Tulsa’s prayers, and past scars, softened reaction to police shooting

The New York Times

TULSA, Okla. — White rioters poured into the streets, burning and looting homes, businesses and churches in a black neighborhood and leaving this city deeply traumatized. That was 1921.

Two weeks ago, not far from where those haunting events took place, the streets of Tulsa were calm after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black motorist. The video of the shooting angered many Tulsa residents, but the subdued reaction was markedly different from the violent clashes that took place in Charlotte, N.C., in recent days, after the police killed a man there.

Tulsa quickly released videos showing the facts. But some here trace part of the reason for Tulsa’s emphasis on prayer, and not protest, in recent days to the lingering scars of the 1921 riot, which is regarded as one of the deadliest race riots in the country’s history and still lingers in Tulsa’s consciousness.

It had been a white mob, on the verge of a lynching, that surged through a black neighborhood, killing between 150 and 300 people, most of them black.

“Having experienced the race riot, we’re not too quick to turn to violence,” said the Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, who leads All Souls Unitarian Church and is white. “There’s still an element of generational trauma in the culture here.”

More modern-day reasons may also help explain what unfolded in Tulsa, where the Tulsa World featured a photograph on Friday that showed a black protester joyously raising the hands of a white police officer and a black officer. This was a day after prosecutors announced the filing of criminal charges against the police officer who shot the motorist, Terence Crutcher, 40.

City and police officials decided to do something unexpected.

The afternoon of Sept. 18, two days after the shooting but before the videos were publicly released, police officials showed the videos first to Crutcher’s relatives and then to more than 50 black leaders, pastors and officials.

At that viewing of the video, inside a police building, some black leaders vented their anger and frustration toward the white Tulsa police chief, Chuck Jordan, who was in attendance with the mayor, Dewey Bartlett Jr., who is also white. But that event helped set a tone of transparency, communication and trust, residents say.