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Oklahoma State Archives, and Douglas, The History of Tulsa, I, were helpful in fathoming the involvement of the National Guard. The records of the District Court Clerk, located in the Tulsa County Courthouse were central to an understanding of the legal aspects of the aftermath, as were materials in the Oklahoma State Attorney Generals Collection at the Oklahoma State Archives.
USE OF CITY DIRECTORIES
     
    Tulsa City Directories, from 1909 to 1922, were used in a number of ways in the research of this book, from trying to gain a sense who the IWW prisoners were to gauging the destruction of black Tulsa during the riot. They were an important source for the map, “Central Tulsa, 1917–1921,” and were virtually the only source for Appendices I and II. The research processes used with the directories were elementary, though often time-consuming. They bear explanation for their applicability to other research in urban social history, particularly in those subjects where manuscript census data is either not available or not particularly helpful.
    Those familiar with city directories know that they share a number of things in common with a modern telephone directory, but that they contain more information. The most complete directories that I employed contained four sections: a general information section; an alphabetical index; an index of businesses; and a street index. The first section, the general information section, is a listing of public officials, public buildings, important commercial buildings, religious institutions, and fraternal orders. This section provided information on a number of subjects, including: how large the Tulsa police force was at any given year; how many police officers were black (in Tulsa city directories for this period, any person or institution designated as black was followed by a “(c)”—for “colored”); the location of important buildings; and the number, age, and congregation size of the city’s black churches (Appendix I was taken completely from this section).
    The bulk of the city directories is taken up by the second section, the alphabetical index. This section, which resembles the “white pages” of a telephone book, purports to be an alphabetical listing of all of the city’s individuals and businesses. (One should assume that the completeness of such a compilation is as questionable as a manuscript census schedule—if not more so). An individual entry in this section might contain the following information: name of the (male) head of household; race, if black; spouse’s name; occupation; employer or place of employment; and residence address. This section of the city directory was used, for example, to determine the race and occupations of the IWW defendants and the persons subpoenaed in the Robinson case.
    The third section, the index of businesses, closely resembles the “yellow pages” of a telephone book. Headings for a particular type of business or business person were followed by a listing of: persons or firms engaged in that line of work; their race, if black; and their addresses. Appendix II is based upon a simple enumeration of all black business persons and establishments as they appeared in this section of extant Tulsa city directories from 1907 to 1923.
    Most of the Tulsa city directories from this period also contain a fourth section: a street index. This is a listing of all of the streets in Tulsa, followed by a listing of what, or who, resided at each address. From this it is possible to get a precise picture of of the distribution of black and white sections of the city, as well as the layout of business and residential districts. We can learn even more about these blocks if we combine this information with that found in the alphabetical index. By looking up each resident in the 500 block of North
    Detroit Avenue, in the 1921 directory, we discover, for example, that most of them were married. We also learn what their occupations were and, for these