Resources for 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: TV Notes and Articles
David Shasha
3 Documentaries You Should Watch About The Tulsa Race Massacre
By: Eric Deggans
If all you know about the Tulsa Race Massacre is the re-creations of the attack featured in HBO series like Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, prepare yourself for a serious education over the next few weeks.
Monday marks the 100th anniversary for one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history, the Tulsa Race Massacre. Back in 1921, a mob of white people tore down and burned the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Okla. — a segregated part of the city so prosperous and bustling, it was known as Black Wall Street.
According to some historians, over 1,200 homes and buildings were destroyed by the violence, killing between 100 and 300 people. But thanks to white-dominated power structures in the city of Tulsa and state of Oklahoma, news about the massacre was wiped from many official sources for decades (several fans of Watchmen and Lovecraft Country have told me they had never heard of the massacre before these fictional TV shows dramatized the attack during their episodes last year and in 2019).
All that will likely change over the next week and beyond, as a flood of programs centered on the Tulsa Race Massacre come to television. From enterprise reporting efforts at ABC, CBS and NBC to projects on National Geographic, CNN, The History Channel and PBS, there are a wide array of documentary films and TV programs aimed at reminding Americans just how deadly unchecked racism can be.
After watching the films offered by The History Channel, CNN and PBS, I saw common themes emerge. First was the power of white society to control what history is recognized, to erase uncomfortable truths and resist efforts to dig up the truth (sometimes literally, as when officials ended early attempts to find mass graves of massacre victims in 1999). Several films featured comments from longtime white residents of Tulsa, including its current mayor, G.T. Bynum, who said they didn't even learn the Tulsa Race Massacre had happened until they were adults.
Such insistence on erasing Black pain from a community's official history creates, by necessity, a shadow history kept among people of color and passed along, often by word of mouth. White America may have tried to forget Tulsa, but the massacre's details lived in the stories of Black survivors and their descendants, handed down like bitter family heirlooms.
(Even worse, for a journalist like me, was to realize the role the media played back then — both in whipping up white fears about Black people through horrifically racist films and newspaper stories, while disappearing news of attacks and lynchings once white people took action.)
The second painful truth was the lasting damage such attacks can have on a people. According to CNN's film, 191 Black-owned business stood in the Greenwood district before the massacre, including one of the finest hotels in the country. These days, there are fewer than a dozen Black-owned businesses in that same area, now reduced to a block-long main drag with modest establishments like a barbershop, health clinic and coffee shop.
Generations of Black wealth were erased in the massacre. Tulsa's racial segregation and the struggle of its Black community remains.
Some people pop up in multiple documentaries, including the Rev. Robert Turner, the sharp-dressing pastor of Historic Vernon AME Church. His church's basement hid survivors of the massacre 100 years ago; more recently, Turner is shown regularly visiting Tulsa's City Hall with a bullhorn, reminding residents of the need for memory and reparations.
"Pastoring a church where the members died and the survivors never saw justice, that aggravated my spirit," Turner says in the History Channel documentary. "It's an embarrassment that we have never had a district attorney investigate the worst crime in this city's history."
Historian Hannibal B. Johnson talks about how Black people enslaved by Native Americans were freed and given land, forming the early basis for the Greenwood district's wealth. And several experts also speak of the effort to find the rumored unmarked mass graves where Black people who were killed in the massacre may have been interred.
Most importantly, the films show how history's broad trends can feed into a singular disaster. As Southern states ratcheted up racialized violence and racially oppressive laws to snatch back Black voting rights, a generation of Black veterans who had served America in World War I were no longer willing to accept the indignities of indiscriminate racial oppression.
When a large group of Black people showed up in Tulsa to stop the lynching of a young Black man unfairly accused of sexually assaulting a white female elevator operator — white crowds had been incited by incendiary, unfair coverage from The Tulsa Tribune — a white man tried to grab a gun from a Black man. A struggle ensued, the gun went off, and the white mob had their excuse to obliterate Black Wall Street over two days of brutal violence.
Here are capsule reviews of three powerful films I found most compelling, from The History Channel, CNN and PBS. Watch at least one of them to learn the kind of American history that should have been taught in classrooms and from schoolbooks nationwide for the past 100 years.
YouTube
Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre, airing on The History Channel (May 30)
This is easily the most cinematic of the three documentaries — small surprise, given its pedigree. Co-directed and executive produced by Emmy-winner Stanley Nelson (Freedom Riders), the film is also executive produced by NBA superstar Russell Westbrook, featuring original music from Branford Marsalis. The story begins with words from Rev. Turner's bullhorn, unspooling into an epic tale of how Black people migrated to Tulsa and built a bustling, successful business district, keeping dollars in the Black community until two days of mob violence destroyed it all. Archival footage of Greenwood, looking impossibly clear and vivid, appears next to photos and inspired commentary from experts like The New York Times columnist Brent Staples and historian Scott Ellsworth. The result is a detailed, evocative story of the massacre and its connection to modern Tulsa, including a renewed, modern effort to find mass graves. This compelling film is also paired with a six-part podcast produced by The History Channel and WNYC Studios in collaboration with KOSU public radio in Oklahoma, dubbed Blindspot: Tulsa Burning.
YouTube
Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street, debuting on CNN and streaming on HBO Max (May 31)
This film features another NBA star, LeBron James, as an executive producer, adding evocative animation sequences to newsreel footage and archival photos to re-create scenes from 100 years ago. CNN's film traces a history similar to Tulsa Burning, bringing cameras to modern Tulsa's modest Greenwood district to show off small businesses continuing a historic legacy, as detailed maps display how much the area has shrunk from its successful heights 100 years ago. While Black people in 1921 enjoyed a community one expert says was like Bourbon Street, Harlem and Washington D.C. rolled into one, racist and resentful white Tulsans used pejorative phrases like "Little Africa" and "N*****town" to describe the area. Named for a popular theater in the Greenwood district, Dreamland uses actors to read powerful quotes from politicians and publications of the time, including Tulsa's mayor during the massacre, T. D. Evans, who blamed the Black victims of the attack for "instigating" a "negro uprising." Rev. Turner also shows up here, pointing out areas in his church's basement where victims huddled while the top floors of the church were destroyed. "I believe there is no expiration date on morality," the pastor says, explaining why he remains an aggressive advocate for uncovering the mass graves and finding justice for the city's Black community.
YouTube
Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten, premiering on PBS (May 31)
For a more personal story, consider this film, focused on the work of longtime Washington Post journalist DeNeen L. Brown, whose reporting on the Tulsa Race Massacre has spread word about the history of the attack. Brown, whose father lives in Tulsa and is a pastor at a Baptist church in town, is shown interviewing descendants of attack victims and experts leading the modern effort to find and exhume unmarked graves. She also serves as a producer on the film, alongside human rights investigator Eric Stover, who is featured in interviews as an expert source; the film is narrated by NPR's own Michel Martin, weekend host of All Things Considered. Viewers learn of failed efforts to sue the government for failing to protect the community — descendants were told the statute of limitations had passed. And the film shows how graphic photos of the destruction were turned into postcards and distributed by some white people. Here, the search for evidence of unmarked graves is presented as a bit of a cliffhanger, as experts work to identify likely areas for the remains, hoping to prove they are the discarded bodies of massacre victims. "Oftentimes, Black people are called on camera after something racist occurs to explain racism ... to explain what happened," Brown says in one moment. "But I can't explain why white people hate black people so much."
This story was edited for radio by Nina Gregory, and adapted for the web by Eric Deggans and Petra Mayer.
From NPR, May 30, 2021
Telling the Story of the Tulsa Massacre
By: Mike Hale
The Tulsa race massacre of June 1, 1921, has gone from virtually unknown to emblematic with impressive speed, propelled by the national reckoning with racism and specifically with sanctioned violence against Black Americans. That awareness is reflected in the spate of new television documentaries on the occasion of the massacre’s 100th anniversary.
“Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre” (Sunday on History), “Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street” (Monday on CNN) and “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten” (Monday on PBS) tell overlapping stories of the horrific day when a white mob stormed through the prosperous Greenwood District of Tulsa, Okla. Triggered by a confrontation between white men planning a lynching and Black men intent on stopping it, the 16-hour spasm of violence left 100 to 300 people dead and most of Greenwood, including more than 1,250 houses, burned to the ground.
All three sketch the history of Black settlement in Oklahoma, where more than 40 Black towns existed in the early 20th century, and the singular success of Greenwood. Each carries the story into the present, covering the excavations carried out in 2020 looking for mass graves of massacre victims. Certain scenes and interview subjects are uniformly present: the historian Hannibal Johnson; “The Bobby Eaton Show” on KBOB 89.9 FM; the Rev. Dr. Robert Turner giving a tour of the basement of the Vernon A.M.E. Church, the only part that survived the conflagration.
But each has its own style and emphasis, its own approach to the unthinkable material. The PBS film is journalistic, built around the reporting of The Washington Post’s DeNeen L. Brown, who appears onscreen, and narrated by NPR’s Michel Martin. It spends a little less time on the past and more on the continuing issues of race in Tulsa, including educational disparities and the protests following the police killing of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed Black man, in 2016. In the nature of the contemporary newspaper feature, it’s a touch sanctimonious. It ends with Johnson, looking uncomfortable, delivering a nominally hopeful sound bite: “We’re not there yet, we’re working on it.”
The CNN and History films both give fuller accounts of the history, and of the timeline of June 1. “Tulsa Burning,” directed by the veteran documentarians Stanley Nelson and Marco Williams, is the most polished and evocative piece of filmmaking, and the most focused thematically, using footage of the excavations as a narrative line and making the strongest link between the massacre and contemporary police shootings.
“Dreamland,” directed by Salima Koroma (and with LeBron James as an executive producer), gives the most thorough presentation of the history. It’s more forthright, for instance, on the way that Native American enslavement of Black people paradoxically led to their owning more land in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma.
That uncomfortable connection is just one of the ironies that echo through the Tulsa history. All three films note that segregation — and the economic self-reliance it produced — made the relative prosperity of Greenwood possible, in turn making the neighborhood and its residents the inevitable targets of white jealousy and rage. And a half-century later, after the neighborhood had been rebuilt, its economy was ravaged again, this time by the effects of integration.
Perhaps the saddest paradox, in the life of Tulsa and in the structures of the films, is that the only real “up” in the story — its closest thing to a happy ending — is the discovery of a mass grave in a cemetery in Greenwood last October. (The remains have not been definitely identified as those of massacre victims, and the PBS film makes the point that people who died in the influenza pandemic of 1918 were sometimes buried in mass graves.)
One thing that none of the films is able to provide, except in clips from a living-history project, is testimony from survivors. For that, it is worth seeking out the 1993 PBS documentary “Goin’ Back to T-Town,” which was told entirely in the voices of massacre survivors and their contemporaries and descendants; it’s available at pbs.org.
Even that film lacked something that is startling, but not at all surprising, in its absence: the voice of anyone who admits a connection to the perpetrators of the massacre, none of whom are identified and none of whom were ever punished.
Typically, this is where I would answer the “If you were to watch one of these films” question, but not this time. If you want to know about Tulsa, and everything it represents, watch all three. We can all afford the four and a half hours.
MORE on the Tulsa Massacre
Other programs tied to the centennial of the Tulsa massacre include “Tulsa 1921: An American Tragedy” (CBS, Monday); “The Legacy of Black Wall Street” (OWN, Tuesday); “Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer” (National Geographic, June 18).
From The New York Times, May 30, 2021
What the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed
By: Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Anjali Singhvi, Audra D. S. Burch, Troy Griggs, Mika Gröndahl, Lingdong Huang, Tim Wallace, Jeremy White, Josh Williams
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/24/us/tulsa-race-massacre.html
Imagine a community of great possibilities and prosperity built by Black people for Black people. Places to work. Places to live. Places to learn and shop and play. Places to worship.
Now imagine it being ravaged by flames.
In May 1921, the Tulsa, Okla., neighborhood of Greenwood was a fully realized antidote to the racial oppression of the time. Built in the early part of the century in a northern pocket of the city, it was a thriving community of commerce and family life to its roughly 10,000 residents.
Brick and wood-frame homes dotted the landscape, along with blocks lined with grocery stores, hotels, nightclubs, billiard halls, theaters, doctor’s offices and churches.
Greenwood was so promising, so vibrant that it became home to what was known as America’s Black Wall Street. But what took years to build was erased in less than 24 hours by racial violence — sending the dead into mass graves and forever altering family trees.
Hundreds of Greenwood residents were brutally killed, their homes and businesses wiped out. They were casualties of a furious and heavily armed white mob of looters and arsonists. One factor that drove the violence: resentment toward the Black prosperity found in block after block of Greenwood.
The financial toll of the massacre is evident in the $1.8 million in property loss claims — $27 million in today’s dollars — detailed in a 2001 state commission report. For two decades, the report has been one of the most comprehensive accounts to reveal the horrific details of the massacre — among the worst racial terror attacks in the nation’s history — as well as the government’s culpability.
The destruction of property is only one piece of the financial devastation that the massacre wrought. Much bigger is a sobering kind of inheritance: the incalculable and enduring loss of what could have been, and the generational wealth that might have shaped and secured the fortunes of Black children and grandchildren.
“What if we had been allowed to maintain our family business?” asked Brenda Nails-Alford, who is in her early 60s. The Greenwood Avenue shoe shop of her grandfather and his brother was destroyed. “If they had been allowed to carry on that legacy,” she said, “there’s no telling where we could be now.”
For decades, what happened in Greenwood was willfully buried in history. Piecing together archival maps and photographs, with guidance from historians, The New York Times constructed a 3-D model of the Greenwood neighborhood as it was before the destruction. The Times also analyzed census data, city directories, newspaper articles, and survivor tapes and testimonies from that time to show the types of people who made up the neighborhood and contributed to its vibrancy.
The marquee block
Perhaps no other collection of businesses tells the story of Greenwood and Black entrepreneurship better than the 100 block of Greenwood Avenue, rising near the southern tip of the neighborhood. This marquee block was the pulse of the Black business community.
“My grandfather often talked about how you could enjoy a full life in Greenwood, that everything you needed or wanted was in Greenwood. You never had to go anywhere,” said Star Williams, 40, the granddaughter of Otis Grandville Clark, who was 18 during the massacre. “He talked about seeing Black success and how his sense of identity and pride came from Greenwood.”
The businesses on Greenwood Avenue were owned by people who were among Tulsa’s most prominent Black citizens.
A city within a city
Mr. Stradford and Mr. Gurley — who purchased large tracts of land in the early 1900s — were among the founders of Greenwood. They began building on the northern side of Tulsa beyond the railroad tracks, forming the bones of the city’s predominantly Black neighborhood that was separate from the white side of town.
Greenwood was one of the few places in the country offering Black citizens — less than six decades out of enslavement — a three-dimensional life.
In the evenings, residents had their choice of entertainment. Survivor accounts that were relayed to relatives recall neighbors getting “gussied up” to gather in Greenwood, with Thursdays being big because of “Maids’ Night Out.” Black domestics, many of them live-in workers who cleaned the homes of white residents across town, were off that day.
Many African-Americans migrated to Tulsa after the Civil War, carrying dreams of new chapters and the kind of freedom found in owning businesses. Others made a living working as maids, waiters, chauffeurs, shoe shiners and cooks for Tulsa’s new oil class.
In Greenwood, residents held more than 200 different types of jobs. About 40 percent of the community’s residents were professionals or skilled craftspeople, like doctors, pharmacists, carpenters and hairdressers, according to a Times analysis of the 1920 census. While a vast majority of the neighborhood rented, many residents owned their homes.
Occupations of Greenwood residents
Segregation kept African-Americans from patronizing white-owned shops, and Greenwood thrived from community support of Black-owned businesses.
“Black folks faced an economic detour,” said Hannibal B. Johnson, an author and the education chair for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. “When they approached the gates to the wider Tulsa economy, they were turned away, so they ended up creating their own largely insular community.”
The massacre that ended it all
The assaults on Greenwood raged over two days. The morning of June 2, 1921 revealed emptiness and ruin in every direction.
Plumes of smoke hovered over the neighborhood. Ash coated the ground. Brick buildings had been reduced to bombed-out husks. And soon, the bodies of those killed would be stacked and discarded in mass graves and a river.
It all began on May 30 with two teenagers in an elevator in the Drexel building in downtown Tulsa and morphed into a sexual assault accusation.
Accounts vary about what happened between Dick Rowland, 19, a young Black shoe shiner, and Sarah Page, 17, a white elevator operator. One common theory suggests Mr. Rowland tripped and grabbed onto the arm of Ms. Page while trying to catch his fall. She screamed, and he ran away, according to the commission report.
The next day, Mr. Rowland was arrested and jailed in the Tulsa County Courthouse. By that afternoon, The Tulsa Tribune published a front-page news story with the headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” which essentially mobilized a lynch mob that showed up at the courthouse.
Twice, a group of armed Black Tulsans, many of them World War I veterans, offered to help protect Mr. Rowland but were turned away by the sheriff.
As the Black men were leaving the second time, a white man attempted to disarm a Black veteran, and a gun went off in the scuffle. That clash and others that day marked the beginning of what would become Greenwood’s armed destruction. Some white rioters were even deputized and given weapons by civil officials.
Near dawn, the white mob descended on Greenwood. Black Tulsans fought back, valiantly defending their families and property. But they were woefully outnumbered.
The mob indiscriminately shot Black people in the streets. Members of the mob ransacked homes and stole money and jewelry. They set fires, “house by house, block by block,” according to the commission report.
Terror came from the sky, too. White pilots flew airplanes that dropped dynamite over the neighborhood, the report stated, making the Tulsa aerial attack what historians call among the first of an American city.
The numbers presented a staggering portrait of loss: 35 blocks burned to the ground; as many as 300 dead; hundreds injured; 8,000 to 10,000 left homeless; more than 1,470 homes burned or looted; and eventually, 6,000 detained in internment camps.
The neighborhood economy was destroyed. Two dozen grocery stores. Thirty-one restaurants. Four drug stores.
Greenwood, where Black success embodied the American dream, was no more, suddenly, dreadfully wiped out.
What was lost
Greenwood would be rebuilt, and for a few decades, it would again thrive before falling to urban renewal and other forces. But that spring of 1921 unmoored and unrooted the neighborhood with lasting effects.
Not long after the attack, shell-shocked survivors — who were blamed for the violence — returned home to ruin. Amid the charred remnants, they were forced to make an excruciating decision that would change family histories forever: leave and start over again somewhere else, or rebuild.
They also faced another kind of white resistance: a fire ordinance intended to prevent Black property owners from rebuilding on their own and insurance companies that refused to pay damage claims.
“Greenwood wasn’t a gift from anyone, it was created by the citizens of Greenwood who withstood the tragedy of 1921 and rebuilt it again,” said Scott Ellsworth, the author of the recently released book, “The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice.” “Greenwood is the story of resilience. It is the story of courage.”
Those who stayed began stitching their lives back together almost immediately. They joined forces and began rebuilding homes and businesses. Within a day, C.L. Netherland, a massacre survivor and minister whose barber shop at 110 Greenwood Avenue was destroyed, purchased a folding chair, a strop and razor, and set up shop on a sidewalk.
The massacre also claimed the Mount Zion Baptist Church, whose first service in its new building had been held less than two months earlier. The congregation’s hundreds of members had financed and built the $92,000 church over several years, according to “Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District,” a book by Mr. Johnson, education chair for the centennial commission. It would have been easier to declare bankruptcy. Instead, church members rebuilt and dug in. It took an additional 21 years before the initial debt was repaid.
The final insult of the massacre came in the silence. For decades, Tulsa deliberately ignored and covered up what had happened in Greenwood. Many descendants said they learned about the mob and the killings only as adults — and even then, some of the recounting was told in whispers.
“You could see the pain in my grandmother’s eyes when she talked about what happened,” said LeRoy Gibbs II, 52, the grandson of Ernestine Gibbs, a massacre survivor who was 17 when the violence unfolded. “Before she would get too far, before it became too painful, she would shift and start talking about where we are today.”
Some surviving business owners who built the 100 block of Greenwood Avenue had remarkable second chapters. Others, who struggled in the aftermath, had heartbreaking stories. The Williams family, among the most successful before the massacre, stayed and rebuilt.
Mr. Smitherman, the civil rights activist who ran The Tulsa Star, eventually landed in Buffalo, where he became the publisher of The Buffalo Star (later named The Empire Star). He was among several Black Tulsans indicted for “inciting a riot,” and was exonerated posthumously.
Ms. Parrish, the journalist who ran a typing school, stayed to chronicle the massacre. The two wealthy men who helped found Greenwood were hit hard financially. Mr. Stradford, who was indicted, escaped to Kansas and then Chicago. He never recovered his fortune. Mr. Gurley reportedly lost nearly $158,000 in 1921, or $2.3 million in today’s dollars.
James Nails, who had opened a shoe shop with his brother Henry, rebuilt but never really recovered. He eventually left Tulsa.
“He was really unable to carry on emotionally, psychologically,” Ms. Nails-Alford said. “You get your education, you work hard, you start businesses, you’re able to employ your family members and community members, and then you lose it all within hours. It takes away a man’s dignity.”
There is a pending lawsuit and ongoing discussions about how and whether to compensate the families of the Tulsa Massacre victims. No compensation has ever been paid under court order or by legislation.
To this day, not one person has been prosecuted or punished for the devastation and ruin of the original Greenwood.
From The New York Times, May 30, 2021
Tulsa Race Massacre, 100 years later: Why it happened and why it’s still relevant today
By: Randi Richardson
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/tulsa-race-massacre-100-years-later-why-it-happened-why-n1268877
Just decades after slavery in the United States left Black Americans in an economic and societal deficit, one bright spot stood out in Tulsa, Oklahoma — its Greenwood District, known as the “Black Wall Street,” where Black business leaders, homeowners, and civic leaders thrived.
But 100 years ago, on May 31, 1921, and into the next day, a white mob destroyed that district, in what experts call the single-most horrific incident of racial terrorism since slavery.
An estimated 300 people were killed within the district’s 35 square blocks, burning to the ground more than 1,200 homes, at least 60 businesses, dozens of churches, a school, a hospital and a public library, according to a report issued by Human Rights Watch.
At least $1.4 million in damages were claimed after the massacre, or about $25 million in today’s dollars, after controlling for inflation and the current economy, but experts say it’s an underestimation.
Survivors never received government assistance or restitution for their losses. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties held a hearing on the issue May 19 in which three remaining known survivors, experts and advocates called on Congress to issue reparations to the living survivors and all descendants to rectify the lasting impact of the massacre.
“I had everything a child could need,” Viola Ford Fletcher, 107, told the committee. “The night of the massacre, I was awakened by my family. My parents and five siblings were there. I was told we had to leave and that was it. I will never forget the violence of the hate mob when we left our home. I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fog. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I live through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot.”
O.W. Gurley, a wealthy Black landowner, purchased 40 acres of land in Tulsa in 1906 and named the area Greenwood. Its population stemmed largely from formerly enslaved Black people and sharecroppers who relocated to the area fleeing the racial terror they experienced in other areas.
But Oklahoma, which became a state in 1907, was still staunchly segregated at the time. So as Gurley opened a boarding house, grocery stores and sold land to other Black people, they secured their own houses and opened businesses. The population grew to 11,000 and the area became an economic powerhouse affectionately called “Black Wall Street.”
Greenwood functioned independently, with its own school system, post office, bank, library, hospital and public transit. It also had luxury shops, restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, jewelry and clothing stores, movie theaters, barbershops and salons, pool halls, nightclubs and offices for doctors, lawyers and dentists.
Hannibal Johnson, author of “Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District,” said the area thrived as an ancillary economy that kept money within the community. Even those who worked outside of Greenwood only spent their money in the area, reinvesting in the neighborhood, he said.
“The district really took off as an economic and entrepreneurial kind of Mecca for Black folks because this was an era of segregation,” he said. “Black folks were shut out from the dominant white-led economy in what I call an economic detour. In other words, when they approached the gate of economic opportunity at the white dominated downtown Tulsa economy, they were turned away. So they created their own insular economy in the Greenwood district and blossomed because dollars were able to circulate and recirculate within the confines of the community because there really was not much of an option, given the segregation that existed here and elsewhere.”
This prosperity continued through the years even as racial terrorism around Tulsa grew, the Ku Klux Klan gained power, and Oklahoma’s Supreme Court regularly upheld voting restrictions such as poll taxes and literacy tests for Black voters. By 1919, white civic leaders sought Greenwood’s land for a railroad depot or other uses.
“You have a really successful Black business community across the Frisco tracks, literally across the tracks from downtown Tulsa,” said Johnson, the education chair for the Centennial Commission. “You have white people, some of whom are not doing well economically, who can look across those tracks and see Black people living in homes, driving cars, furnishing their homes with pianos, women wearing furs, all the trappings of economic success. And so there's that dissonance between what these people think ought to be, based on white supremacy, and what actually is. And one of the ways to harmonize that dissonance is to bring the Black folks down a peg through violence.”
Tulsa police officers arrested Dick Rowland, a Black 19-year-old, May 31, 1921 for allegedly assaulting a white girl, the report said, but there was little evidential proof. The Tulsa newspapers swiftly published incendiary articles about the allegation, prompting a group of mostly white men to descend on the courthouse to lynch Rowland.
When Greenwood residents learned of the impending lynch mob, a group of mostly Black men, which included World War I veterans, armed themselves and went to the courthouse to protect Rowland. This method became custom whenever Black people were on trial as they usually faced lynchings.
But the sheriff told the group to leave and they complied. The white mob grew to more than 2,000 and Tulsa police did not disperse the crowd. Later that night, the armed Black men returned to protect Rowland and a fight broke out when a white man tried to disarm a Black man, prompting shooting that lasted through the night, the report said.
In the early hours of June 1, 1921, then-Gov. James B. A. Robertson dispatched the National Guard and declared martial law. The National Guard, local law enforcement, and deputized white citizens canvassed Greenwood to disarm, arrest and move Black people to nearby internment camps, dragging some out of their homes. This upheaval resulted in the uncontested mob outnumbering the remaining Black people by 20 to 1, the report said. Old World War I airplanes dropped bombs on Greenwood, with the mob fatally shooting Black people and looting and burning their homes and businesses.
Dreisen Heath, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who authored the report, said law enforcement’s involvement in the massacre illustrates the demands of racial justice movements a century later.
“A number of the massacres that happen that are normally coined as a riot — Memphis, Chicago, those are all places where you also have documentation of police participation and being deputized,” she said.
No one in the white mob was prosecuted or otherwise punished for the massacre, the report said.
Within a week of the massacre, at least 6,000 of the remaining residents were detained in internment camps. They were issued identification tags and remained at the camps — some for months — and could not leave without their tags and permission from white supervisors, the report said. Black residents never received any financial assistance after the massacre to rebuild. Some filed insurance claims or lawsuits, but none resulted in payment due to riot clauses, the report said. They were left to rebuild on their own.
Fletcher's brother Hughes Van Ellis, 100, and a World War II veteran, said his childhood was hard as his family recovered from the massacre.
“We didn’t have much. What little we had would be stolen from us,” Ellis told the committee. “When something is stolen from you, you go to the courts to be made whole. This wasn’t the case for us. The courts in Oklahoma wouldn't hear us. The devil courts said we were too late. We were made to feel that our struggle was unworthy of justice and that we were less valued than whites, that we weren't fully American.”
Fletcher served white families for most of her life as a domestic worker. “I never made much money,” she said. “To this day, I can barely afford my everyday needs.”
The siblings, Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, and some of the experts who testified called on Congress to provide reparations to the survivors and descendants of the massacre.
“We are not asking for a handout,” Ellis said through tears. “All we are asking for is for the chance to be treated like a first-class citizen, that this is the land where there is liberty and justice for all. We are asking for justice for a lifetime of ongoing harm.”
That harm includes the city of Tulsa faulting Greenwood residents for the damage. “Let the blame for this negro uprising lie right where it belongs — on those armed negros and their followers who started this trouble and who instigated it and any persons who seek to put half the blame on the white people are wrong,” the Tulsa City Commission wrote in a report issued two weeks after the massacre.
Shortly after the massacre, a grand jury was empaneled to prosecute the rioting, weapons and looting and arson charges. The all-white jury indicted more than 85 people, who were mostly Black. Those indictments were largely dismissed or not pursued, according to the Human Rights Watch report.
The final grand jury report agreed with the Tulsa City Commission that Black people were the main culprits. “There was no mob spirit among the whites, no talk of lynching and no arms. The assembly was quiet until the arrival of the armed Negros, which precipitated and was the direct cause of the entire affair,” the grand jury wrote.
The case against Rowland was dismissed.
Black Wall Street did, eventually, rise from the ashes and Greenwood enjoyed another heyday in the 1940s, but integration and urban renewal in the 1960s and the 1970s led to new declines the neighborhood was unable to fully overcome, Johnson said. The setback has only compounded since then as Tulsa remains largely segregated and riddled with racial disparities.
Greenwood is just outside of North Tulsa, which is mostly Black, while South Tulsa is a mostly white area. These days, more than 30 percent of North Tulsans live in poverty compared to 13 percent of South Tulsans, the report said. On average, North Tulsans live 14 years less than South Tulsans. Black Tulsans are three times more likely to face police brutality in comparison to their white counterparts. Statewide, 43 percent of Black people own their homes compared to 72 percent of white people.
Johnson said there are two main casualties of the massacre that contribute to these discrepancies and affect everyday life — a breach in trust between Black and white communities and the inability to transfer accumulated wealth.
“Many people in the white mob that destroyed the Greenwood community back in 1921 were deputized by local law enforcement. You have an incident like that, then the breach in trust is huge. The other thing that happened post-massacre — there are a lot of promises made by local leaders, these are white men, about rebuilding the Greenwood community, and they didn't really materialize. So, promises broken. So trust is a real lingering issue,” he said.
The other lingering issue is how Black wealth is generally one-tenth of white wealth. Johnson said the inability of Black people to accumulate wealth and transfer it intergenerationally is the root cause.
“Slavery was obviously a huge example of an inability to accumulate wealth — uncompensated labor,” he said. “But the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is an example of the inability to transfer wealth intergenerationally because of disruptors — some of these wealthy Black men, their wealth was lost in the massacre, and it was not restored.”
That’s why, Randle said, it is important for the survivors and descendants of the massacre to recoup some restitution.
“Justice in America,” Randle said, “is always so slow or not possible for Black people and we are made to feel crazy just for asking for things to be made right.”
From NBC News, May 28, 2021
Tulsa massacre: centennial of white mob rampage to be commemorated in Oklahoma
By: Richard Luscombe
One of the darkest chapters in the long and turbulent history of racial violence in America will be commemorated in Oklahoma on Monday, the 100th anniversary of a rampage by a white mob that left an estimated 300 Black people dead.
Details of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which saw the razing of the prosperous Greenwood neighborhood known as the Black Wall Street, were hidden for decades as authorities covered up the existence of mass graves and destroyed evidence of thousands of Black people being interned by the Oklahoma national guard.
The riot began after armed members of the Black community attempted to prevent the lynching of a youth accused of assaulting a white woman. Hundreds of Black-owned businesses, churches and homes were burned, leaving an estimated 8,000 homeless and 800 more injured.
In recent years, historians have joined with activist groups and descendants of the victims to expose the truth of the atrocity, which will be remembered in events in the city this week including a visit on Tuesday from President Joe Biden.
The anniversary comes at a critical time for race relations in the US, following high-profile police killings of African Americans including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
Law enforcement organisations around the US have been warned by the federal Department of Homeland Security of the potential for targeted violence at events to commemorate the Tulsa massacre, a federal official told the Associated Press.
The official said the alert was issued given the nature of the commemoration and the “volatile threat environment”.
Scott Ellsworth, a University of Michigan historian whose book Death in a Promised Land helped put Tulsa on the pathway to confronting its racist past, told the Guardian: “The story of the massacre was actively suppressed in the white community for 50 years.
“Some people don’t want to talk about this at all; they just want to cover it back up. Others are shameful about it. Others are heartbroken. You had whole generations of people who grew up in Tulsa not knowing about it.”
Earlier this month, Viola Fletcher, 107, the oldest survivor of the massacre, testified before Congress that she was still seeking justice.
“I am here asking my country to acknowledge what happened in Tulsa in 1921,” she said.
“The night of the massacre, I was awakened by my family. My parents and five siblings were there. I was told we had to leave and that was it.
“I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home. I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day.”
Two groups, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre centennial commission, and the Black Wall Street legacy festival, will host events through the week.
A Remember & Rise ceremony planned for Monday, however, was cancelled amid a dispute over payments to survivors. The event was due to feature a performance from John Legend and a speech from the voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams. Neither Legend of Abrams immediately commented on the cancellation.
Other commemorations will include marches, talks and the opening of a $30m history centre and museum featuring photographs of Greenwood in the 1920s.
Among those honored will be Loula Tom Williams, a Greenwood entrepreneur and owner of the Dreamland Theatre, a de facto Black community centre that was burned by the mob.
From The Guardian (UK), May 30, 2021