We Know About the Tulsa Race Massacre.
But what have we learned?
This question was posed by Oklahoma Senator James Lankford to the U.S. Senate, on May 25th, 2016. Lankford was anticipating this year’s Centennial anniversary of this senseless massacre, which decimated Greenwood, the African-American district of Tulsa. “And in five years the entire country will pause and will look at Oklahoma and will ask a very good question: ‘What’s changed…what have we learned in 100 years?’”
It’s a provocative question to ask both our leaders and ourselves, particularly when some Americans are only now wrapping their heads around the brutal and indiscriminate slaughter of an entire community, once known as The Black Wall Street.
For the record, the Tulsa Race Massacre wasn’t just one of the worst, but in fact was “the deadliest outbreak of white terrorist violence against a black community in American history.” That’s Professor Karlos Hill categorizing the violence, in his foreword to Randy Krehbiel’s 2019 journalism history, Tulsa 1921; Reporting a Massacre. Krehbiel is a veteran reporter for the Tulsa World. I recommend his book to anyone wanting a deep dive into the Massacre, starting in the 1800s with the first white settlements of the territory.
Maybe you’ve seen the premiere episode of the HBO sci-fi series Watchman. The horrific, but mostly accurate, opening depicts events of the Tulsa Race Massacre. “It’s estimated that more than three hundred, mostly blacks, died. The white mob looted and then set ablaze practically every home and business in the Greenwood District. In less than 24 hours, the thirty-five square blocks that was Greenwood… lay in ruin.” Krehbiel writes that on the morning of June 1, six airplanes circled overhead. “Authorities say the planes were used strictly for reconnaissance, but others say the crafts attacked with guns and bombs.” White citizens deliberately fire-bombing fellow citizens on the other side of the tracks? Despite my B.A.in Amercian Studies, this never appeared in a textbook.
I first learned about the Massacre on a brief visit to Tulsa 9 years ago. I’m neither a journalist, nor a historian. I’m a retired, 69-year old, white man from Lawrence, Kansas who then wanted to understand just how the Tulsa Race Massacre happened and why it was buried for so long. So I drove back to Tulsa in January, 2020.
The first thing I learned … there’s no substitute for a personal visit to the Greenwood District. The neighborhood is proud of its past success, survival, and refuses to be defined by the Massacre. That’s the sentiment of the vast majority of people I spoke to, including historians, curators, business leaders, even people on the street I talked to during Tulsa’s MLK day parade.
Secondly…I found the city of Tulsa welcoming, culturally vibrant, and rich with Americana everywhere I looked and listened: the Tulsa Sound in Cain’s Ballroom among other clubs, U.S. Route 66 landmarks, parks, world-class art, and a center honoring folk legend Woody Guthrie. In fact, it was unsettling to walk the streets of Greenwood, where hundreds of Black people were murdered a century ago, while admiring Tulsa’s Art Deco skyline in the distance.
So if you’ll be visiting Tulsa and Greenwood anytime soon knowing some history and context is helpful.
Oklahoma’s roots lie in the deep south. After the Civil War, the Oklahoma Territory was advertised as a safe haven for Black people wanting to escape the Jim Crow south. Here, Black families could remain intact, establish communities and, they expected, fullfill their American dream, according to Michelle Adcock Place, Executive Director of the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum.
“For wealthy southern whites, you had second, third, and fouth sons who were not in-line to inherit the family plantations. They migrated into Oklahoma as risk-takers hoping to prove something to their families back home.”
Oklahoma became a state in 1907. The first law, Senate Bill One, was Jim Crow throughout, stipulating that every coach whether rail, car, or trolley, had to provide separate coaches or compartments for white and “negro” passengers.
Tulsa was once known as “The Oil Capital of the World.” Oil strikes just west of the city in 1901 and 1905 helped populate the town with both investors and laborers. Wealth and work paved the way for the city’s stunning architecture, culture, parks, and museums. Fast money from the wells also fueled a huge wave of civic pride, patriotism and xenophobia. A caste system, and the need for scapegoats, was directed at Native Americans, Blacks and union members. Vigilante groups administered whippings to whites for violating “moral” codes or simply for associating with Black people, Mexicans, Indigenous People or Jews.
Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” wasn’t an isolated instance of African American neighborhood success. “Black people had been doing that forever,” says Vanessa AdamsHarris, Outreach Coordinator for the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation in Tulsa. “Who do you think ran the plantations?” In fact, moving into the 1900s there were many towns with a thriving African-American culture and successful businesses: the Hayti Community in Durham, North Carolina; Jackson Ward in Richmond, Virginia; The Fourth Avenue District in Birmingham, Alabama; and even Boley, Oklahoma, for a short time the largest predominantly black town in the United States.
Originally named by Booker T. Washington as “the Negro Wall Street,” the economic strength of the Greenwood commercial district was the result of the Oklahoma’s extreme Jim Crow laws, prohibiting African-Americans from making purchases in predominatly white areas. Black citizens had no choice but to buy and sell locally. “Greenwood was alive with an enterprising spirit of commerce remarkable given black American’s limited access to capital and markets,” writes Krehbiel.
But from the wealthy, white side of the tracks, Krehbiel notes that “Greenwood looked like a sordid nest of sin and disease.” In early May 1921, just weeks before the Massacre, a federal narcotics officer declared Tulsa overrun with narcotic peddlers. Other reports claimed, “gambling, bootlegging and prostitution were very much in evidence” and “there were low brothels where low whites mixed with low blacks.”
The Tulsa Race Massacre was not an isolated case. In 1919, more than two dozen major race-based disturbances, labeled “race riots,” flared across America during the “Red Summer.” According to Oklahoma historian Hannibal Johnson, “the physical intimidation of racial oppression in the United States at that time is almost unfathomable today.”
Race riots? In the past, some have referred to the Tulsa Massacre and others like it as a “race riots.” Adams Harris wonders why.
“Isn’t a riot supposed to mean an uprising against a political power structure? So how are people in an oppressed condition of segregation… how are they the power system you are uprising against? It’s code. The word riot, coupled with race, is a manifestation of white’s violence against brown and Black people, under a system created by whites to uphold whiteness.”
And here’s the deeper imprint, writes journalist Arthur Garrison in the Daily Call. “Race riots,” like those in Tulsa and the Rosewood [Florida] massacre of 1923, “not only took black lives and wiped whole black neighborhoods off the face of the earth, they ended black economic wealth that could be passed to subsequent generations.”
The Massacre began with a rumor. A Black shoeshiner, Dick Rowland, boarded an elevator operated by a white woman, Sarah Page, in a downtown office building. For unknown reasons the elevator stopped suddenly. Sarah screamed. Rowland fled, but was eventually arrested and jailed on assault charges. Fearing a mob lynching, a group of armed Greenwood citizens confronted of group of armed white Tulsans at the Tulsa jail. Shots were fired. White and Black men were killed. The next morning 3,000 all white, mostly men, invaded the Greenwood District.
The violence that followed is well documented, but what became of Rowland and Page is not. Page declined to prosecute. Four months later, the charges against Rowland were dropped. Rowland reportedly moved to Kansas City soon after his release.
Greenwood was re-built after the massacre. “In spite of building code restrictions that were put in place…the Greenwood community actually came back better than it had been,” said Place.
“By the end of 1921, Greenwood residents had rebuilt more than 800 structures in the neighborhood. By June 1922, virtually all of the area’s homes had been replaced. And in 1925, the National Negro Business League held its annual conference in Tulsa, indicating that Black Wall Street’s stature as an economic force had been restored,” writes journalist Victor Luckerson. Adams Harris insists the rebuilding of the Greenwood district is what allowed the city of Tulsa to survive.
“You can’t be known as the city that killed its Black people. The fear of this happening again might have been what caused the city’s collective amnesia.”
The story of the Tulsa Race Massacre is ongoing. If Senator James Lankford wonders “what’s changed in the past 100 years,” he could consider some progress. In February, 2020, the Oklahoma Department of Education added the Tulsa Race Massacre to its required curriculum for students from elementary through high school. Previously, some Oklahoma schools included the history of the Massacre, while others left it out.
In June 2021, a research team begins exhumation of what is believed to be the remains of people killed in the Massacre. Eyewitness accounts tell of Black bodies carted out of Greenwood in the days after the Massacre. Last fall, researchers found twelve badly decomposed coffins in a trench in Oaklawn Cemetery’s Black paupers’ field. It’s reported that an area large enough to contain 30 sets of remains will be excavated this summer.
On May 19, 2021 two of the last known survivors of the Massacre testified before a U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee discussing the Massacre’s legacy and the possiblity of compensation or reparations for survivors and dependents.
Viola Fletcher, 107, now living in neighboring Bartlesville, told lawmakers, she “can still smell the smoke” and “hear the screams” from the night her family fled Tulsa and the white mob. “I have lived through the massacre every day…I will never forget.”
Tulsan Leslie Randle, age 106, testified virtually. “By the Grace of God, I am still here. I have survived to tell this story. I believe I am still here to share it with you. Please give me, my family and my community some justice.”
Another survivor was Mary E. Jones Parrish, who died in 1972 at age 80. She wrote and self-published her memoir, Events of the Massacre, documenting her escape from the white mob and her eventual return to Tulsa. Her great grand-daughter, Anneliese M. Bruner has republished the memoir under the title “The Nation Must Awake.”
In an NPR interview, Bruner spoke to reporter Debbie Elliot about the very long-term impact of the Massacre.
“There are people whose psyche is still affected generationally; trauma after trauma after trauma just continues to build on itself. And none of it gets resolved if you’re in a system that sometimes has the unequal application of law and/or opportunity.”
“Bruner sees a toxic line from Tulsa to violence against Black people today, and says the same questions apply,” reported Elliot.
“Who’s going to be held accountable?” Bruner asks. “Are reparations going to be made? Is there going to be any official admission of responsibility?”
So the queston posed by Senator James Lankford at the beginning of this piece should be modified. “What hasn’t changed in the past 100 years. What work remains to be done?”
