PUTTING TULSA IN CONTEXT

All of a sudden, the media is talking about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre! But don't count on them to give you the whole story. No, that will never be televised. At any rate, let us try our best to put the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in historical context.

Back in the early 1980s, a young college coed sat in class only half listening until, that is, the history prof began saying things she knew were simply not true. Repeatedly, she challenged his assertions about the mass killings and carnage that ravaged the Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa in 1921.

Eventually, the instructor said, “Why are you so certain none of this happened?” She shot back, “How could it? I never heard any of this before, and I was born and raised in Tulsa!” Needless to say, when this white student went home and confronted her parents and grandparents, they bowed their heads in shame, and admitted it was true. What exactly was it that they kept from her?

The Greenwood section of the capital city of Oklahoma, Tulsa, was the most prosperous Black district not just in the state, but in the nation, that is, until May 31, 1921. The Tulsa Race Massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked the Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Numerous eyewitnesses described airplanes carrying white assailants, who fired rifles and dropped firebombs on buildings, homes, and fleeing families. The attack destroyed more than 35 square blocks. 300 people were killed, 10,000 African Americans were left homeless, and property damage amounted to more than $32 million in today’s dollars. Afterwards 6,000 Black residents were interned in large facilities, many of them for days on end.

The Tulsa Race Massacre was omitted from local, state, and national histories and only in recent years is it slowly beginning to come to light. Despite the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission’s 2001 recommendations for specific reparations, nothing at all has been done to compensate the survivors or their descendants.

The Tulsa Race Massacre may have been the single worst incident of racial violence in the United States history. But it was only one of many. "'Leave now, or die!' Those words-or ones just as ominous-have echoed through the past hundred years of American history, heralding . . . a wave of racial cleansing that wiped out or drove away black populations from counties across the nation. . . These expulsions, always swift and often violent, were extraordinarily widespread in the period between Reconstruction and the Depression era. . . (Whites) burned and killed indiscriminately, sweeping entire counties clear of Blacks to make them racially 'pure.' Many of these counties remain virtually all-white to this day." Thus, writes Elliot Jaspin in "Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America."

All of this gives the lie to the frequently repeated lament, often with crocodile tears, “Why don’t African Americans simply do like others and form successful businesses?” Because whenever they did, they were destroyed, collectively, as in Tulsa, or individually, as many a lynch victim, who was guilty of no other crime than being a successful businessman.

Oklahoma was on the frontier, that is, at the very limit of the European expansion into North America, on the “front tier” of white settlements. Lying between the Native American and white regions, here segregation and the absolute primacy of whites was not enforced. However, as the extent of European settlement pushed westward, the frontier was absorbed and white supremacy therein enforced by law. Therefore, the Greenwood community of Tulsa could not stand. It could not stand physically, and it could not stand psychologically, that is, in the psyche, in the consciousness of white America, and so it was obliterated.

Look at how Tulsa was portrayed in the 1949 Hollywood motion picture, simply titled, TULSA. It begins with a documentary-like review of Tulsa’s history, with no mention of the massacre 30 years before. The movie revolves around the machinations of oilmen and cattle barons over the future of the state. The main characters are all white, including a white actress playing the part of a woman with Native American and white heritage. The Native Americans are shown as surly, drunken fools who lucked up and became rich because oil was discovered on their land. As for African Americans, they are the servants.

Six years earlier, in 1943, the landmark musical OKLAHOMA opened in New York, ushering in an entirely new format for the Broadway musical. Though set in 1906, years before the Tulsa Race Massacre, look at the plot. It concerns the romance of a cowhand and a maiden, endangered by a villainous outsider, Jud Fry. Note the name "Fry." Though never stated explicitly, it is implied that he could me a person of mixed race passing as white. At the climax, he assaults the girl and is killed by the hero. A kangaroo court is quickly assembled and the hero is swiftly pronounced "Not Guilty." Also note, the film and the play both end in a fiery climax, as if the story of Greenwood, though sublimated, still bursts forth in distorted, conscience-easing, storybook form.

And so, what is the lesson of the tale, the story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and its suppression and its all of a sudden “rediscovery?” There are many. Though we are happy that the media has had a bit of a “come to Jesus” moment, do not take their telling as the whole truth and nothing but. We have to tell our story. And we have to know that we were great in the past, we are great now, and we will be even greater still, as long as we stick together. Your take?