J.B. Stradford
Remembering the Greenwood District History
John the Baptist Stradford was born in Kentucky on September 10th, 1861. There aren’t many details about JB’s early years, but it is known he graduated from Oberlin College in 1896 and from Indiana Law School in 1899, after which he began practicing law and invested in a hotel in Alexandria, Indiana. When the hotel went out of business in 1900, he started looking for new places to establish businesses and ended up movin to Tulsa. In Tulsa, Stradford quickly established an informal partnership with O.W. Gurley, focusing en real estate and building rental units. JB’s greatest accomplishment was the 54-suite luxiry Stradford Hotel, valued at the time at 75,000 $ (2.5 million $ today)1. It was the largest black-owned hotel in the US at the time and his empire also included rental houses, rooming houses, pool halls, shoeshine parlors and bathhouses. On June 6th, 1921, Stradford became the first person formally charged with “inciting a riot”, with a penalty of life in prison or death. Grabbing some cash, he fled Tulsa and ended up in Chicago with his son, Corneliues Francis Stradford, where they successfully fought against his extradition to Tulsa. Stradford passed away in Chicago in 1935.
