The 1921 race riot in Tulsa began on Monday, May 30, Memorial Day, when a young black man stepped into an elevator, tripped, and either grabbed a young white girl’s arm to steady himself, or stepped on her foot. She screamed. No one else witnessed what transpired on that elevator.

Someone suspected a possible assault and called the police.

He was 19 years old. His name was Dick Rowland. He shined shoes on Main Street. A number of Tulsa’s lawyers knew Dick, because he shined their shoes, but none believed him capable of assault. He had stepped into the elevator because he wanted to use the restroom on the top floor.

She was 17 years old. Her name was Sarah Page. She had a job operating the elevator that day.

Dick and Sarah were teenagers, but he was black, she was white, and this was Oklahoma in 1921. They might have known each other before this day. Only Dick and Sarah knew what occurred on that elevator, and Sarah refused to press charges.

The next day, Tuesday, May 31, Tulsa police detained Dick Rowland, questioned him, and placed him in a jail cell atop the Tulsa County Courthouse. He sat there, alone, feeling terrified.

That afternoon the Tulsa Tribune published a sensationalized account of the incident that incited Tulsa’s white citizens. “Lynching is feared if the victim is caught,” the newspaper reported. A mob of one, perhaps two, thousand white men gathered around the courthouse by sundown.

Tulsa’s Chief of Detectives James Patton later said, “If the facts in the story, as told to the police, had only been printed, I do not think there would have been any riot whatsoever.”

Sheriff Willard M. McCullough positioned his deputies around the courthouse, but three white men, members of the mob, dared to enter the courthouse and demand that the Sheriff turn Rowland over to them. The courageous Sheriff stood up to the mob and refused to comply.

A number of blocks away, on Greenwood Avenue, a smaller group of black men met to decide how best to protect Dick. Carrying firearms and ammunition, they marched to the courthouse to confront the white mob. By then, many of the whites had rushed home to get their guns. A shot was fired.

“Throughout the early morning hours, on Wednesday, June 1, groups of armed White and Black people squared off in gunfights.” Facing an increasing number of white attackers, the blacks fled their homes and raced north on Greenwood Avenue to the town’s very limits, in a mass exodus.

Many called their section of Tulsa, “Little Africa,” or “the Black Metropolis of the Southwest.”

It was then that the white mob moved in to loot and cart off whatever they could grab. Then, they began to set fires in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, torching a series of now-empty homes and businesses.

After sunup, the whites ramped up their attack. They headed to the airport to fly planes over the burning town, several square blocks of now incinerated debris. From the air, riflemen shot down the desperate fleeing people, while others dropped “burning turpentine balls,” onto several buildings.

By mid-morning, the National Guard had arrived to declare martial law and to restore order, but by then some 35 square blocks of Tulsa had been converted into burned-out rubble. “Black Wall Street,” “at that time the wealthiest Black community in the United States,” was gone, destroyed by a mob.

No one with reasonable certainty can determine the exact numbers injured or killed: at least 39 dead, perhaps as many as 300; and upwards of 800 injured.

Of the homeless black people, evicted from their homes, “thousands, however, were forced to spend the winter of 1921-22 living in tents.” The whites then claimed for themselves the former black section.

No jury or judge ever convicted one perpetrator of the devastation and atrocities that the victims had witnessed, felt, and endured. Reparations, yet today, are frequently called for.

Within a year of the riot, a survivor named Mary E. Jones Parrish published her account, calling it, Events of the Tulsa Disaster. In it, she said, “When mob violence first began, it originated in the South, and its victims were Black men and women. Today the hand of King Mob is being felt in all parts of the United States, and he is no respecter of person, race, or color—not even sparing white women.”

And just as quickly, all of Tulsa’s residents refused to talk about what had happened in their town. Few wanted to know how and why? They preferred to ignore it. They chose silence for decades.

In recent years, people in Oklahoma are more open about the riot. They have set up commissions, conducted investigations, and identified the murdered and dispossessed. Today it is known as “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history,” and it happened one hundred years ago this weekend.

In recent days, an editor at the New York Times asked readers to send in their wise words that they try to live by. The best responses appeared in two Sunday editions in April. A few examples follow.

A Missouri resident named Dave Dillon said, “Always behave as if someone were watching.” Kristy McCray, of Ohio, said she lives by the Platinum Rule. “Treat others as they wish to be treated.” Norma Douglas, of Idaho, quoted her dad. “You are not better than anyone, but no one is better than you.”

Ronald W. Pies, of Massachusetts, said that he follows Marcus Aurelius’s words, “There is but one thing of real value—to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger, in the midst of lying and unjust men.” He also likes the Dalai Lama’s words, “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”

David Pastore, of New Jersey, quoted John C. Maxwell, a leadership expert, who said, “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”

Thomas P. Roberts, of North Carolina, says that he subscribes to H. Richard Niebuhr’s essay, “The Grace of Doing Nothing.” Roberts admits that “In personal relationships, I have found the wisdom in sometimes doing nothing. It’s incredible how well those interactions go by saying nothing.”

Alexander Von Nordheim, of Maryland, said, “Find what makes you happy, do it, and do what you can to help others find their own happiness.”

A favorite is from William Dock of Seattle, who saw a small sign on the end of a dock that warned all boat owners, “Your Wake Defines You.” He writes, “No matter what I am doing, I always pay attention to the impact my choices have on others. If my impact is too destructive, I change course.”

Graduation season is upon us. Last Saturday morning, a windy day, officials at my alma mater, University of Northern Colorado, in Greeley, read off the names of well over a thousand graduates.

I am curious. What should any graduate hear at their graduation? Here are some ideas.

David Foster Wallace, a college professor and novelist, delivered the commencement address to Kenyon College’s class of 2005, and in it, he said,

“The cliché that any college teaches students how to think means that you will learn how to exercise some control over how and what you think. You will learn to choose what to pay attention to.” To that I would add: what to ignore, and what to shout down as wrong, bigoted, or unjust.

A graduate should also hear words about perfecting his or her communication skills, and also with numbers. Lee Iacocca said, “there were a lot of people smarter than me when we all graduated in 1945, but I surpassed them all. How? My communication skills, my ability to speak and write.”

He added, “The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.”

Although Iacocca died in 2019, if he could, he would encourage you, a graduating senior, to study numbers and words. Learn to decipher numbers, and never pass up an opportunity to speak in public, to teach a class, or to draft a letter, an essay, or an article. Take advantage of the opportunities that appear.

To all the above, I would add, a graduate might strive to develop ambitious curiosity. An idea strikes and a typical person will dismiss it, lay it aside, but another may dig deep, work toward a better understanding, and in that process learn a new vocabulary and details that will prove most rewarding.

For example, right now, I am trying to learn of a connection between two alternative numbering systems, the hexadecimal and the binary. The former is based upon the number 16, and the latter is based upon just two numbers, 0 and 1.

Computers use the binary system, 0 for switched off, and 1 for switched on, but the 0’s and 1’s can then be converted into the hexadecimal system, an easier method for men and women to read. I still have much to learn. More about this later.

Last Friday, May 7, I noticed that the lilacs had bloomed on the corner of my property. This brought on a startling memory, of a poem I read years ago, Walt Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” from his book Leaves of Grass.

He wrote it in the spring of 1865, after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, when the nation was in deep mourning. He writes of “lilacs,” and of “a drooping star,” the planet Venus that was there but then had disappeared in recent nights. “O powerful western fallen star!” he cried out, voicing his grief.

A biographer described a young Ralph Waldo Emerson as a “mind on fire.” Because so many ideas rushed through Emerson’s mind, that on occasion he would give up composing sentences in his journal and just draft a catalog of nouns, without verbs, a list that would run for multiple paragraphs.

Ambitious curiosity, communication skills, finesse with numbers, elements of justice and kindness and our effect upon others: all of these a college graduate might work on in the days ahead.

William Shakespeare passed away on April 23, 1616, at the age of 53, leaving behind some 39 plays that he wrote alone or assisted in writing, for his acting company, the Kings’ Men. Two others in that company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published in 1623, 36 of his plays in the First Folio.

Of the 750 copies of the First Folio, only 235 remain in existence today. Heminges and Condell’s heroic editorial work preserved and saved from extinction the better of Shakespeare’s plays.

We all wonder and ask, “What is the big deal about Shakespeare?”

Isaac Asimov, a twentieth-century American author, answered that question best. “Shakespeare has said so many things so supremely well that we are forever finding ourselves thinking in his terms.”

For example, the English playwright coined dozens of new words, including: accessible, addiction, assassination, batty, bedazzle, catlike, disgraceful, eventful, fitful, lackluster, lonely, moonbeam, pious, outbreak, quarrelsome, stealthy, useless, watch-dog, and well-read.

English speakers have adopted countless numbers of his expressions: one fell swoop, primrose path, bated breath, brave new world, break the ice, for goodness’s sake, foregone conclusion, full circle, heart of gold, wild-goose chase, tower of strength, snail paced, sorry sight, and spotless reputation.

People still repeat certain of his sentences today: “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.” “What fools these mortals be!” “There is a tide in the affairs of men.” “All the world’s a stage, and all men and women merely players.” “What a piece of work is man.”

“The lady doth protest too much.” “Neither a borrower nor a lender be. “A plague on both your houses.” “The quality of mercy is not strained.” “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

In recent days I came across a passage from Hamlet that spurred me to investigate further. “Your bait of falsehood take this carp of truth, / And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, / With windlasses and with assays of bias, / By indirections find directions out.” What did Polonious mean here?

The first phrase—bait of falsehood and carp of truth—refers to “making sure that your little lie brings out the truth.” The second phrase—wisdom and reach—means, “We’re doing this wisely.”

Now a windlass refers to “a horizontal cylinder, a barrel, which men on a ship or atop a mine rotate by a crank, and wind a rope or cable around it and draw up fishing nets or boxes of ore.” When Polonious mentions windlasses, he means he wants to see “roundabout or indirect methods” used.

And when he says, “assays of bias,” he refers to “a game of bowls, when a player must allow for a curving surface, in order to get his bowl to the mark.”

Then, “By indirections find directions out,” Polonoius means he will work in a roundabout manner, after he has examined the lay of the land. He will research and test first, and then apply himself.

Not all of Shakespeare’s passages require this degree of laborious investigation to understand the bard’s meaning. For example, in Cymbeline, John of Gaunt says, “Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” He means that death will take us all, even the young and beautiful.

Shakespeare wrote mainly in blank verse, or iambic pentameter. Blank verse refers to poetic prose, or unrhymed poetry. Iambic pentameter refers to “five pairs of syllables, the first unstressed, and the second stressed or accented.” This is key to understanding Shakespeare’s skill with quill and ink.

For example, in The Tempest, here are three of Prospero’s lines: “Our revels are now ended. These our actors / (As I foretold you) were all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air.” Count the syllables of each line, and you should get ten in each. (The word “revels” counts as one syllable.

Last Friday night on PBS’s “Great Performances,” I watched Romeo and Juliet performed on one of London back stages, a different approach.

Most viewers of the play, enjoy the balcony scene, the most famous scene in Shakespeare’s canon. It is young love, forbidden love, between a Montague, Romeo, and a Capulet, Juliet. Their families have disintegrated into a bloody feud, and yet these two star-crossed lovers fall for each other one night.

Yet, I am drawn to the final scene when both Romeo and Juliet are dead. The Prince charges the heads of the two families. “Where be these enemies? Capulet! Montague! / See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, / That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

“A glooming peace this morning with it brings, / The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head, / Go hence to have more talk of these sad things; / Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished: / For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” Here, Shakespeare ended his best play.

Can you count ten syllables in each of the Prince’s lines?