Buck Colbert Franklin came to Tulsa late. He was born on May 6, 1879, near Homer in the Chickasaw Nation, the son of David Franklin, who had escaped slavery and fought for the Union, and Millie Colbert Franklin, who was raised in Choctaw ways; he is on the Dawes Rolls as a Choctaw Freedman. He studied law by correspondence while teaching, was admitted to the Oklahoma bar in December 1907, and practiced in Ardmore before moving in 1912 to Rentiesville, the all-Black town between Muskogee and Checotah. There he was the only lawyer, the postmaster and the justice of the peace, and as his son John Hope Franklin later wrote, "there was not a decent living in all those activities." In February 1921 he went to Tulsa ahead of his family and opened an office with I. H. Spears and T. O. Chappelle at 107 1/2 North Greenwood Avenue.
June 1921
He had been there four months when the mob burned Greenwood on May 31 and June 1. He was marched at gunpoint to the Convention Hall and held, and his office was destroyed. A ten-page typescript he wrote, found in 2015 and now at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, describes it: "Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air." He asked, "Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?"
By June 6 he and Spears were seeing clients in a Red Cross tent. The next day the City Commission passed a fire ordinance that pulled the burned district inside the city's fire limits, so that anything rebuilt there had to be of fireproof material its owners could not afford. The Tulsa World reported that the real estate exchange backed it to help turn the land by the rail yards into an industrial area, and because it would cause "a wider separation between Negroes and whites."
Lockard v. Evans
In August Franklin and his partners filed suit for Joe Lockard, a Greenwood man who wanted to rebuild, against Mayor T. D. Evans and the city commission. A panel of three judges first granted a restraining order because the ordinance had been passed without proper notice. The city passed it again, and in early September the judges issued a permanent injunction on the ground that it would take the owners' property rights. Their written opinion has been lost. The state commission's report of 2001 calls the case one of the few triumphs of the rule of law to come out of the massacre.
What it saved
It rebuilt nothing. Thousands of Black Tulsans spent the winter of 1921 and 1922 in tents, and the insurance claims Franklin and Spears pressed for them failed. But it left Greenwood's owners free to build on their own land, and they did.
Franklin's family joined him in 1925, and he practiced in Tulsa until he died there in 1960. His son became the historian who served as a consultant to that 2001 commission.