Segregation in Oklahoma City

by William H. Benson

October 18, 2018

     In Sam Anderson’s recent book, Boom Town, The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, he mentions three individuals, African-Americans who grew up in OKC, when segregation was enforced: Roscoe Dunjee, Ralph Ellison, and Clara Luper.

     Roscoe Dunjee began the Black Dispatch, in 1915, on the east side of OKC, and dedicated the newspaper to African-American issues. In its pages, he insisted upon racial integration.

     Dunjee’s words stunned his readers. In an article dated September 21, 1917, that he entitled, “The Jolt and Shock We Need,” he wrote,

     “Who is doing our charity work? Nobody. A feeble effort here and a little struggle there, and the rest saddled on the ‘white folks.’ All of this is the result of our lack of a live working usable organization. What shall we do? . . . And here we, at Oklahoma City, lay sleeping, unthoughtful of the moment, unprepared for tomorrow, disorganized, confused. What shall we do, who can say?”

     What Roscoe Dunjee did was begin an OKC chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and served as the organization’s state president for 16 years.

     One of his fiercest battle was the African-American’s “simple right to take up space.” Laws prevented blacks from moving into white areas. Dunjee encouraged his black friends and colleagues to cross the border and buy a house in the white neighborhoods. Once the police arrested the defiant man, “Dunjee bailed them out and sent them back to get arrested again.” A case went to the courts.

     A federal court sided with Dunjee and the blacks’ right to purchase homes outside of the segregated district. “By the tiniest possible increment, OKC’s black world began to expand.”

     Ralph Ellison was born in 1913, and grew up on on OKC’s East First Street. In his teens, he read the Black Dispatch cover to cover. Often he visited Dunjee’s office. He loved jazz, and he loved to read.

     In 1921, Ralph’s mother moved the family out of OKC, to Gary, Indiana. She decided that there was no future in OKC. Lynchings were too common. Anderson wrote, “The place was too brutal. She could not take her boys to the zoo, or to a decent public park. There was not even a proper library for Ralph.”

     On the way north, the family stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma to visit a cousin, who lived in Greenwood, Tulsa’s segregated community, then considered the wealthiest black community in the United States. The Ellison’s were shocked to see “solid brick homes and shops, lawyers and doctors, wealth from the city’s endless oil booms, luxurious furniture, and in the cousin’s living room a baby grand piano.”   

     The Ellison family struggled in Gary, Indiana. No jobs. No food. Hungry and desperate, Ralph’s mother decided she must return to OKC, where the family would have access to food.

     On the journey back to OKC, they stopped a second time in Tulsa to visit their cousin, and were stunned to see that “Greenwood was gone.” Thirty-five city blocks were “a smoking rubble.”

     On May 31 and June 1, 1921 a race riot had broken out. “For two days, white mobs went to war on Greenwood, burning everything that the Ellisons had admired—its churches, shops, hospitals, and houses. Machine guns mowed down those fleeing the burning buildings, and there were eyewitness reports of airplanes circling and dropping incendiary bombs onto the roofs of buildings.”

     Young Ralph, then only eight, never forgot the sight. When seventeen, he fled OKC, headed north to New York City, where he became an author, publishing Invisible Man, in 1952, a best-selling novel.

     Clara Luper taught American history at Dunjee High School. On Tuesday, August 19, 1958, she, her daughter, her son, and eleven other children, “all members of the NAACP Youth Council,” walked into the Katz Drug Store on Main Street in OKC, sat down at the lunch counter, and ordered Cokes. 

    No waitress would serve them. Clara and “the children sat and waited. This was a test, a deliberate provocation.” The police arrived. TV cameras appeared. Managers told them to leave. Hours passed. Then, they got up and left. The next day they returned and sat down, and ordered Cokes. They waited.

     On the third day, “Katz Drug Store gave in and announced that it would now serve everyone, black and white, at its lunch counters, in OKC, and in all 38 of its drug stores across four states.”

     Luper and the children did not stop with Katz. They sat down in other cafeterias and businesses up and down OKC’s Main Street, asking for service. Luper was arrested 26 times, but she fought back again and again. “Through these sit-in’s, she and the children succeeded in integrating numerous public facilities in OKC and across the state by 1964.”

     Roscoe Dunjee, Ralph Ellison, and Clara Luper. Each understood how segregation led to despair and humiliation. Whereas Ralph fled OKC for a better life elsewhere, Roscoe and Clara stayed to fight. 

The Oklahoma City Thunder

by William H. Benson

October 4, 2018

     Early in the twenty-first century, Oklahoma City’s citizens were desperate to bring to their city their first professional sports team. The city’s fathers had already built a downtown arena, hoping to lure a hockey team there perhaps, but sports officials who make those decisions concluded that “OKC’s television market was too small to support a team.”

     Then, in August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina cut a wide and killing swath through New Orleans, and that city’s basketball team, the Hornets, had no place to practice that fall.

     OKC’s city fathers invited the Hornets to move north and play in their arena. The team agreed, and the OKC arena “was almost always sold out, and it became one of the loudest places in the league,” even though the New Orleans / OKC Hornets lost half their games that one season.

     In 2006, the owners of the Seattle SuperSonics put their team up for sale, and the Professional Basketball Club, LLC, a group of OKC investors, led by businessman Clay Bennett, indicated that they would pay the owners’ asking price, $350 million, promising Seattle that the team would stay in Seattle.

     Sam Anderson, sports writer for the New York Times, wrote in his book, Boom Town, “It’s hard to map all the currents and crosscurrents of delusion, collusion, deception, self-deception, naïveté, false consciousness, and magical thinking that must have allowed what happened next to happen.”

     In 2008, Clay Bennett announced he would move the SuperSonics to OKC. Anderson wrote, “This seemed like the world’s most obvious bait and switch, a swindle in broad daylight, for which both sides were partly culpable. Mayhem ensued: lawsuit after lawsuit.”

     Seattle’s fans were outraged. Yet, after the Oklahoma dust and the court cases settled, the team’s players and coaches packed up and moved to OKC. Seattle lost their pro basketball team. OKC won.

     One of the SuperSonics’ players who now put on the OKC Thunder’s blue and orange jersey was Kevin Durant. The SuperSonics had drafted him the year before, in 2007, and now he was ready to play his second season, but in OKC, and for the Thunder.

      Then, in 2008, Thunder’s management drafted an erratic point guard named Russell Westbrook, and in 2009, they drafted James Harden, the guy with a thick black beard. This was deep talent on one team. The stars were now aligned for a possible NBA championship. Another boom in “Boom Town.”

     Sam Anderson calls the six-foot-nine Kevin Durant “Mr. Nice,” a polite guy who, before games, kisses his mother and reads his Bible. His motto is “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.” His OKC fans loved him. “He was the perfect bridge between the NBA and Oklahomans.”

     Some commentators thought, “he was a little too nice, that he wasn’t aggressive enough,” on the court, given his size, and “that too often he failed to use his nuclear skills with maximum violence.”

     Six-foot-three Russell Westbrook was Durant’s polar opposite. Sam Anderson calls Westbrook “a petulant, impulsive, cursing, scowling, unbalanced, bullheaded vortex of doom.”

     Westbrook’s favorite play was the pull-up jumper. He would “charge toward the rim with reckless lunacy,” forcing defenders to backpedal, but then he would stop, “launch himself straight into the air,” shoot, and make basket after basket. After a big play, he “stomped and strutted all over the court.”

     Durant and Westbrook “formed as powerful a duo as you were ever likely to see in sports. It was absurd that one team had both.” These two pros “were a mighty but imperfect fit. They clashed and blended, amplified and diminished each other. KD was civilization; Russ was chaos.”

     Six-foot-five James Harden was the sixth man for the Thunder, the first off the bench and into the game, a left-handed shooter with a bag of tricks: “quick shots, misdirections, sudden shifts in speed, and arm motions that baited defenders into fouls.”

     Durant, Westbrook, and Harden made the playoffs in 2010, but lost in an early round to the Los Angeles Lakers. In 2012, the Thunder made it all the way to the NBA finals, where they met up against the Miami Heat and LeBron James, who proved too much. The Thunder won the first game, but lost the next four. Another bust in Boom Town.

     After the 2012 season, the Thunder traded Harden to the Houston Rockets, and in 2016, Kevin Durant signed with the Golden State Warriors. Only Westbrook remains at OKC.

     Next time in these pages, I will consider Oklahoma’s historical struggles with racial equality, another most interesting part of Sam Anderson’s book Boom Town.

Boom Town

by William H. Benson

September 20, 2018

     Before Federal government officials granted Oklahoma statehood in 1907, people called it the “Indian Territory,” a reserve between Texas and Kansas that the Federal government had granted to certain Native American tribes decades before.

     After the Civil War, both whites and blacks requested that the Federal government allow them to settle on certain “Unassigned Lands,” within the “Indian Territory.” By the Homestead Act of 1862, settlers could claim 160 acres of land for free, if they settled there first.

     On March 23, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison gave in and signed legislation that opened up two million acres for homesteading on the “Unassigned Lands,” within the “Indian Territory.” The legislation set the date of April 22, 1889, as the day when “Boomers” could rush in and stake claims.

     At noon that day, bugles blared, and cannons blasted, and the great Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 began. Men on wagons whipped their horses into a frenzy and raced toward the center, the point where the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad met the Northern Canadian River.

     On that spot, Oklahoma City was born. Its population exploded from 0 to 10,000, in a single day .

     The “Boomers” then looked and discovered that others had not waited for the bugles and cannons, but had “jumped the gun” days before. These “Sooners” had already claimed certain prime areas.

     In Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical, Oklahoma, the cowboy Curly sings, “Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain, and the wavin’ wheat, can sure smell sweet, when the wind comes right behind the rain.”

     The constant, strong, and red dust-filled wind in Oklahoma though does not blow mainly from the north or northwest, as it does here, and as the word “down” in the lyrics would indicate. Instead, the wind blows “up” from Texas, from a south / southeast direction, causing trees to lean to the north.

     A new book came out early in September. Sam Anderson, a sports writer who now works for the New York Times, has written, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis. That long title describes the book best.

     Anderson writes about Oklahoma City’s beginning and its subsequent history, but he then intersperses that history with tales of the city’s well-loved basketball team, the Thunder, and its current and former star players, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant, and James Harden, the guy with the beard.

     Anderson also mentions the strong prevailing wind, the devastating tornadoes, and the hot summers.

     Anderson’s motif is “boom.” The city has endured a succession of economic booms, as well as its unwelcome sister, the busts. For example, wildcatters discovered oil under the city in 1928, and its residents have enjoyed numerous booms, followed by the busts whenever a barrel of oil’s price drops.

     Another type of boom Anderson mentions is the sonic boom. On February 3, 1964, a fighter jet, flying faster than the speed of sound, soared over the city, causing a series of loud booms. Eight times a day, for the next six months, the jets roared overhead, generating 1253 sonic booms. Windows broke, residents complained, but the Federal Aviation Authority refused to address the complaints.

     The city’s Chamber of Commerce had applied for and won Operation Bongo II, a Federal government study to quantify the effects of transcontinental supersonic transport on a city. The project measured the booms’ effects on buildings and houses, as well as the public responses. The study’s results caused the FAA in 1971 to withdraw from supersonic transport plans.

     Another boom was Oklahoma City’s land grab. In the mid-twentieth century, the city’s fathers gobbled up huge swaths of adjacent lands, incorporating them into the city, until it was one of the biggest cities in the world, in terms of land area. Today it sprawls over 620.34 square miles.

     Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., Pittsburgh, Manhattan, San Francisco, and Miami could fit inside Oklahoma City, with extra space remaining. Los Angeles covers 502.7 square miles.

     The biggest boom ever to occur in the city was the home-built bomb that Timothy McVeigh exploded next to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building on April 19, 1995, causing “a fiery 7,000-mile-per-hour wind and the deaths of 168 citizens,” a ghastly and most unfortunate event in the city’s past. 

     One glaring thing though that Anderson fails to include in his book is the citizen’s overwhelming devotion to Fundamentalist religion. After all, Oklahoma City lies in the very heart of the Bible Belt.

     Next time in these pages, I will consider Oklahoma City’s basketball team, the Thunder, a most interesting part of Sam Anderson’s book.

London Blitzkrieg

by William H. Benson

September 6, 2018

     The German Nazis decided to launch an aerial attack upon London, England, on September 6, 1940. The command to attack England came from no less than Hermann Göring, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, and the Führer himself, Adolf Hitler.

     The two Nazi leaders believed that a series of terrorizing airstrikes would melt British willpower to fight. A submissive United Kingdom would then permit the Nazis opportunity to march troops into the Soviet Union unhindered, and there to surprise an unprepared Joseph Stalin.

     Yes, Stalin was unprepared, but the Nazi leaders misjudged the English people’s determination to never surrender, unlike the rest of Europe that had capitulated before the German military juggernaut.

     On the afternoon and evening of September 7, 1940, some 300 German bombers lifted off from airstrips in Europe, headed west, crossed the English Channel, circled over London, and dropped 337 tons of bombs on London, cutting short the lives of 448 London citizens.

     Each day thereafter for the the next fifty-seven days, a stream of German bombs reined down upon London’s helpless citizens, mainly at night. The total death toll climbed to over 40,000 during the London Blitzkrieg, and thousands of buildings across the city were leveled, reduced to rubble.

     The strange thing is that the Nazi’s bombing campaign on London failed to diminish British resolve even one iota. Instead, the English people’s sense of determination strengthened. They learned to withstand the bombs that the Germans dumped on them each night, and they lived with the hope that one day they could repay the damage to the Germans.

     Winston Churchill told London’s citizens over the radio, “We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be.

     “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” The English people believed Churchill.   

     Also, because the Germans lacked sufficient intelligence on the ground in England, their bombs often missed their targets and failed to cripple England’s munitions factories. Once the bombs began to fall on the city, management packed up and moved their factories out of London, to the countryside.

     Once a London building was bombed at night, English laborers would show up the next morning, set to work, and in three or four weeks remove the rubble. Some 1,700 freight trains transported some 750,000 tons of bombsite stones to the countryside in eastern England, where workers would lay them into the ground to construct airstrips.

     The following spring, London’s citizens saw the numerous empty plots, the bare ground where houses and buildings once stood, and there they planted vegetables—peas, carrots, beets, potatoes, and tomatoes—in order to ease wartime food shortages, and they called their plots “victory gardens.”

     An expression comes to mind. “When life gives you a lemon, make lemonade.” In other words, the English people converted the rubble of their lives into something useful, and in the bare spaces where the Germans wrecked and destroyed what once had stood there, they planted a garden.

     The day came when British and American bombers took off from airstrips in England, flew across the English Channel, and dropped their bombs upon Nazi Germany’s cities. Of the several German cities bombed, Dresden suffered horrible damage.

     Between February 13 and 15, 1945, in four separate raids, 722 British Royal Air Force bombers and 527 U.S. Army Air Force bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs on Dresden, causing a horrific firestorm that destroyed over 1,600 acres, and killed some 25,000 German citizens. Because it was Shrove Tuesday, many of the dead children were dressed in carnival costumes.

     The English historian Paul Johnson said, “This was not the work of lunatics. It was the response of outraged democracies corrupted by the war that the Nazis had started.”

     Three months later, on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered, and the Third Reich disintegrated.

     In Voltaire’s novel, Candide, the French author allows a character to say, “We must take care of our garden. When man was put into the Garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it, and this proves that man was not born to be idle.” In other words, everyone should cultivate their own garden, even if it is in an area where a house or a building once stood.

Pete Rose, Mike Tyson, Lance Armstrong, and Roger Clemens

by William H. Benson

August 23, 2018

     On August 23, 1989, Pete Rose accepted a settlement with Major League Baseball’s authorities that included a lifetime ban from the sport. A debate has raged ever since that he deserves better.

     During a twenty-four year career, from 1963 to 1986, Pete Rose hit 4,256 times at bat, still a world record. Also, Pete hit 160 home runs, had a .303 batting average, and played on three World Series Championship teams, twice for the Cincinnati Reds, and once for the Philadelphia Phillies. His impressive statistics make him one of baseball’s greatest players ever.

     And yet, Pete gambled. At first, he bet on football games and horse races, but then, in the 1970’s, rumors surfaced that he was betting on baseball games, and even on his own team.

     He did this, even though he knew of Major League Baseball’s rule 21(d), that states “a player faces a ban of one year for betting on any baseball game, and a lifetime ban for betting on his own team.” Signs stuck on clubhouse walls remind all players that the penalties for gambling are heavy.

     In 1989, an investigation revealed that, as manager of the Cincinnati Reds, Pete Rose was placing bets on the outcome of his own team’s games. Although he denied the charges then, years later, in 2004, he published his book, My Prison Without Bars, and confessed that the allegations were true.

     On November 22, 1986, Mike Tyson earned the title of world heavy-weight boxing champion. At twenty years of age, he became the youngest champion ever, and he defended his title twenty-three times, before Buster Douglas defeated Tyson on February 11, 1990.

     And yet, Mike Tyson had a spending problem. The fourteenth highest paid athlete ever, Mike Tyson filed for bankruptcy in 2003, after making and spending $700 million. A lavish life-style, two divorces, a less-than-scrupulous promoter named Don King, and legal troubles—due to his rape conviction in March of 1992—all contributed to his financial collapse.

     After serving three years in prison, Tyson returned to the ring to fight the world heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield on June 28, 1997. During the third round, when Tyson and Holyfield were locked in a clinch, Tyson bit off a one-inch piece of cartilage from Holyfield’s right ear.

     The referee allowed the fight to continue, but Tyson again bit down on Holyfield’s left ear, scarring it, forcing the referee to disqualify Tyson and end the fight.

     Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France bicycle race an astonishing seven consecutive times, from 1999 through 2005, after his diagnosis and treatment for testicular cancer in 1996.

     And yet, in order to win, Armstrong cheated. He took drugs, “performance enhancing drugs” and “human growth hormones,” that gave him an advantage. Certain drugs saved Armstrong’s life when cancer nearly ended it, and other drugs helped him win a series of seven bicycle races.

     In 2012, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released a detailed report that included devastating sworn statements from several of Armstrong’s former teammates, including Floyd Landis, a government-protected whistleblower. The same agency banned Armstrong from all future competition, and the International Cycling Union then stripped him of his seven Tour de France wins.

     On January 17, 2013, Armstrong appeared on Oprah Winfrey and confessed that he had resorted to drugs in order to win races. Then, last April, Armstrong agreed to pay the federal government $5 million, to settle a civil fraud case. The U.S. Postal Service had paid $31 million between 2001 and 2004, to sponsor Armstrong’s team. Altogether, Armstrong’s deception has cost him “$100 million.”

     Roger Clemens, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, appeared on 60 Minutes on January 6, 2008, and told Mike Wallace, “I work hard.” As for illegal substances, that “never happened.”

     On February 13, 2008, Clemens appeared before a Congressional committee and said, “I never use anabolic steroids or human growth hormone.” Two years later, on August 9, 2010, a grand jury indicted Clemens for making, what they believed were, false statements to Congress in 2008.

     At Clemens’s first trial in 2011, the judge declared it a mistrial, and, at the second, in June of 2012, the jury declared Clemens not guilty on all six counts of lying to Congress.

     Pete Rose gambled, and forfeited a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Mike Tyson declared bankruptcy, was convicted of rape, and chomped down on ears. Lance Armstrong turned to drugs to win the Tour de France, but Roger Clemens’s guilt or innocence remains uncertain. He refused to confess to anything. Perhaps he was innocent.

“Good Morning, Vietnam”

by William H. Benson

August 9, 2018

     Two Viet Cong terrorists—Hynh Phi Long and Le Van Ray—parked their bicycles on the riverbank across from My Canh, the Mekong Floating Restaurant, in Saigon, and left behind bags strapped to their bikes’ handlebars that contained bombs aimed at the restaurant. The first bomb detonated at 8:15 p.m., on Friday, June 26, 1965, and the second, just minutes later.

     In Vietnamese, My Canh means “beautiful view.” It was a vessel, or a barge, that floated in the Mekong River, in downtown Saigon, connected to the riverbank by a twenty-five foot long gangplank, a popular establishment frequented by the Vietnamese, as well as by the French and American soldiers and civilian advisors. More than one hundred people were relaxing and dining on the barge that night.

     The twin bombs killed thirty-two people at the restaurant, including thirteen Americans. More than forty-two more were wounded. Minutes after the blasts, Maxwell Taylor, the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, arrived at the scene to survey the carnage. “He shook his head, got back into his car, unable to believe what had just happened.”

     Norman Schwarzkopf, a newly-minted officer and a West Point graduate, had arrived in South Vietnam that same day. He and another officer had wanted to dine that evening at My Canh, but due to jet lag they had selected the roof garden cafe atop their hotel, the Majestic.

     “We had just placed our orders when wham,” recalled Schwarzkopf in his 1993 autobiography, “It Doesn’t Take a Hero.” From the roof, he and his friend looked down and saw the wounded customers moving slowly across the walkway to shore. He said, “I watched as the second explosion blasted them from the gangplank into the water. That was my welcome to Vietnam.”

     An American airman name Adrian Cronauer had finished dinner and walked across the gangplank, but was still in the area, visiting with friends, when the two bombs exploded. He worked as a radio announcer, and wanted to report on his next day’s morning show, Dawn Buster, the bloodshed he had witnessed, but his superiors refused, because, they said, “it had not been officially confirmed yet.”

     Cronauer later said, “But I had seen it. I was there. All the news agencies knew! No; censorship ruled.” He decided to “swallow the stupidity and obey.”

     Headlines called it, “The Terrorist Attack that Shook the World.” The horrific crime was an example of maximum impact. “It was a trendy location during prime time, Friday evening, just after 8 o’clock, an international venue, and only a few blocks away from foreign news bureaus.”

     During the previous six months, the Viet Cong had bombed Saigon’s Brinks Hotel, the U.S. Embassy, and the airport terminal, but those terrorist acts had failed to shock the public and ignite the outrage that the bombing at My Canh did.  

     Fifteen years later, in the late 1970’s Adrian Cronauer wrote a script for a possible television show based on his experiences in Vietnam, similar to M.A.S.H. Years passed and his script languished in the reject pile. A movie producer saw the script, and converted it into the 1988 movie, Good Morning, Vietnam, that starred Robin Williams, a fictional account of Cronauer’s experiences.   

     Like Robin Williams did in the movie, Cronauer did stretch out the word “good,” but as a delay so that he could find the next record to play or the next page of news.

     Cronauer admitted that “if I had acted in real life as Robin Williams did in the film, I would still be serving time in the military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.” The one scene in the film not fictional though was the bombing of the restaurant, but called “Jimmy Wahs.”

     Cronauer said, “When I was stationed in Vietnam, I did interviews with the troops out in the field, and one of the reactions I got from them was frustration. They would be in hot pursuit of an enemy unit, but they would have to disengage because the unit would cross over some invisible barrier or border. Vietnam was fought as a no-win war.”

     Adrian Cronauer met Robin Williams at the film’s premiere showing. “The two men shook hands, and Williams said he was glad to meet Cronauer, who replied that he was glad to meet himself too.”

     Adrian Cronauer passed away last month on July 18, 2018, age seventy-nine, and Norman Schwarzkopf died December 27, 2012, age seventy-eight, both men veterans of the Vietnam war.