Nowhere is the racial tension that divides much of America more apparent than in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the legacy of a 1921 race riot and fire, that destroyed a prosperous section of the city known as Black Wall St., dominates the culture even today.
The Tulsa Race Massacre officially left at least thirty people dead, but that number is based on reports that were deliberately meant to minimize and erase the events of June 1, 1921 from public memory. Subsequent official investigations put the actual death toll as high as 300. Almost all the victims were Black.
Cover Photo: Vernon A.M.E. Church, Tulsa, OK
Tulsa is a small mid-western city, a few hours from the Texas border. It is impossible to walk or drive the streets of the compact downtown without seeing signs of the racial violence that burned most of the Greenwood section to the ground 100 years ago.
Street signs commemorate the neighborhood, plaques mounted into sidewalks mark the spots where successful Black owned businesses once stood, two churches stand as permanent memorials to the violence, there is a public park dedicated to reflection, street murals, and a main street re-named Reconciliation Way.
A century after the riot, the Greenwood section is still rebuilding. It is the location of a ballpark and the site of new construction designed to make downtown Tulsa a modern, walkable urban destination. Tulsa has all the signs of an emerging and successful mid-sized city.
What happened?
According to most available reports, on May 30, 1921, a young Black man named Dick Rowland walked into an elevator in a downtown Tulsa office building. Inside, a young white woman was working as an elevator operator. When Rowland stepped in she screamed and Rowland ran. No one saw what happened, but the next morning Rowland was arrested as police investigated the incident as a possible sexual assault.
Rowland was held in the local courthouse and an angry white mob gathered outside demanding that he be turned over to them for street justice. The police refused and protected Rowland on the top floor of the building. A group of Black men from the Greenwood section also arrived at the courthouse and offered to help protect Rowland, but the police sent them away.
Tulsa was a prosperous, but segregated city and after a second confrontation between Blacks and whites at the courthouse, rumors began to spread about a Black insurrection in Greenwood. White Tulsans referred to Greenwood as Little Africa.
On May 31, and the early morning of June 1, 1921, thousands of white Tulsans poured into Greenwood looting and burning homes and businesses. At one point, it is reported, incendiary devices were dropped on the neighborhood from the air.
More than 1,200 homes were burned. Businesses were lost and churches were destroyed. Firefighters claimed the mob prevented them from putting any of the fires out. The National Guard was called in by the governor, but by the time those forces arrived, the riot had come to an end. By June 2, up to 8,000 Black Tulsa residents had been forced to re-locate to a refugee camp at a local fairgrounds.
Charges were dropped against Dick Rowland and according to the history of the event, he left Tulsa and never returned. There was a concerted effort by local leaders, businesspeople and even the newspaper to cover up the massacre and that's why many Americans have never heard of the event - though it is one of the worst instances of racial violence in the nation's history.
Above: A monument to the events of 1921 at John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park. A Black Lives Matter mural in the parking lot of the Vernon A.M.E. Church.
Two churches stand in Greenwood as direct links to the violence of 1921.
The Mt. Zion Baptist Church had opened just two months before the riot. During the height of the violence whites suspected the church was being used to hide weapons, so it was burned to the ground. The basement was still usable and that's where the congregation met for several years after the fire. The existing church was re-opened in the 1950s.
A few blocks away, the Vernon A.M.E. Church was under construction at the time of the violence. Although the fires did extensive damage to the foundation of the church, it too was salvaged and the construction project was finished, and the church opened, in 1928.
In the racially charged summer of 2020, former President Donald Trump drew new national attention to the history of the race massacre, when he scheduled his first indoor campaign rally of the year in Tulsa in June. The decision was seen as insensitive as much of the country was experiencing street protests prompted by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis the month before. For reasons unrelated to race relations, the rally was seen as a disaster for the Trump campaign and a pre-cursor of the defeat that was to come in the fall.
The memory of 1921 was brought back to the forefront of Oklahoma politics in January of this year(nearly 100 years later) during congressional debate over the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
U.S. Senator James Lankford(R) of Oklahoma, was one of several Republican lawmakers who initially intended to object to the election outcome in several states. Critics noted that when you considered the jurisdictions where Republicans were attempting to challenge the vote, most were predominantly Black. The argument followed that what Republicans were really trying to do was disenfranchise Black voters in a targeted way. President Trump and his supporters wanted all white votes to be counted, but wanted votes in Black areas of U.S. cities thrown out.
After a riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Lankford withdrew his objections and later apologized to his constituents, especially those in north Tulsa. In a letter released publicly, he said he did not fully realize many Black voters saw his objections as a "direct attack" on their right to vote. He is up for re-election in 2022.
Tulsa has struggled with the legacy of the race massacre through much of the last 100 years. Efforts to cover it up in school history classes and the news media have failed. Yet the underlying issue of race relations is still evident in Tulsa and throughout the United States today.
There have been legislative debates over whether to mandate education about the race riot in Oklahoma schools. The legislature voted "no," because it was argued such a mandate was un-necessary. Last fall, there was debate in Tulsa over whether to remove a Black Live Matters mural from one of Tulsa's main streets. It was.
One lesson from the Tulsa race riot of 1921 may be, in the end, the truth wins out. Such an atrocity cannot be forgotten in the minds of people who lived through it or those who follow. These events in history cannot be permanently scrubbed no matter how hard people in power may try. This is especially important to understand in an era dominated by news media silos that appeal to audiences based on what they are pre-disposed to believe rather than objective facts.
The only way to heal is to confront the truth directly so that everyone is operating from a shared set of facts and can make decisions about moving forward that correct injustice.
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© Dean Pagani 2021
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© Dean Pagani 2021