Why we must remember the Tulsa Race Massacre
It started as a lynch mob, a seething mass of white people, mostly men, seeking to kill and likely mutilate a young Black man arrested for a crime he probably didn’t commit. It turned into something much worse, the wholesale destruction of a proud Black neighborhood, the slaughter of hundreds.
There’s a good chance you don’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre, which took place 100 years ago, May 31 through June 1, 1921. Widely considered to be the worst incident of racial violence in U.S. history, it was rarely taught in schools, and only whispered about in the city where it happened. Today, as we debate how history and current events are taught in school, and whether “critical race theory” should be banned, the Tulsa Race Massacre is a reminder that we have makeup homework to do in remembering the basics. At least we’re now discussing the massacre, not ignoring it.
“It was systematically erased from history,” says Stanley Nelson, co-director of the new documentary “Tulsa Burning,” which airs on the History Channel on May 30. “The Tulsa newspapers didn’t cover it at all. There were no trials, and there were no penalties. And so a lot of people don’t know about it. The United States is not good at confronting its painful past.”
This is slowly changing. In 2001, the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, sponsored by state Rep. Don Ross, recommended reparations for massacre victims — a call that was echoed just last week in Congress. In “Tulsa Burning” we witness the excavation of unmarked graves, a first step toward
dignified burial. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission is planning commemorative events throughout the weekend.
The massacre also has permeated pop culture. The first episode of the HBO series “Watchmen,” which premiered in 2019, starts with a brutal reenactment of the massacre. In 2020, the horror series “Lovecraft Country,” always wise to the ways of institutionalized racism, sent its characters back in time, from the ’50s to 1921, where they, too, witness the tragic mayhem.
“It’s been pretty hard to ignore lately, especially since 2019 when ‘The Watchman’ came out and they did their opening sequence in Tulsa,” says Tim Madigan, author of the book “The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.” Originally published in 2001, when, he says, “it was promptly ignored,” the book, a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, was recently republished with a new afterword.
Madigan also points to the police killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day last year, and its proximity to the date of the massacre. “When George Floyd’s murder happened it just seemed like Tulsa became kind of ground zero for racial reckoning,” Madigan says. There was also Donald Trump’s dog whistle campaign rally in Tulsa last Juneteenth, a welcome call to white supremacists, which drew outrage for its brazen insensitivity.
So what exactly happened 100 years ago?
The Greenwood district of Tulsa was a crown jewel of Black culture, not just for the city but also for the country. It had movie theaters, hotels, banks, nightclubs and other thriving businesses.
It was a source of great pride for the Black community, a city within a city on the north side of the railroad tracks.
“One of the things that was so amazing about Greenwood was that because there were businesses, stores, banks, lawyers and doctors, the money stayed inside the community,” Nelson says. “The dollar turned over and over in the community itself.” White Tulsa noticed this. White Tulsa didn’t like this, or the pride it represented.
Of course, 1921 wasn’t actually the most infamous year for race massacres. That would be 1919, known for what has since been labeled Red Summer.
From Chicago to Washington, D.C., to Elaine, Ark., white mobs turned against residents, killing hundreds. With the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan following the 1915 release of the blockbuster Klan paean “The Birth of a Nation,” lynchings were on the rise. Meanwhile, Black soldiers were returning home from World War I, expecting to be treated with some respect. Instead, whites scorned them for not knowing their place. Houston had its own racial incident in 1917, when the Black soldiers of Camp Logan, upon hearing reports of an angry white mob, mutinied after growing tired of abuse at the hands of the Houston Police Department.
The Tulsa Race Massacre was set in motion as so many lynch mobs have been throughout history, with a white woman’s accusations against a Black man. On May 30, a Black teen named Dick Rowland entered an elevator operated by a white teen named Sarah Page. The two knew each other. By the time the elevator ride was finished, Page was screaming about assault. Police detained Rowland the following morning and whisked him away to jail. That day, the Tulsa Tribune, published by the sensationalist
racist Richard Lloyd Jones, ran a story with a headline that read more like a command: “Nab Negro For Attacking girl In an Elevator.”
With that, the armed white mob assembled outside the jail. It wanted blood. Word spread to the men of Greenwood, who weren’t about to sit back and see one of their own lynched. Several Black men marched over to the jail, wielding their own guns. The Black community was not passive in the face of bloodshed. A member of the white mob tried to forcibly disarm one of the Black men. A shot rang out in the scuffle. The white man fell dead.
From there, the violence didn’t stop until Greenwood was burned to the ground. The white attackers launched a militarized attack, including an aerial assault from planes flying overhead. The white rioters, many of them deputized and armed by local police, indiscriminately shot and killed Black people. As a recent New York Times story reported, “The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 killed hundreds of residents, burned more than 1,250 homes, and erased years of Black success.”
The Tulsa Race Massacre is a vital chapter of American history, which, like many such chapters, reminds us of the atrocities racism can lead people to commit. It’s also the kind of incident that could become harder to teach as Republican-led legislatures, including here in Texas, debate banning “critical race theory,” an academic movement to examine the systemic role of race and racism in our society.
“Do you want our Texas kids to be taught that the system of government in Texas, in the United States, is nothing but a cover-up for white supremacy?” asked state Rep. Steve Toth, who sponsored House Bill 3979, in early May. “Do you want them to be taught a souped-up version of Marxism?”
Marxism, it should be needless to say, is concerned largely with class, not the study of systemic racism.
Teachers say the bills could stifle the kind of open-ended, hard discussions their students need to have. Supporters of the bill say that it encourages the teaching of multiple perspectives through training for teaching civics.
“We want to do our part to preserve the system and yes to talk about our history, warts and all,” said state Sen. Bryan
Hughes, R-Mineola, on the Senate floor Friday. “But present it truly and accurately, especially those founding principles, which have made Americans so special.”
Late Friday, it first appeared the bill died in the House when a procedural violation was raised over competing versions of the bill. The House version was less restrictive, and would require the State Board of Education to develop standards that would have students learn about key figures in our history, including the Founding Fathers and others, including Ona Judge, who escaped enslavement in George Washington’s household, Sally Hemings, and Frederick Douglass. The bill was then revived when the Senate struck its changes to the House bill.
Meanwhile, regardless of how hard legislators end up working to limit debate about our history, we still have the words and wisdom of Viola Fletcher. At 107, she is the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre. She’s one of three lead plaintiffs in a reparations lawsuit filed last year against the city of Tulsa, Tulsa County, the state of Oklahoma and the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce.
As she recently told a House Judiciary subcommittee, “I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home. I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams.”
In short, she remembers. It seems fair that we should, too.