Remember these other massacres of Blacks, too

Editor’s note: This is the second of two columns on the Tulsa massacre.

By this date in 1921, the thick black smoke from arsonists on the ground and in the sky that hovered over Tulsa’s Greenwood district had cleared, revealing the smoldering ruins of a Black community destroyed by hate.

Today, the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre is seen in stunning clarity, its centennial surrounded by unprecedented media coverage — including a spate of documentaries, books, and newspaper, magazine and online articles.

But Tulsa wasn’t an aberration, an atrocity never seen before or since. It wasn’t the only Black community in the United States to be attacked by white supremacists. Still shrouded and buried deep in our history are other datelines of racist mob violence.

It was a violence rooted in the institution of slavery. John Locke, the 17th-century English political philosopher, wrote that when a man enslaves another man, he has entered a state of war with him. After emancipation and the Civil War, Black people sought to raise families, own land, build businesses, create safe and selfsustaining communities, and live in freedom and peace.

But Jim Crow, Black Codes and white mobs, especially in the South, continued to wage war on them.

During Reconstruction, on Easter Sunday in 1873 in Colfax,

La., armed Black men who’d gathered to defend a courthouse surrendered to a white paramilitary group known as the White League. Upon surrender, as many as 150 of the Black men were killed, some after being held prisoner for several hours.

In 1898, Wilmington, N.C., was a city with a Black majority, Black elected officials who served as part of a multiracial government and a prosperous Black middle class. On Nov. 10, white supremacists declared a “White Declaration

of Independence,” overthrew the local government and murdered 60 to 300 Black residents. David Zucchino, author of “Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup Of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy” calls it America’s first and only armed overthrow of a legally elected government.

In Slocum in East Texas, whites in July 1910 went on a rampage against Black residents, shooting them down, torching their homes and running them

out of town. No one knows how many were killed. It could be in the dozens. It could be 100 to 200. As is often the case in these massacres, bodies were buried in mass graves or thrown into rivers.

The year 1919 was so bloody with racial violence across the United States that it was called the Red Summer. That July in Longview, white people burned down homes and business of Black residents, killing one. In September in Elaine, Ark., a white mob attacked Black farmers attempting to unionize, killing up to 200 Black residents.

Before Tulsa’s centennial, the 1923 murders of 150 Black people in Rosewood, Fla., may have been the better known of the massacres because of John Singleton’s 1997 film “Rosewood.”

There were other massacres, along with more than a century of domestic terrorism — lynchings, and Black citizens being run out of towns, and Black citizens having their land confiscated. Animating all these attacks were white supremacy and the desire to suppress the rights and ambitions of Black citizens.

Beyond terrorizing Blacks, these were assaults on democracy, a decades-long campaign of pillage and plunder that, paired with the use of laws, limited the opportunities of African Americans to fully participate in the political system and create generational wealth.

This isn’t Black history that should be taught and known.

This is American history that should be taught and known. The only reason for not wanting to learn all your nation’s history, the ugly as well as the glorious, is that you don’t want to feel uncomfortable or be held accountable.

Our intelligence agencies warn that white nationalist groups are the greatest threat to the nation. In 1921, white supremacy destroyed Black Tulsa. In 2021, white supremacy threatens to destroy the United States. This time, as violence escalates and democracy is dismantled, Black people won’t be the only ones who suffer.

Whatever discomfort we feel learning unpleasant facts about our history pales to the pain we’ll feel in refusing to learn from that history.

John Locher / Associated Press People at a prayer wall outside Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greenwood remember the Tulsa Race Massacre. But other attacks on Blacks by white mobs remain forgotten.