WHO WAS BC FRANKLIN?
The man who fought for justice and whose personal account only recently resurfaced
An eyewitness account of the massacre in Tulsa was discovered in 2015 and donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and Culture. The ten-page manuscript – written by Buck Colbert Franklin, an attorney in Tulsa at the time of the unrest – shed new light on the terrible events of 1921.
BC Franklin was born in the Chickasaw Nation, a Native American territory before it became part of Oklahoma, and went on to become a lawyer. Having experienced racial prejudice within the American judicial system early in his career, he committed himself to defending his fellow African Americans in Oklahoma. After surviving the massacre in 1921 he represented the survivors when the city council attempted to block Black residents from rebuilding the Greenwood district.
The case went to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, where Franklin won.
He began to write an autobiography, but died in 1960 before it was published. His son John Hope Franklin, a prominent civil rights advocate who was involved in the Brown versus Board of Education case, had the book published posthumously.
However, his father’s ten-page account of the massacre did not surface until after John had also passed, in 2009. Within it BC Franklin describes the growing anger and violence of the day, and confirms the use of turpentine balls dropped from the air to set buildings on fire. It’s a powerful firsthand account by a gifted writer of a truly harrowing event in which BC Franklin manages to convey the heroism and defiant spirit of the community that he committed himself to serving.