoken threat of embarrassing protests. Dissenting members of the community had already set up a rival series of events, the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival, which will include nationally known politicians and entertainers.

Greenwood Rising Black Wall Street History Center, a $20 million project of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. The building looks like the sort of thing a small-town bank with more budget than taste would have built in the 1960s, after knocking down their 1890s Romanesque Revival edifice. Copyright 2021 Michael D. Bates. All rights reserved.

UPDATE 11:30pm, 2021/05/28:

Below is the email from survivors' attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons to the Centennial Commission, obtained by News on 6. The email appears to have been written on Sunday, May 23, 2021, and refers to a meeting on Saturday, May 22, 2021.

The email mentions an article in the May 22 Enid News, reported by Janelle Stecklein, chief of the CNHI Oklahoma Capitol Bureau, which included the following statements from State Sen. Kevin Matthews, chairman of the Centennial Commission, commenting on the demand from the survivors for some of the money raised by the Commission to tell the 1921 story to help make whole those who lost everything in 1921.

However, Matthews said the plaintiffs don't have a right to the $30 million raised to construct the history center because the money was donated expressly to build it.

"The first goal is to tell the story, transparently," Matthews said. "That's the foundation of reparations."

He said that during the past 100 years there have been books, movies and documentaries about the massacre. Survivors haven't sought those profits, but now the efforts of local Tulsa residents trying to tell the story are being attacked.

"I will say that I am not angry about those accusations," Matthews said. "I think that they come from an honest place. Unfortunately when you have a community that is starved of resources and attention for so many years, these types of things happen rather than ... having meaningful discussions instead of pointing and blaming. And, unfortunately that happens in traumatized communities, families and relationships."

Matthews said one of the center's donors has independently agreed to pay the three survivors salaries and assist with their health care costs during the remainder of their lives.

But he said the survivors didn't mention that assistance during their congressional testimonies calling for reparations.

With that in mind, here is the letter from Solomon-Simmons:

Good evening Everyone,

First thank you for your time yesterday. Please know that we thought the meeting was productive. leaving the meeting we were cautiously optimistic that an agreement could be reached which would allow us to have a more unified Centennial commemoration. However, finding out today that Sen. Kevin Matthews, Chair of the Centennial
Commission, attacked the credibility and integrity of our survivors has set-us back some.

As a result, this is where we are and/or what we need in order to come to an agreement at this point:

1. $1M per survivor. We believe you understand this is a priority for us. We believe you understand there is a great sense of urgency. We understood that you are going to visit with the Commission/TCF/Funders to ascertain how much you can commit to providing to the survivors before May 31st 2021.

2. $50M pledge to our Survivor and Descendant fund.

a. After debriefing with our advisors, we have decided we will not agree with any other entity housing our fund.

This is non-negotiable. It is important to us and our community that our fund be housed at a Black bank.

b. As I explained during our meeting we have been working with our corporate counsel, Schulte, Roth, and Zable (including William Zable), and our mentor Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative to develop our fund. With Bryan's counsel we have identified 6 Black banks that we are currently in discussions with about the possibility of holding our fund.

c. With the help of our national partners, we plan to announce our fund at our May 31st, 2021 nationally streamed Survivor and Descendant Town Hall with an initial fund raising goal of $100M.

d. We request that the Commission/TCF/Funders pledge to raise $50M for our fund. If you agree to this, we would like for you to specify a date you plan to have this amount raised by.

3. Allot 33% of Greenwood Rising revenue to directly benefit survivors and descendants and the North Tulsa community. We understand you believe this ask is high. However, we understand you will visit with the Commission/TCF/Funder to ascertain what type of revenue split would be acceptable to you. We also understand that you would agree to make a public announcement to work towards establishing a TIF district for the Historical
Greenwood community that would directly and specifically benefit North Tulsa.

4. Greenwood Rising board make-up. We understand that you are going to ascertain whether the Commission/TCF/Funders will agree to expand the board by 6 to 15 and allow us to select those 6 new members.

5. Public Support of lawsuit. We understand that you will visit with the Commission/TCF/Funders to ascertain whether you all will publicly support our litigation and efforts to hold the perpetrators of the Massacre and its aftermath accountable.

6. Public apology from Commission Chairman Sen. Matthews for Attacking Survivors.

a. Sen. Matthews must immediately and publicly apologize for his inaccurate portrayal of the survivors, his misrepresentation of the proposed gift from GKFF, and our campaign for justice and reparations in the media. https://www.enidnews.com/news/last-tulsa-race-massacre-survivors-push-for-reparations/article_cf550c14-ba7c-11eb-b273-872233bcb49b.html.

b. GKFF and I agreed that any gift would be strictly anonymous to ensure the gift would not impede our larger reparations campaign. In fact, the grant agreement specifically states the grant would be "anonymous and not be announced in an way publicly or privately." Obviously, this confidential agreement was breached, and the proposed gift
is now being used to try to put the survivors in a false light to lessen their credibility and undermine our overall reparations fight. As a result, we will decline the grant.

c. Sen. Matthews needs to clearly state that no Commission donor has given any funds to Justice For Greenwood or the Survivors. Despite what Sen. Matthews and others have falsely stated, there was never an agreement to provide for the survivors "for the rest of their life" or "all of their medical needs." Sen. Matthews' public apology and clarification must occur by the end of business tomorrow Monday May 24, 2021.

7. Rise and Remember Event. If we can get to an agreement on the above, we would also want to help shape the program of the Rise and Remember event at ONEOK Field occurring on May 31, 2021. We want an opportunity to speak and honor the survivors and our work.

In regard to timing because our events begin Thursday May 27th 2021, and our schedules will be completely swamped from then on, we believe that we need to have an agreement on the above points by Wednesday May 26th 2021. As a result, we believe we should schedule our next meeting for tomorrow afternoon Monday, May 24th 2021. We are available between 3-5pm.

Please let us know what time will work for you. Dr. Crutcher will be in Dallas for a speech, so a Zoom call is preferable. Lastly, we request that until and unless we can get to an agreement please remove any refe[re]nce of survivors participating in any Commission events from your website.

Thank you.

Damario Solomon-Simmons, Esq., M.Ed.
Managing Partner
SolomonSimmonsLaw

In a brief press availability today, Matthews took no questions, but, according to News on 6, he stated that "they had been approached by legal representation of the three living survivors and said they had agreed to $100,000 per survivor, along with $2 million in seed money for a reparations fund. He said they had raised the money."

Michael Mason of the Center for Public Secrets posted late this afternoon on Facebook:

According to an unnamed source, Abrams and Legend backed out because the Commission would not bend to the survivor's demands.

This evening I walked through the Greenwood District and past ONEOK Field, still set up for Remember and Rise -- a massive stage in the outfield, seats in the infield, generators on the outfield concourse. Workers appeared to be packing stage equipment into cases. It seems a shame that, after all the preparation, with seats and a stage in place, nothing will happen there on Monday evening.

1915 Sanborn map showing the commercial section of Tulsa's Greenwood district a few years before its first destruction

To journalists, photographers, and visitors, pilgrims this week of the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: Welcome to Tulsa. Some context may help you interpret what you see and hear this week.

The cultural foundation for violent mob action on May 31 and June 1, 1921 was laid over the previous four years by Tulsa's respectable government, media, and business leaders, who openly encouraged mob violence against labor union organizers and other undesirables during the World War and afterwards. In the Tulsa Outrage, November 7, 1917, masked vigilantes whipped, tarred, and feathered 17 men connected with the International Workers of the World, an event that the front page of the Tulsa World cheered with the headline "Modern Ku Klux Klan Comes into Being." The Center for Public Secrets is featuring a series of articles by historian Randy Hopkins, "The Trail of Atrocity." There's an exhibit at the Center's space at 573 S. Peoria, Architects of the Massacre, open daily from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. through Thursday, May 27, 2021. The exhibit illustrates the powerful Tulsans who set the tone for the 1921 pogrom and its roots in the extra-legal Councils of Defense established by Oklahoma governor Robert Lee Williams to suppress dissent after the U. S. entered World War I. Randy Hopkins spoke on this topic last night; tonight, Tuesday, May 25, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., Hopkins will speak again along with Chief Egunwale Asuman on "The Mask of Atonement: Tulsa's False Promise of Reparations."

Within a year of the 1921 massacre, Tulsa's African-American community rebuilt Greenwood, having first defeated in court an attempt by city officials to use zoning to block survivors from rebuilding on their own land, forcing the community further north. Survivors of the massacre called the rebuilt Greenwood greater than what had gone before. But Greenwood was destroyed a second time by city government, using federal highway and urban renewal money, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, driving an expressway through the district's very heart, and following up with the Model Cities urban renewal program that left only a single block of retail buildings and a handful of churches. City officials finally succeeded in driving Tulsa's African-Americans further away from downtown; displaced families were encouraged to relocate to cheaply built post-war subdivisions in far north Tulsa, neighborhoods that had been utterly white at the 1960 census.

1939 Sanborn map showing the commercial section of Tulsa's Greenwood district, an area known as Deep Greenwood, after its rebuilding

BatesLine has presented over a dozen stories on the history of Tulsa's Greenwood district, focusing on the overlooked history of the African-American city-within-a-city from its rebuilding following the 1921 massacre, the peak years of the '40s and '50s, and its second destruction by government through "urban renewal" and expressway construction. The linked article provides an overview, my 2009 Ignite Tulsa talk, and links to more detailed articles, photos, films, and resources, including the Solomon Sir Jones films, home movies that documented Greenwood and other black Oklahoma communities in the mid to late 1920s.

1951 aerial photo showing the commercial section of Greenwood ("Deep Greenwood") and the present-day path of I-244.

Carlos Moreno has written a series of feature stories, The Victory of Greenwood, on the men and women who built and rebuilt the community: John and Loula Williams, O. W. Gurley, A. J. Smitherman, Mabel Little, Ellis Walker Woods, to name a few. A book of the same title will be released on June 2.

You might notice that, up the hill and west of Martin Luther King, Junior, Boulevard (formerly Cincinnati Avenue), along John Hope Franklin Blvd (formerly Haskell Street) and nearby streets, there are empty blocks of land, with old brick foundations and concrete steps where homes used to be. These are not race massacre ruins. The homes you see, in a neighborhood that was untouched by the 1921 disaster, were acquired and cleared in the 1990s and 2000s by the city's urban renewal authority as part of the city's promise to provide 200 acres for a state university campus. About 80 acres of that land, now filled mainly with surface parking lots and a few academic buildings, came from the Greenwood urban renewal area; the rest came from west of MLKJr Blvd. I wrote a feature story, "Steps to Nowhere," for This Land Press, in 2014, about the history of this neighborhood, which was never part of Greenwood; that link will also lead you to photos and other articles about the neighborhood's history.

Photo copyright 2014, Michael D. Bates. 116 E. Fairview St., Tulsa. These are urban renewal ruins from the 1990s, not race massacre ruins from 1921.

The centennial commemorations have exposed divisions within Tulsa as a whole and even within the African-American community, with separate organizations sponsoring separate events.

The Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission is not an official body of state or local government, but it has become as unofficially official as possible, with elected officials appointed to its board, and the support of the City of Tulsa, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and other foundations, and the Tulsa Regional Chamber. This is the group sponsoring the new $20 million Greenwood Rising tourist attraction on the southeast corner of Greenwood and Archer; the group sponsoring the sold-out Remember and Rise event at the baseball stadium, headlined by Georgia politician Stacey Abrams and singer John Legend.

Many black Tulsans feel excluded and alienated by the Centennial Commission's plans. Former City Councilor Joe Williams seemed to speak for many people when he wrote:

This Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission and so-called remembrance of the destruction of Greenwood and slaughter of the several hundred innocent victims and celebration of Black Wall-Street is one entirely big joke. Most of US can't even get tickets to the main event including the Survivors and their Descendants because they were already saved up and reserved for the elite and other people from the outside. The power brokers and system are just trying to make it appear to the nation and world like we are all cumbaya and all good together here in T-town. They don't care at all about US or OUR community and the disrespect is intolerable. The day after May 31st our treatment will be back to the usual same-o-same-o status quo. They are pushing FAKE NEWS!

From a recent Human Rights Watch article on Tulsa:

Rather than working on such a plan [for reparations to survivors and descendants], city and state authorities have focused most of their efforts on creating the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission and its flagship project, the "Greenwood Rising" history center, which is meant to honor the victims and foster cultural tourism. The Centennial Commission has raised at least $30 million, $20 million of which went to build Greenwood Rising, but it has alienated massacre survivors and many descendants of victims by failing to adequately involve them in its planning....

At least one survivor, 106-year-old Lennie Benningfield Randle, has issued a cease-and-desist letter ordering the commission to stop using her name or likeness to promote the project. All three living massacre survivors have sued the city of Tulsa, accusing it of continuing to enrich itself at the expense of the Black community by "appropriating" the massacre for tourism and economic opportunities that primarily benefit white-owned or controlled businesses and organizations....

The three living survivors of the massacre have said they do not plan to participate in any of the Centennial Commission's commemoration events. They will instead headline a community-sponsored event called the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival, which is the only centennial commemoration that includes and centers the survivors. They will be joined by US Senator Cory Booker, US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, and the creators of the HBO hit series "Watchmen," which was situated in Tulsa and depicted the race massacre in its opening scene. Unlike the Centennial Commission's events, the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival will emphasize the Black Tulsa community's demand for reparations.

The three survivors, Lessie E. Benningfield Randle, Viola Fletcher, and Hughes Van Ellis, Sr., along with Vernon A. M. E. Church, and descendants of survivors who have passed on, have sued the City of Tulsa, Tulsa Regional Chamber, Tulsa Development Authority, Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, Tulsa County Commission, the Sheriff of Tulsa County, and the Oklahoma Military Department in district court under public nuisance and unjust enrichment law. From the complaint:

The problem is not that the Defendants want to increase the attraction to Tulsa, it is that they are doing so on the backs of those they destroyed, without ensuring that the community and descendants of those subjected to the nuisance they created are significantly represented in the decision-making group and are direct beneficiaries of these efforts.

I note that page 47 of the complaint uses a graphic I created for my initial column on the "Greenwood Gap Theory" in the June 13, 2007, edition of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The graphic (shown earlier in this article) is a section of a 1951 aerial photo, overlaid with names of streets, landmarks, and railroads, along with the present-day path of I-244, a path that was cleared in 1967.

(Unfortunately, the complaint also misuses, on page 52, a graphic from my 2014 This Land Press story about the lost Near Northside, a photo of steps on the south side of Fairview Street between Boston and Cincinnati Avenues (now MLKJr Blvd), from which the BOK Tower in the background had been digitally erased. As detailed in the article, based on land records, street directories, fire maps, and aerial photographs, this neighborhood was a white neighborhood in 1921, was not damaged in the massacre, and survived until the City of Tulsa's urban renewal authority acquired the land in the 1990s.)

In addition to the Centennial Commission and the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation is hosting its annual symposium May 26-29, with a keynote speech by Prof. Cornel West, and many other talks and panel discussions.

The Greenwood Cultural Center, located just north of I-244, is offering tours of the Mabel Little House (a house that was relocated from further north on Greenwood and rescued from urban removal), a special exhibit of the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection, a Sunday, May 30, "Brunch with the Stars," featuring Alfre Woodard, Tim Blake Nelson, Garth Brooks, Wes Studi, and Stanley Nelson, a June 2 panel discussion on the "Bitter Root" Comic Series, the Greenwood Film Festival, June 12 - 14, and a virtual reality film, The Greenwood Avenue Experience, June 15-17.

There is also conflict within the African-American community over the significance of the last remaining block of 1922 Greenwood that survived urban renewal. Small business owners there, mostly African-American, regard it as primarily a place of business, as it was before and after 1921. Other members of the community seem to see it primarily as a sacred space of remembrance. The Greenwood Chamber of Commerce, representing the building owners and businesses, publicly opposed the application by the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival to close Greenwood Avenue and were condemned by many for evicting a small business early this year for non-payment of rent. Business owners had mixed feelings about the Black Lives Matter mural that was painted on the street in front of their shops during the protests of last summer, with some feeling that it distracted from the story of 1921.

The Greenwood Chamber of Commerce is hosting its own event, the Greenwood Centennial Marketplace Showcase, May 28-30, which will include live music, food trucks, an art gallery, and a welcome center at 101 N. Greenwood, on the northeast corner of Greenwood and Archer.

The Black Wall Street Alliance is hosting the Faces of Greenwood Timeline Experience at the Black Wall Street Alliance Art Hall, 100 N. Greenwood (northwest corner of Greenwood and Archer), Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. - 4 p.m., through July 17th.

The Black Panther Movement is sponsoring a National Black Power Convention, May 28-30, featuring a Second Amendment Armed Mass March for Self-Defense on Saturday, May 29, at 4 p.m.

Enjoy your visit. Mourn and celebrate. Learn the history in all of its complexity, a history that didn't stop in 1921.

Sincerely,

Michael Bates

P. S. Members of the community have expressed a desire to add their own messages to this open letter to visitors to Tulsa -- watch this space for those in the coming days.

As we approach the centennial commemoration of the Tulsa Race Massacre at the end of this month, I was curious to look through contemporaneous records to learn more about the times in which it occurred.

On page 6 of the May 1, 1921, edition of the Tulsa Sunday World, there's a story about a $473,600 lawsuit brought by jewelry store owner Moescha Rosenberg against Sinclair Oil and Gas, owners of the building in which his store was located. On March 15, 1918, Rosenberg entered into a 10-year-lease for retail space on the northwest corner of the building, sitting right on the highly visible southeast corner of 5th and Main in downtown Tulsa, at the junction of two streetcar lines. His rent was $400 a month. According to 1919 and 1921 city directories, the shop was called Montrose Jewelry Company, located at 2 East 5th Street. Ads for the store, sometimes called "Montrose of New York" or "The Montrose Shop," appeared often in the papers, particularly in the run-up to Christmas.

According to Rosenberg, not long after he leased the space, Sinclair employees began harassing him to get him to leave. First, a company official, C. E. Crawley, "offered to buy his stock if he would give up his lease. When he refused he says that the company made threats to add two stories to the building and permanently close up the entrance which he was using." Then Sinclair employees cut the lights to the store at night, and he lost his insurance policy, which required the lights to be on all night, and that forced him to operate without insurance. After an automobile crashed into the shop window, Sinclair boarded it up and refused to replace it with new glass, and refused to let him put in "sectional glass." When Rosenberg put a sign on the boards saying that he was still open for business, the building superintendent tore it down. When Rosenberg hired two clerks to work for him, Sinclair claimed that he was subletting the space in violation of his lease and sought a court order to evict him; Rosenberg got an injunction to get the company to leave him alone. Finally, about two months earlier (late March 1921), he gave up, dismantled his store fixtures (worth $16,000), liquidated his stock at a loss of $75,000, and then vacated with seven years remaining on his lease. Rosenberg's lawsuit demand for compensation included his estimated $50,000 per year income on the remainder of his lease. Rosenberg claimed that the space would now have a rent of $2,000 per month. (The city directory for the following year, 1922, shows the Suzanne Shop, milliners, in the space at 2 East 5th.)

The situation has the appearance of a landlord trying to force out a tenant in hopes of either charging higher rents or providing a prime location to a better-connected tenant or both.

Rosenberg's case went all the way to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. The details of the case are not available online, and the ruling is terse, but it appears that Rosenberg prevailed in District Court, Sinclair appealed to the Supreme Court, and Rosenberg failed to file an answer to the appeal. The Supreme Court reversed the trial court and remanded the case "with directions to sustain [Sinclair's] demurrer to the petition." I was unable to find a newspaper story on the final disposition, but it appears that Rosenberg's cause was lost. The case has an entry in Pacific Reporter, Vol. 219, p. 650.

Moescha Rosenberg seems to have been quite a flamboyant businessman. When he was ready to close his shop in Glen Cove, Long Island, in preparation for a move to Tulsa, he placed an ad in the local paper threatening to publish the names of all the customers who had outstanding debts with the store. The story hit the wire services and was published all over the country. From the Long Beach Telegram, December 6, 1917.

IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE
Jeweler Collects All His Debts With One Piece in Paper

(Glen Cove, L. I., Cor. New York Times).

Moescha Rosenberg's advertisement in the local paper had its desired effect. He threatened to print today a list of those who owed him money and would not pay. All week and right up to press time Rosenberg was kept busy receipting old bills, and now he says that there is not a resident of this village who owes him a cent. Rosenberg is a jeweler and is closing up his store. Several thousand dollars was due him, and he wanted it before he left town. So he put in the advertisement in which he said: "I shall publish the name and exact address and vocation of each of the aforementioned deadbeats, giving in my usual style a psychological treatise of their character and make-up. The paper goes to press at 10:30 a m., and all who are anxious to have their characters defined in print should not settle their accounts before that time."

Immediately creditors began to appear and pay their bills. Men who had bought engagement rings on credit and others who had purchased presents that they did not care to have published, all paid up promptly, and the jeweler was happy. So today Rosenberg, published an advertisement on "Soiled Linen," in which he said: "There are those who firmly believe that there is no wrong that could not be corrected. That it all depends on the laundry. Some linen must be badly soiled, but all can be cleansed. It depends on how hard one rubs. We are glad to state that not one dollar that was owing to us last week is unpaid today. We do not want to congratulate our friends who paid up, but, rather, ourselves, as good, hard-rubbing launderers."

On December 11, 1917, the Brooklyn Daily Times reported that Rosenberg was leaving the jewelry business to become a pig rancher near Tulsa. I suspect he was joking, perhaps to suggest that he'd be happier dealing with pigs than his deadbeat Long Island customers.

The ex-jeweler who had stores also in Southampton and in Manhattan has disposed of all his business and abandoned his former vocation to conduct a pig ranch which he purchased near the city of Tulsa.

Three months later he had a 10-year lease on a prime space in a new shopping district at the south edge of downtown -- 5th & Main. He first appears in the city directory in 1919, living in rooms at 1408 S. Perryman Ave. Perryman Ave., named for the Muscogee Creek family whose ranch covered much of modern-day Tulsa, ran from 13th Street to 15th Street, and was renamed Carthage Ave. circa 1920 to conform to the city's new alphabetical street name system.

Soon thereafter, on March 16, 1919, Rosenberg, 43, had married Julia Goodman (née Finston), 29. Officiants were Rabbis Morris Teller and M. Himelstein, and the congregation was specified only as "Jewish Faith." At the beginning of 1920, according to census records, the couple lived at 1326 Perryman Avenue, in a building with three other families. On February 26, 1920, they had a son, Arthur Leonard Rosenberg, about whom more later. A 1920 city directory shows the family at 1436 S. Norfolk Ave., in an area demolished in the 1970s for part of the southeast interchange of the Inner Dispersal Loop -- a part that was never built. A daughter, Edna, was born to the couple in 1922. The 1923 city directory shows Mrs Julia Rosenberg at 1432 S. Norfolk, but no Moescha. Moescha's Miami obituary indicates that this is when he moved to Florida. 1436 S. Norfolk Ave. (Lot 2, Block 13, Broadmoor Addition) was purchased by Julia Rosenberg on February 12, 1920, and sold by her to Jacob Rosenberg on April 9, 1923.

In the 1930 census, the whole family turns up in Manhasset, North Hempstead, Long Island. By 1931, Moescha is in the papers again, but now in North Miami, having been robbed by three bandits of $100,000 in jewelry ($37,450 wholesale). His name turned up from time to time in newspapers for Florida's Jewish community. On November 6, 1931, the Jacobean reported that Moescha Rosenberg had returned from Manhasset to his home and had announced the opening of a new jewelry store on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. In 1935, for Sukkoth (Feast of Booths or Tabernacles), Moescha invited up to a dozen men a day to come to the booth he set up at his home at 1728 Lenox Ave., Miami Beach, to converse with Rabbi Dr. Jacob H. Kaplan "the problems of modern life, such as the invited guest may suggest."

The 1935 Tulsa City Directory places Mrs. Julia Rosenberg once again at 1432 S. Norfolk Ave., with Beulah Cooper occupying the rear of the property (identified elsewhere in the directory as a maid, presumably occupying servants' quarters over the garage), and Mrs. Rose Finston (widow of Julia's brother Mark Finston, who was an executive with Bell Oil & Gas Co.) across the street at 1443 S. Norfolk. Someone named E. Frank Pumphrey lived at 1432 in 1934. Property records show that Rose Finston sold Lot 1, Block 13, Broadmoor Addition to Julia Rosenberg in 1937, who sold it on to Alice Osborn Cain in 1941. The lot had been in the Finston family since 1919. The State of Oklahoma purchased it in 1971 from R. G. & Lena Goodman for the never-built Riverside Expressway connection to the Inner Dispersal Loop.

Court records show that Moescha and Julia were divorced in Miami in 1935. He died on November 16, 1939. From the next day's edition of the Miami Daily News:

MOESCHA ROSENBERG

Funeral services were conducted at 10 a. m. today in the Miami Jewish funeral home by Rabbi Abraham Kellner for Moescha Rosenberg, 74, retired diamond merchant, 1728 Lenox Ave., Miami Beach, who died yesterday. He came to Miami 16 years ago from Tulsa, where he is survived by a son and daughter. Burial was in Woodlawn Park cemetery.

At some point, Julia and the children made their way back to Tulsa, where young Leonard attended Central High School, studied under legendary speech and drama teacher Isabelle Ronan (who also taught Paul Harvey), and graduated in 1937. (That's his senior yearbook photo on the right.) Julia, Leonard, and Edna were at 5 Riverside Drive, New York City, in the 1940 census, at the start of Leonard's long and successful career on Broadway and in radio, film, and television. You might remember him from The Odd Couple or Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? under his stage name, Tony Randall.

The Sinclair Building is in the news again. Having languished for several years under absentee ownership, the Ross Group is renovating it as apartments and retail space. Perhaps they will find a way to commemorate the first tenant of that coveted corner space (and his better-known son).

MORE: "Love, Lennie," a 2016 article in This Land Press by Charles Morrow: A brief biography of Leonard Rosenberg, aka Tony Randall, with a special focus on his Tulsa years and his later TV series, "Love, Sidney." The author's father had been a Central class of '37 classmate of Lennie, as he was known then: "When I asked Dad if they'd been friends, he frowned. 'No, he didn't talk to anybody. He was a snob.'"

TulsaTVMemories has several reminiscences of Tony Randall and his later visits to Tulsa. He spoke at the 1975 dedication of New Kendall Hall, having just learned earlier in the day that his childhood home had been demolished for an expressway. His driver that day, Edwin Fincher, recalls, "He was crushed, then cried, then cursed. He vowed to never come back again & made a horrible scene - live - during his speech on 'progress' in his old hometown, reading the original speech as it was written, but inserting 'remarks'."