Editor's note: What happened to Dick Roland? In this article first published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 9. May 1, 2013, Steve Gerkin sifts through public records and family history for what became of the young man at the center of what was then called the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.
Diamond Dick Roland disappeared.
Secreted out the door of the Tulsa County Jail into an awaiting car provided by Sheriff McCollough, Diamond Dick Roland took in the smoldering midday air, while 30 square blocks of Tulsa’s Greenwood District burned to the ground. It was June 1, 1921, and Roland was bound for a suspect destination in Kansas City intended to keep him safe from a vigilante lynch mob. He hid in the backseat. Then, he disappeared forever.
In his absence days later, Roland was represented pro bono by court-appointed attorney Wash Hudson, who was a member of Tulsa’s Ku Klux Klan. Roland was formally charged by a grand jury with intent to rape a 17-year-old white woman named Sarah Page. Newspapers, and many following historical accounts, suggest that Roland’s arrest triggered the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The perfumed and dapper Mr. Hudson ventured into the charred remains of Greenwood to advise Dick’s mother, Damie Roland Jones, of the situation.
Damie lived in a tent provided by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, pitched where her family’s boarding house and Roland’s home once stood at 505 E. Archer in downtown Tulsa, which is a concession stand and centerfield entrance to the Drillers baseball park now. Several months before her death in 1972, the 87-year-old survivor told interviewer Ruth Avery that she saw Dick one more time following his disappearance. There are no certifiable accounts of him returning to Tulsa. Damie claimed he had gained weight from the jail food, and had the stench of a man who had hitched a ride in a train car. She said he cried to her, “Look what I have done,” and left before dawn to avoid detection by angry survivors.
Roland was rumored to have moved north. Possibly working at Unity Bindery and living in an industrial neighborhood just east of downtown, a “Richard Roland” vanished from the Kansas City, Missouri, public records in 1926. Damie stated Dick wrote that Page was still “bumming around Kansas City,” suggesting that Roland not only knew Sarah Page, but that they were familiar. There is no census or directory information that Page actually lived in the metropolis. The Great Depression was on the horizon and work was drying up. Damie says that Roland wrote of an interest to see the shores of Oregon, seeking employment in the shipyards.