We’ve All Heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
But what have we learned?
This question was posed by Oklahoma Senator James Lankford on the U.S. Senate floor on May 25th, 2016. Lankford was anticipating the 2021 Centennial anniversary of this senseless massacre, where Greenwood, the African-American district of Tulsa, was decimated. “And in five years the entire country will pause and will look at Oklahoma and will ask a very good question: ‘What has changed in 100 years?’”
For the record, the Tulsa Race Massacre wasn’t one of the worst, but in fact “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 causes, catalysts, and conclusions of this unspeakable trauma.
Maybe you’ve seen the premiere episode of the HBO science fiction series Watchman. The horrific, but mostly accurate, opening depicts the 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.” In his chronology, Krehbiel writes that on the morning of June 1, six airplanes circle overhead. “Authorities say the planes were used striclty for reconnaissance, but others say the craft attacked with guns and bombs.”
I first heard about the Massacre on a brief trip to Tulsa 8 years ago. Late last year, I thought it was time for a closer look. I’m neither a journalist, nor a historian. I’m a retired, 68-year old, white man from neighboring Lawrence, Kansas who wanted to learn about, certainly, and try to understand how the Tulsa Race Massacre could ever happen.
The first thing I learned … there’s no substitute for a personal visit to the neighborhood and the city. This included face-to-face conversations with historians, curators, business leaders, even random people I interviewed last January during Tulsa’s MLK day parade.
The second lesson…Tulsa is not defined by the Massacre itself. It’s diverse, welcoming, culturally vibrant, and rich with Americana everywhere you look and listen: the Tulsa Sound in Cain’s Ballroom, Oral Roberts University, U.S. Route 66, and a museum/library/cultural center dedicated to folk legend Woody Guthrie all come immediately to mind. But if you’re planning to visit Tulsa, and the Greenwood neighborhood (still in existence), some history and context will be helpful. Here’s what I found most useful, and often suprising.
Oklahoma’s roots lie in the deep south. After the Civil War, the Oklahoma Territoty was advertised as a safe haven for blacks wanting to escape the Jim Crow south. Here black families could stay together for the first time in their American history, establish communities and, they thought, follow 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.” Then came the oil. Two huge strikes near Tulsa, in 1901 and 1905.
The city isn’t that old. It wasn’t until 1907 that Oklahoma achieved statehood. Tulsa’s census that year counted 6,611 whites, 638 Negroes and 46 Indians. The oil strikes just west of the city helped populate the town with both investors and laborers. Once known as “The Oil Capital of the World,” wealth and work paved the way for the city’s stunning architecture, culture, parks and museums. Quick wealth also fueled a huge wave of civic pride, patriotism and xenophobia. Natural enemies emerged in union organizers, Native Americans, and former black slaves. Vigilante groups administered whippings to whites for just associating with African Americans, Mexicans, Indians or Jews, or violating other “moral” codes.
Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” wasn’t an isolated instance of African-American neighborhood success. “Black people had been doing that forever,” says Vanessa Adams-Harris, Outreach Coordinator for the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation in Tulsa. “Who do you think ran the plantations?” In fact, moving into the 1900’s 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 came from the commitment NOT to trade with white business,” according to Krehbiel. Yet there were no banks or financial institutions. Krehbiel writes that “Black Main Street of America” might have been a more accurate description. “Greenwood was alive with an enterprising spirit of commerce remarkable given black American’s limited access to capital and markets.”
From the wealthy white side of the tracks, “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.”
Neither was the Tulsa Race Massacre an isolated case. In 1919, more than two dozen major race-based disturbances, labeled “race riots,” flared across America.” 1919 has been called 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? Some TV journalists have referred to the Tulsa Massacre, and others like it, as a race riots.
“Wait a minute,” cautions Adams-Harris. “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, she says. 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 begins with a rumor. A black shoeshine, Dick Rowland, boards an elevator operated by a white woman, Sarah Page, in a downtown office building. Sarah is heard screaming. Rowland flees, but is eventually found and jailed on assault charges. A group of Greenwood citizens gathers at the Tulsa jail. They fear a lynching. A confrontation ensues. Shots are fired. Apparently, no one is injured. But street fighting that begins in white downtown Tulsa spreads to Greenwood early the following morning with the literal invasion of 3,000 whites. Charges against Rowland are dropped four months later. But rumors persist to this day. Some claim Rowland and Page were romantically involved but there’s no record of whatever happened to either of them.
Greenwood 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,” says 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 by 1925, the National Negro Business League was holding 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 allowed the city of Tulsa to survive.
“Black people went back to work for the very people who destroyed their town. You can’t be known as the city that killed it’s black people. There’s some level of humanity there.” But at a price, she adds. “The fear of this happening again might have been what caused the city’s collective amnesia.”
The story is unfinished. Some early hope was quickly smashed. In January, 1926 the Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision to deny Greenwood property owners a path to recover damages. Some changes are being made. This past February the Oklahoma Department of Education added the Massacre to its required curriculum for students from elementary through high school. In the past, some schools taught it, others didn’t.
Some hope remains. Eye witness accounts tell of black bodies being carted out of Greenwood on the days after the Massacre. There are reports of bodies dumped in the Arkansas river, in coal pits or elsewhere. Thirteen were reported buried at Oaklawn Cemetery. In the fall, 2018, Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum announced the city would re-open the search for group burial sites in that cemetery with new evidence to suggest at least two sites might exist. The city has agreed to “limited excavations” for confirmation. But that effort is on-hold because of COVID-19 restrictions.
“We don’t know who left, never to return. We know some who perished, but we have no idea who left and who was dumped in a mass grave. The point is not that we find ultimate answers to ancestory, but that we pursue the eyewitness accounts and honor the oral tradition that exists in our community,” says Place.
Seeking more stories in preparation for the 2021 Centennial. As part of the runup to the Centennial, the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission is seeking “the seldom-shared oral histories of white families whose ancestors participated in and/or observed the devastation of Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood Districts ..Multiple perspectives and insights ultimately help us evaluate and understand what transpired and why.”
These perspectives and memories, passed down one or two generations, would include the stories of whites who participated in the mob violence, as well as those who fed, clothed or housed Greenwood residents during or immediately after the Massacre.
“There might be thousands of white people who have never felt comfortable sharing these family stories,” says Adams-Harris. To date, she says, not one of them has come forward to share and be publicly identified.
“We can say all we want to about those white people being racist. But what if they were scared? What if the dirty family secret is your father was a man who worked for the mayor with no choice but to participate? If it’s fear, opposed to being racist, we would then have to look at this differently.”
What if we hear those stories from those white people on the other side of the tracks? The aggressors and the protectors. Will the wounds from the worst race massacre in US history be healed? Vanessa Adams-Harris from the Reconciliation Center suggests using a wider lens before answering this question. “This is not a story about white people against black people. It’s a story of legal segregation. This was also the condition that whites were under.”
This made sense. After all, didn’t Tulsa’s wealth and work history suggest that working class whites shared some aspirations with Greenwood African-Americans, like that portion of the American Dream of working hard to give your children a better life?
Here, during this interview, on my final morning in Tulsa, the light bulb switched on. I had felt compelled to be physically in the city, not just remotely reading about it. I had walked through the Oaklawn Cemetary where the remains of many of the 300 victims of the Massacre may rest. I was there to remember them.
I was also there to honor Tulsa. Because it was the entire city that intially survived, has since thrived, and now is confronting the legacies of “the deadliest outbreak of white terrorist violence against a black community in American history.”
