His arrest sparked the Tulsa Race Massacre. Then Dick Rowland disappeared.
He liked to call himself “Diamond Dick.”
Dick Rowland, a tall teenager with velvet skin, wore a diamond ring as he shined shoes in downtown Tulsa. Rowland, 19, had recently dropped out of Booker T. Washington High School, where he was a star football player, because he was making so much money polishing the shoes of oilmen in a city that billed itself as the “oil capital of the world.”
On May 30, 1921, Rowland took a break from his shoe stand inside a pool hall and walked to the Drexel Building to use the only public restroom for Black people in segregated Tulsa.
Rowland passed Renberg’s, a department store that occupied the first two floors of the Drexel Building, and stepped into an open wire-caged elevator operated by a 17-year-old White girl named Sarah Page.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/30/dick-rowland-tulsa-massacre-sarah-page/
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