Tulsa was a rough town back then. It appears a mob had hanged a white teen for murder a year before. All of Oklahoma was lawless back then.
Bill Tilghman (One of the THREE GUARDSMEN of OKLAHOMA) was still a lawman who was murdered a few years later in Cromwell OK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Tilghman
“The local Knights of the Ku Klux Klan demanded justice and printed fliers and warnings to criminal elements to leave town or suffer the consequences.[citation needed] One month after Tilghman’s murder, the town of Cromwell was torched, with every brothel, bar, flophouse and pool hall burned to the ground, and no arrests were ever made. Cromwell never recovered its former “wild” status after that, and as of the 2000 census, its population was fewer than three hundred residents.[2]
Osage Indians were being murdered for their oil rights,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osage_Indian_murders
http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/t/tu013.html
” But Tulsa was also a deeply troubled town. Crime rates were sky high, while the city had been plagued by vigilantism, including the August 1920 lynching, by a white mob, of a white teenager accused of murder. Newspaper reports confirmed that the Tulsa police had done little to protect the lynching victim, who had been taken from his jail cell at the county courthouse.”
“Eight months later an incident involving Dick Rowland, an African American shoe shiner, and Sarah Page, a white elevator operator, would set the stage for tragedy. While it is still uncertain as to precisely what happened in the Drexel Building on May 30, 1921, the most common explanation is that Rowland stepped on Page’s foot as he entered the elevator, causing her to scream.”
http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/t/tu013.html
“On the morning of May 30, 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland was riding in the elevator in the Drexel Building at Third and Main. The white elevator operator, Sarah Page, claimed that Rowland grabbed her arm, causing her to flee in panic. Accounts of the incident circulated among the city’s white community during the day and became more exaggerated with each telling.”
And south of McAlester is still called “Little Dixie”.