Six on History: The Tulsa Race Massacre
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History.
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
.JPG?part=0.3&view=1)
1) 'This is still being suppressed': OU professor's book of recovered photos preserves history of Tulsa Race Massacre, OUDAILY
"Once a gathering place for the city’s Black community, Mount Zion Baptist Church stands empty with smoke billowing from it, shortly before being burned to the ground, in an image from the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Today, it continues to act as a place of community for its members, who meet in a large building similar to the one in the image. But its members haven’t forgotten its history.
Sharlene Johnson, chair of Mount Zion’s joint board, said when the church started in 1909, it was held in a one-room frame building. Construction began on a larger building, on the same land the church is on now, in 1916. The first services were held in the new building in April 1921 — two months before white Tulsans would burn the building to rubble.
To learn more and hear directly from the sources in this story, listen to our podcast with assistant news managing editor Ari Fife about her article.
Johnson said all of the Greenwood District was attacked because of racism and bigotry, but Mount Zion was a special target because white rioters wrongly believed it to be the headquarters and ammunition storage for the Greenwood community. She said she learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre growing up in Chicago, but when she moved to Oklahoma in 1977, she found that event wasn’t taught locally.
“This is your history, it’s national history,” Johnson said. “But it wasn’t taught here, it was ignored for years and years. … This is a history that you can’t keep silent.”
After half a century without pictures of the massacre readily available, OU professor Karlos Hill compiled images like the ones of Mount Zion and others as part of his latest project, “The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History.” His photobook is centered on the experiences of Black survivors and is intended to contextualize images taken by white participants.
In his research on the massacre, Hill has seen countless images depicting destruction, damaged buildings and, simultaneously, the wrecking of the hopes and dreams of a prosperous Black community. But in his mind, one stands out from the rest — an aerial image of a smoky sky above a smattering of buildings, with a caption scratched across the bottom of the picture." ...
"For Black America, the demand for reparations is always an uphill battle. Even when lawmakers and other elected officials appear to be for reparations, it often seems like they’re only half-in. For example, there’s never any proposed legislation that green lights actual monetary compensation for descendants of slavery; it’s always a commission to examine the possibility of discussing reparations, which always reads as lawmakers doing the bare minimum in order to look like they’re doing much more.
Monday will represent the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 in Tulsa, Okla. On Friday, it was announced that an event to commemorate the anniversary that was set to take place in Tulsa was canceled because the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission was unable to reach an agreement with state officials regarding the monetary compensation for three Black people who survived the horror of the mass murder by a white mob who burned the affluent Black city to the ground.
From the Associated Press:
Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons told The Associated Press that he submitted a list of requests to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission in order to have the survivors attend the “Remember & Rise” event Monday at ONEOK Field in Tulsa. The commission had enlisted Grammy-award-winning singer and songwriter John Legend to headline the event, and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams was to deliver the keynote address.
“After months of zero communication and under immense pressure that John Legend and Stacey Abrams may no longer participate if the survivors were not centered, a meeting was scheduled for Saturday,” Solomon-Simmons said in a text message to the AP. “Immediately following that call, our legal team submitted a list of seven requests to ensure the survivors’ participation with the commission’s scheduled events.”
“The agreement was to have answers on each of the requests by (Tuesday). That didn’t happen.”
Solomon-Simmons is representing the survivors and their descendants in a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa and other defendants seeking reparations for the destruction of the city’s once thriving Black district.
State Sen. Kevin Matthews, the chairman of the commission, said after meeting with Solomon-Simmons and other representatives of the survivors, the commission agreed to provide $100,000 to each of the three survivors, along with $2 million in seed money for a reparations fund.
The representatives for the survivors and descendants of one of the most vicious attacks on the Black community in the last 100 years said that $100,000 isn’t enough—because it isn’t. But Matthews said that the amount of money Solomon-Simmons demanded was far too much.
“We raised the money and we were excited the survivors were going to accept these gifts,” Matthews said Friday. “Unfortunately, on Sunday they reached out and increased the amount of the $100,000-per-survivor gifts to $1 million, and instead of $2 million, they asked for $50 million—$50 million—in seed money. We could not respond to those demands.
“To be clear, I absolutely want the survivors, the descendants and others that were affected to be financially and emotionally supported,” he continued. “However, this is not the way.”
See, it’s that last line that really gets me—“This is not the way.”
It’s one thing if $50 million is simply unaffordable—if you ain’t got it, just say you ain’t got it—but when Matthews positions himself as the arbiter of what “the way” is, he loses me. (Matthews is Black, but he’s not a survivor of the massacre.)
Solomon-Simmons said “the $50 million figure was never a non-negotiable demand,” AP reports, which is why it’s just odd that the whole thing got scrapped. You mean to tell me no one could find any middle ground between $2 million and $50 million?
Of course, on one hand, it’s a shame that an agreement couldn’t be reached and the event was canceled. On the other hand, commemorating the race riot was the easy part; reparations for the survivors was the important part, and that’s where America always seems to fall short.
3) Blood on Black Wall Street: The Legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre, NBC NEWS
"None of my mostly African American 11th graders in Portland had ever heard of the so-called Tulsa Race Massacre, even though it stands as one of the most violent episodes of dispossession in U.S. history.
The term “race riot” does not adequately describe the events of May 31-June 1, 1921 in Greenwood, a Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In fact, the term itself implies that both Blacks and whites might be equally to blame for the lawlessness and violence. The historical record documents a sustained and murderous assault on Black lives and property. This assault was met by a brave but unsuccessful armed defense of their community by some Black World War I veterans and others.
During the night and day of the riot, deputized whites killed more than 300 African Americans. They looted and burned to the ground 40 square blocks of 1,265 African American homes, including hospitals, schools, and churches, and destroyed 150 businesses. White deputies and members of the National Guard arrested and detained 6,000 Black Tulsans who were released only upon being vouched for by a white employer or other white citizen. Nine thousand African Americans were left homeless and lived in tents well into the winter of 1921.
Like pearls on a string, we can finger the beads of violent and “legal” expulsions of people of color from their land in the nation: The Cherokee Removal and multiple wars against indigenous people, the 1846-48 U.S. war against Mexico, the Dawes Act, government-sanctioned attacks on Chinese throughout the West, the “race riots” that swept the country starting in 1919, Japanese American incarceration, and the later use of eminent domain for “urban removal.” The list is long.
I tell students in the English language arts class I co-teach:
I want you to think about wealth in this country. Who has it? Who doesn’t? A study by the Pew Research Center found that, on average, whites have 20 times the wealth of Blacks. Why is that? When there’s a question that puzzles you, you must investigate.
It’s a nontraditional curriculum for a language arts teacher, but I aim to teach students to connect the dots about big ideas that matter in their lives — and I use both history and literature to explore injustice.
This year, Tulsa was one of the instances we studied to probe the legacy of racism and wealth inequality. To stimulate students’ interest in resurrecting this silenced history, I created a mystery about the night of the invasion of Greenwood. I wrote roles for students based on the work of scholars like John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth that gave them each a slice of what happened the night of the “riot.” [See and download lesson “Burned Out of Homes and History: Unearthing the Silenced Voices of the Tulsa Race Massacre.”] There’s a jumble of events they learn: the arrest of Dick Rowland, a young African American shoe shiner, who allegedly raped Sarah Page, a white elevator operator (later, students learn that authorities dropped all charges); the newspaper article that incited whites and Blacks to gather at the courthouse; the assembly of armed Black WWI veterans to stop any lynching attempt — 26 Black men had been lynched in Oklahoma in the previous two decades; the deputizing and arming of whites, many of them KKK members; the incarceration of Blacks; the death of more than 300 African American men, women, and children; the burning and looting of homes and businesses.
The Zarrows, a white family, hid some African Americans in their store during the massacre.
Because not all white Tulsans shared the racial views of the white rioters, I included roles of a few whites and a recent immigrant from Mexico who provided refuge in the midst of death and chaos. I wanted students to understand that even in moments of violence, people stood up and reached across race and class borders to help.
Our students’ history textbook, History Alive!, is silent about the events of Tulsa, but more significantly, the book fails to help students search for patterns in our nation’s history of race-based dispossession and murders. Textbooks like this one help keep students ignorant about the roots of today’s vast wealth inequality between Blacks and whites. Instead, our students must imagine why African Americans lack wealth: Unwise spending? Bad luck?
A law office was set up following the massacre.
To inject hope into this “stealing home” unit, I created a role play about recent efforts in Oklahoma to obtain restitution for the death and damages suffered by Blacks in Greenwood. For me, teaching a “people’s history” is not merely offering students a fuller, more meaningful history than is included in textbooks. It also means that we engage students in a problem-posing curriculum that brings history to life through role play and simulation.
In 1997, the Oklahoma legislature authorized a commission to study and prepare an accounting of the “riot.” After three and a half years, the commission delivered its report.
Rather than just reading about the results of the proceedings and the more recent lawsuit initiated in 2003 on behalf of the survivors and their descendants, my co-teacher and I asked students to think about what “fair” compensation for the loss might mean. We put students in the position of commission members. We asked them to determine what, if any, reparations should be made to the riot survivors and their descendants.
Students made passionate arguments about what should happen. Aaron’s was typical: “We can’t change what happened in the past, but we can compensate the offspring for the loss of their property and inheritance. At least give the descendants scholarships.”
But Desiree demanded:
Who suffered the most? Which was worse — death or property loss? The entire community suffered. We should choose a mixture of compensations: There should be scholarships, as well as compensation for the survivors and their descendants. There should be a memorial day and a reburial of the mass graves.
Sarah feared that bringing up the past would open old wounds and reignite the racism that initiated the riots. Vince and others disagreed: “This is not just the past. Racial inequality is still a problem. Forgetting about what happened and burying it without dealing with it is why we still have problems today.”
And this was exactly what we wanted kids to see: The past is not dead. We didn’t want students to get lost in the history of Tulsa, though it needs to be remembered; we wanted them to recognize the historical patterns of stolen wealth in Black, brown, and poor communities. We wanted them to connect the current economic struggles of people of color by staying alert to these dynamics from the past. We wanted them to see that in many ways Tulsa and other Black communities are still burning, still being looted.
We wanted to bring the story home.
Tulsa Massacre survivors at the Supreme Court.
This article is part of the Zinn Education Project’s If We Knew Our History series.
Posted at: GOOD | Common Dreams | Huffington Post.
© 2013 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.
Photo Credits- “Running the negro out of Tulsa.” Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
- The Zarrow family store. Courtesy of the Greenwood Cultural Center.
- Law office set up following Tulsa Massacre. Courtesy of Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society.
- Survivors of the Tulsa Massacre at the Supreme Court. BeforeTheyDie.com — website for the documentary chronicling the Tulsa Massacre.
Linda Christensen has taught high school language arts in Portland, Oregon for almost 40 years. She is the author of Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching about Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word and Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-imagining the Language Arts Classroom, both published by Rethinking Schools.
