Ralph Ellison: Coming of Age During the Rise of the KKK / Sam Anderson. In: Lit Hub Daily August 21, 2018

During WWI, black soldiers boarding trains to leave Okla­homa City held banners that read, DO NOT LYNCH OUR RELATIVES WHILE WE ARE GONE. This was a reasonable fear. Despite all of Ros­coe Dunjee’s fighting—through the pages of his newspaper, the Black Dispatch—the city’s white power structure held its grip.
In the summer of 1920, Oklahoma City was rocked by a lynching. A white mob arrived at the county jail, broke in with suspicious ease, and pulled out an 18-year-old black prisoner—the lone survivor of a bootlegging raid in which two police officers had been killed. The mob took the young man into the countryside, hanged him from an elm tree, and shot him twice in the forehead. The prisoner never should have been held in Oklahoma City in the first place—he was brought there, illegally, by the county attorney, who feared that a largely black jury in the neighboring county might acquit. The attorney was known to be af­filiated with the Ku Klux Klan; he made the prisoner’s whereabouts known and left the jail unprotected.
In the outrage that followed the lynching, the Oklahoman reported rather credulously on the attor­ney’s relationship to the crime: “O. A. Cargill, when asked if he had a statement to make about the abduction of the negro last night, said that he had not, except that he was glad that he was at home and in bed when it happened.”
“NEGROES URGED TO STAY HOME,” read the paper’s front page.

Dunjee’s Black Dispatch, by contrast, raged. “The most dastardly and hellish crime that has or can ever stain the fair name of the State of Oklahoma was staged at the County Jail,” it began, and it pro­ceeded to report on the desperate scramble that night on the East Side, where 1,000 people had gathered on Second Street to try to figure out how to help the abducted prisoner before it was too late. Fifty policemen, along with the mayor himself, came out to the East to monitor and constrain the crowd. The police sent the Deep Deuce search party in the wrong direction, so that by the time they found the abducted prisoner, dumped in the tall grass out in the country, he had already been dead for hours. The Black Dispatch did not flinch from describing the “ghastly sight” of his body: “his tongue had been choked out and hung limp over his lower lip. His right eye was wide open while the left was closed.” Although the dead man had not lived in OKC, his body was brought back to Second Street, where huge crowds came through to mourn.
Roscoe Dunjee ruthlessly mocked law enforcement’s official ac­count of the crime. “Three men overpowered the jailor,” he wrote,

tied him, cut his telephone wires and light, HIS TELEPHONE WIRES, OVER WHICH THE EDITOR OF THIS PAPER HELD A CONVERSATION WITH THAT SAME JAILOR AN HOUR LATER. . . . THINK OF IT, IN five minutes, un­known men can come to the jail, tie the jailor, cut the wires and then find the man whom they seek, from among the many cells, they can do all of this without any information or assis­tance from the inside. THE PUBLIC IS ASKED TO BELIEVE THIS.

Well, WE DON’T BELIEVE IT.

Thus the story circulated through Oklahoma City, the official ver­sion and the alternate, the story and the story underneath—the real­ity of the East Side versus the reality everywhere else. In the streets of Oklahoma City, children walked around selling these stories, holler­ing out competing newspapers’ headlines in their tiny voices. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/ralph-ellison-coming-of-age-during-the-rise-of-the-kkk/