Rally stirs embers of Tulsa’s fiery past
In the real world, 74-year-old Donald Shaw is walking on the empty, parched grass slope by Tulsa’s noisy crosstown expressway. He’s on the other side of the city’s historical white-black dividing line from where US President Donald Trump will hold a rally today with his overwhelmingly white supporters.
But Shaw can conjure stories and images of so much more — the once-thriving black community that stood on this same ground, destroyed nearly a century ago by white violence and ensuing decades of repression.
“Just imagine, in your mind, all these homes,” Shaw said, remembering the black-built, blackowned houses and churches that covered dozens of blocks where he’s walking, the site of Tulsa’s
1921 race massacre. “Just picture that. Hotels, movie theatre, roller rink,” said Shaw, a retired man who spends his mornings sitting in the shade of an engraved stone memorial to the Home Style Caf, AS Newkirk photography studio, and literally hundreds of other African American-owned bakeries, barber shops, attorney offices and businesses razed in the massacre.
Burned bricks and a fragment of a church basement are about all that survive today of the more than
30-block historically black district. On May 31 and June 1 in 1921, white residents and civil society leaders looted and burned Tulsa’s black Greenwood district to the ground, and used planes to drop bombs on it. The attackers killed about 300 black Tulsans, and forced survivors into internment camps overseen by National Guard members.
Historians say the trouble began after a Tulsa newspaper drummed up a furore over a black man who allegedly stepped on a white girl’s foot. When black Tulsans showed up with guns to prevent the man’s lynching, white Tulsa responded with overwhelming force. A grand jury investigation at the time concluded, without evidence, that unidentified agitators had given Tulsa’s African Americans both their firearms and what was described as their mistaken belief “in equal rights, social equality and their ability to demand the same”.
“Everything they had downtown,” Shaw said of the whiteowned business district where Trump will rally, “we had here.”
Trump’s choice to resume his giant rallies in Oklahoma, a loyal Republican state, and in Tulsa, an oil centre, has brought a surge of national interest in the Greenwood district once called Tulsa’s “Negro Wall Street”. The rally at the 19,000-seat BOK Center will be Trump’s first since the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the US by late March.
Trump’s initial plan to hold the rally yesterday — Juneteenth — also sparked interest in the turbulent racial legacy here, although he later pushed back the rally date to today. So has a spring of nationwide street protests over police killings of George Floyd and other black Americans.
Despite the Oklahoma heat, visitors of all races drive up to the site of the destroyed black community. They take photos of themselves in front of the inscribed memorials to what’s now called Black Wall Street. They raise a defiant fist in the air for other photos in front of a mural to Black Wall Street painted on the side of the overpass.
For Shawn-Du Stackhouse, a barber from the Washington DC area and one of those visiting the Tulsa massacre memorials, the proof that cellphone videos provide of killings of African Americans today somehow make the killings of the past, like Tulsa’s, more real as well.
For black Americans, the cellphone videos “show what they have already known”, Stackhouse said. “It gives more confidence” to speak up about all the killings, past and present, he said.
The Tulsa rampage was part of a surge of white attacks on black communities — from Washington DC to Chicago to the Pacific Northwest — at the time, said Scott Ellsworth, a historian who has worked for decades to bring the Tulsa massacre to light. The Ku Klux Klan was surging as well, putting many of its members in public office and other influential positions.
In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson gave a White House screening and praise to The Birth of a Nation, a tremendously influential and viciously racist film on the South.
Today, opponents say Trump’s statements and actions embolden white supremacist sentiment in the country. That includes Trump’s opposition to renaming military bases named after Confederate Civil War figures, and his emphasis on a hard-line “law and order” response to recent protests. Trump denies any racism, and said his administration has been beneficial to African American citizens.
After generations of determined public silence on the massacre — long referred to by white Tulsans dismissively as a race “riot” — black and white Tulsans increasingly are trying to tell the story of Black Wall Street, including its fiery, deadly end.
Teaching about the massacre is being added to state and city school standards, so that this fall third graders will learn about it. Even preschoolers in some districts are being told about Black Wall Street — not about how it ended, but what it was, said Danielle Neves, deputy chief of academics for Tulsa public schools.
“Four-year-olds can understand that people like them once owned movie theatres and hotels and . . . had a thriving community,” Neves said.
Four-year-olds can understand that people like them once owned movie theatres and hotels and . . . had a thriving community.