Tulsa: Reflections on the Race Massacre 1921

5/29 

Now we call it a massacre...

 This weekend, my heart and mind are in Tulsa, where  the city I lived in for 10 years is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. There is added poignance to this date following the one year anniversary of the torture and murder of George Floyd. During my years in Tulsa, 1976-85, the Massacre was spoken of quietly and not in public. Records could not be found in newspaper archives or libraries. I learned about it from my friend David Breed, then editor of the Oklahoma Eagle, the remaining Black newspaper on Greenwood. It was still possible to meet people who had lived through it in both sides of town.

 What I heard then were stories. Of the whites marauding through Greenwood. The aerial bombings. Rumors of mass graves on the sandy banks of the Arkansas. Families who fled to remaining Black towns in Oklahoma or even to the Black community of Nova Scotia, as far as you could get from Oklahoma on this continent. One of my older church members remembered visiting her boyfriend who had been deputized to stand guard over interned Black citizens in the park turned into a detention center. All Black Tulsans who survived were rounded up and herded into pens where they were kept until a white person would come and sign for them. The surviving victims of the Massacre were treated as prisoners of war. 

She went to the park where he stood guard in front of stacks of pine wood coffins. It was a hot day. She brought him an ice cream cone. He took one bite, and overcome by the stench of dead bodies, immediately threw up. She was serving as a nurse at an emergency medical station set up in the basement of our church …I wonder who was actually treated there? 

 The old woman I took meals on wheels  to off Greenwood, her walls filled with pictures of JFK, RFK, MLK and Oral Roberts; never wanted to speak of it. They said the reason Tulsa was quiet in the sixties was parents warned their children to be cautious “lest it happen again…”

 The Greenwood of my day was a shadow of itself. Not much left. It had actually made a come back. The King of Western Swing himself, Bob Wills, would sing “ …would I go back to Tulsa, you bet your boots I would, leave me off on Archer and I’ll walk down to Greenwood…” He would leave a club like Cains Ballroom around midnight then close out his night jamming with friends like Bobbly Blue Bland on Greenwood. The ultimate death knell of Greenwood was urban renewal, the crosstown expressway (as always, the strategic use of highways) and integration. The Black Wall Street of America was done. 

 In the years since, the facts and truth of the Massacre have finally begun to reach public awareness and the event has come to been seen as a paradigmatic moment defining the experience of Black people in the US. In the last two years, two HBO series have had the Massacre as central plot points. The reboot of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons super (anti) hero graphic novel “Watchmen” is set in Tulsa and opens with the Massacre. Its impact has lasted until the current day. At its core, “Watchmen” exposes the reactionary vigilante quasi-fascist undertones of our superhero narratives. It also exposes the underlying racism of privileged white liberalism which ultimately serves to maintain the status quo under a veneer of concern for injustice. It also raises serious questions about the concept of  what can be sacrificed for “the greater good” through the Adrian Veidt character who saved the earth at a cost of millions of lives.  And with eerie prescience, envisions a day when masks are ubiquitous. Ending with, “You can’t heal under a mask.” 

 The social horror series, “Lovecraft Country” also has the Massacre as its central event. In the tradition of George Romero’s “Dawn….” zombie trilogy and Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” the series exposes the ugly truth that white racism is more horrifying than any fantasy monster. Both films’ graphic portals of the Massacre day bring its terror through the eyes of main protagonists to life. As we have learned from Garcia Marquez, sometimes it takes fantasy to make real the truth of reality. ( Underground Railroad on Amazon Prime is the latest example of this door to understanding through its alternative reality story using metaphor and allegory to make the experience of slavery and the birth of Jm Crow palpable. Its “Indiana Winter” chapter is yet another iteration of the Tulsa story. ) 

 The Oklahoma Black experience was a unique chapter of the life of Black people in this country. The Five ‘Civilized” Tribes brought their slaves with them on the Trail of Tears from the US Southeast under Jackson’s program of ethnic cleansing. During Indian Territory days Oklahoma became a haven for runaway slaves and free Blacks fleeing the South. There was even a proposal to create a Black and Native American state to be named Sequoia. Some 35 “Garveyite” Black towns developed and took root. (15 remain today, their mayors' photos in this week's New York magazine.) How well I remember our annual trips to the Boley Rodeo, where every summer, like Brigadoon, the small Black town sprang back to life  filled with returning  sons and daughters  And even though hemmed in by segregationist walls of separation, Black Tulsans created a complete community of their own with a multi class society of substantial wealth, the Black Wall Street of America. Although fueled by white fear and anxiety over Black male sexuality, the real driving force behind the leveling of Greenwood was the inability to accept Black peoples'  capacity to create a world of their own and actually prosper. Envy and anger over that prosperity fed the looting and destruction. While not wanting to allow Blacks into their white world, neither could they be permitted to succeed in their own. 

This is only part of what we learn from the Massacre. Even though the history has now been acknowledged and owned, monuments erected, strategic renewal projects begun, streets renamed, serious questions questions remain as to who benefits from these projects. First steps are being taken. But true reconciliation remains far away. There is still the question of reparations to be dealt with openly and honestly. (In Watchmen, reparations had been imposed by President Redford….) May this weekend be one of remembrance and recommitment. May justice come.

Living in coronavirusworld 265: Pentecost

 

5/23

Red is for Pentecost

Time enough for coffee and a blueberry danish and the  Sunday Times before church.  Once again with my friends from Beverley in Brooklyn. And once again virtual from my dining room table. Here's what I had to say, ....

Hey, time to stop and catch your breath…It’s Pentecost ….and we’re going to talk about breath and breathing…

I’ve preached on Pentecost for 45 years.  And almost always preached on the Acts passage…2: 1-21, you know the one that reverses Babel, where people are gathered from all over and all of a sudden there are ”tongues like fire” and everyone is hearing the disciples speaking in their own languages like “hey, now they’re talking my language, like they’re singing my song…” What I came to understand as a miracle of hearing, not of speaking.  

But not this year. I felt this year needed something different. I checked out the assigned Gospel reading in John but once again it came across as circular and convoluted and not on the money.  In the end, the only one that made sense to me  was the “Old Testament” or Hebrew Scriptures or prophetic  lesson in Ezekiel, you  know, the “dry bones” passage as in Dem Bones Dem bones Dem dry bones….

Ezekiel was an almost unheard of combination of prophet and priest, called by God  in a most difficult time for his people. Most likely between 593 and 591 BCE.  In 587 Israel had fallen to Nebuchadnezzer and the Babylonian empire.   Judah carried a way into exile and Jerusalem fallen. The whole people was a good as dead. 

And Ezekiel has visions. Visions so trippy that ancient Jewish commentators said that no one under 30 years of age should be allowed to read the book. He sees his people as a defeated army in a Valley of death. So completely defeated that there’s no one left to even bury the bodies. All that’s left is a valley filled with dry bones.

Then follows that beautiful hallucinogenic vision where bone by bone  then gets reconnected and sinew follows and muscles and flesh, All as Ezekiel prophesies to the bones. But what is really needed to bring them back to life is breath. And so he prophesies to the breath.

We are coming back to life slowly. Bone by bone. Bar by restaurant. School by stadium. (Churches lag behind.) We are venturing out slowly, fearful of giving  up our masks. Vaccines are the magic potion. But it’s not enough,

It’s been a hard year. I don’t need to tell you  how hard. We’ve lost over a half million of us. Nearly the whole earth a valley of  bones. Most of us have suffered at least one personal loss. Most of us went without human touch for over a year.  People like my mom in nursing homes and care facilities may as well have been incarcerated or sent to solitary confinement.

We’ve seen the very supportive structure of our democracy shaken and called into question.  We’ve seen the ugly roots of our systemic racism exposed for all to see and yet denied by so many.  We have survived individually  but we cross the finish line like runners, here it is, out of breath,.

We’ve all heard those words “I cannot breathe” and know that chokeholds take your life by taking away your breath and ironically in the same way, this virus causes death, police violence another pandemic..I can’t breathe…prophesy to the breath,  We need to catch our breath.

I can visit my mom in her residence now. And they don’t worry about time.  I can even take her outside and wheel her around the lake behind where she lives. But since the pandemic, she now must have an oxygen tank. I too, in my late in life asthma, need to carry an inhaler. We talked about how what we used to take for granted is now precious, each breath a gift of God’s grace. (My new renter, a recent covid patient, came to my house with a portable oxygen tank)

Think of all our our words related to breath….we expire when breath...and life... leaves us, Respiration brings us back to life. There’s my favorite…conspiracy, which is literally breathing together. An inspiration enlivens us and leads us to create even as our creator created life by breathing on the water and separating the dry and form the water and then breathed life into Adam, earth man.

Pentecost comes 50 days after Easter. Ten days after the end of the risen Lord’s resurrection time on earth. It comes to inspire us to come together like those dry bones and continue the life of the risen one on this earth. This is the birthday of the church, we together are the body if the risen one. God is there to revive us, recreate us, even as breath began creation.

We need to catch our breath.  We may not know how this happens but we know who.  God is ever near to us as breath itself. 

I’m not sure how you are. How dry you might feel. I’m not sure how Beverley Church is, how its bones  are doing, I know our denomination, like so many institutions, is gasping for breath.  Pentecost is our time to catch our breath. Jesus may not be here in the flesh, but he has left us the Holy Spirit, the spirit that has been there since the beginning of time, 

It’s here. Now. It’s time to catch our breath,  Breathe….

Let the people say, Amen. 

Ezekiel 37: 1-14

1The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2He led me all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” 4Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.“

7So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. 9Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” 10I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

11Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ 12Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”

This Eid. This year.Israel. Palestine.

5/15

"Happy Eid"

It is Eid, then end of Ramadan. Usually a time of celebration and  happiness for the Muslim community. But not this Eid, this Thursday. 

Every Thursday throughout the pandemic I have joined weekly study and prayer service with the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. With most of the participants from the Palestinian Christian community, others join in from around the world.  Not surprisingly, the gathering last Thursday was filled with anguish and sadness as the Israel-Palestine conflict once again enters a new phase of violence. 

While there is no question that rockets flying into your country create a sense of fear and vulnerability, Trevor Noah of the Daily Show has rightly pointed out that ultimately you have to ask the question of who has then power to do what to whom when. The overwhelming imbalance of power militarily and every other way make any attempt at “moral equivalence” simply inappropriate. 

While determining justice in any particular moment of this conflict depends on when you start the clock, the previous owners of the Sheik Jarrah properties were in fact Jews, every other detail from the lack of a “law of return”,for Palestinians or compensation for land lost in West Jerusalem to lack of building permits squeezing East Jerusalem Palestinians into ever more constricted areas objectively do constitute an apartheid reality. 

It’s hard to pontificate about a “right to defend one’s country” in the context of a policy clearly aimed at making a viable life for Palestinians in Jerusalem impossible.

On my last visit to Jerusalem in 2010, my friend Arik Ascherman, Executive Director of Israel human rights organization Torah Zedek, Torah of Justice, took us on a tour of Sheik Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood at the center of this moment of the conflict.  We mat families, heard their stories, as of theihouses they had lived in for half a century. The effort to evict them is not about retributive  justice  for any wounded party but  more to create more real estate for ultra right Israeli settlement and further shrinking of Palestinian space. This particular chapter has been going on now for decades and is now before the Israeli supreme court.

The same day as our Sheikh Jarrah tour  we participated in protest against the digit up of a Palestinian cemetery to build a “museum of tolerance.” No comment necessary. Eleven years later, the project nears completion.  The bones of over 400 Palestinian  bodies have been removed. 

IN 1978, I toured Gaza in the wake of the Sadat - Begin agreement. The images I retain are of crowded streets, docks filled with rotting oranges embargoed against export and a giant Israeli  watch tower looming over the  city like an alien war machine.  Even under Palestinian authority,  Gaza remains in a state of continued strangulation. 

Describing the current reality, people  in our meeting use words like “unbelievable” and “out of control.” “Worst we’ve seen in 35 years.” The intercomunal violence has people shaken, “like a civil war” they say, “Neighbor against neighbor.” We see a cell phone video of a right wing Israeli Lynch mob looking for Arabs in a West Jerusalem market with passive police accompaniment. 

I think of my friend David from Kibbutz Gezer and the meals we have shared in the Arab town of Ramle. His friend Samir’s restaurant, featured in “Hummus: the Movie,” arguably the best in the country. What is going on in Ramle? Friends in Jerusalem afraid to leave their homes.

It’s a hard issue to talk about tin the US. Support for lsrael runs very deep. Lobby groups like AIPAC seem to wield as much influence over Congress as the NRA. Conservative Evangelicals see Israel as part of  a “divine plan” and offer unquestioning  support. Traditional liberals are most likely to fall into the PEP (“progressive except Palestine”) circle. Others, ignoring power differentials, argue moral equivalence. In Congress except for Bernie Sanders and AOC and the Squad, it’s an undebatable issue. This current crisis will make President Biden’s desire to avoid the issue untenable.

Despite international pressure and feelers from Hamas to enact a truce, Israel wants to “teach a lesson,” still not understanding that humiliation whether harassment at check points or massive bombing never works. 

The bottom line  reality is, Israel is only able to continue  its position of dominance and control  because of the annual $4 billion support from the US.  Sooner or later we need to take accountability for the fact that we are funding the current reality of Israel-Palestine Increasing numbers of analysts think it is too late for a two state solution  already.  One way or another, US citizens have to take responsibility  and hold Israel accountable. That’s  the only way for peace to have a chance…

Living in coronavirusworld 264: the in between

 May 9

blooming trees

what was this?

Cold and rainy Mothers Day.  More people in Penn Station since before..... And in the train.  And at Hamilton Station.  Homeless scattered and sleeping throughout Penn Station, And on the streets outside. And nearby, Throughout the city. Record numbers. I’ve lost count. 

My whole family gathers together at my sisters for the first time since Christmas 2019.  We feel like we need  a Christmas tree and an Easter egg hunt, a years’ worth of holidays to make up. 

Last week I played live music in an Irish pub in Long Island City with glass partitions between every table. And Saturday in a bar with a full house of full tables. And no partitions. But wear your mask to the restroom.

live music

At a Yankee Stadium, there’s a tent for vaccinations. Get a shot and a free ticket.. You need a photo ID and mobile ticket, negative test result or tax proof and a temperature check to get in. Supposedly 10,000 tickets sold but maybe 2-3000 there. People still insecure. Even with empty rows in front and back of you. They’re talking about next month having vaccinated and unvaccinated sections. 

Germany still under lockdown. A new surge in Ontario, Canadian border still closed. The Blue Jays start their season in Dunedin, Florida and are now moving to Buffalo so the Bisons are playing in Trenton.

Funeral pyres burn round the round the clock in India. Brazil too is overwhelmed. In Jerusalem, the final pushing of Palestinians out of the East Jerusalem  Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is underway and protesters amid Ramadan crowds at Al Aqsa on the Temple Mount are met with tear gas and rubber bullets. Shepherds in the south Hebron hills are driven out of their grazing grounds. 

With doors reopening, life returning in so many ways, our mood should be lightening. Like summer. My mom’s facility let me take her out in her wheel chair and we walk around the lake in the sun stopping to smell the the blooming  trees. It feels good. 

There were at least 10 mass shootings last weekend, 194 in 18 weeks.  Like the homeless, we’ve stopped counting. Yet another pandemic. 

every vote must count

blooms

I want to feel relieved, to open up to flourish again, as they call it.  But across the country Republican legislatures are launching the worst voter suppression laws since the post Reconstruction Jim Crow days. Seeking revenge against black voters for the defeat of Trump.  They say  they have to restore confidence in the voters the it was only the election result lies that sowed lack of confidence in the first place. Arizona puts a recount of already four times audited election results in the hands if a company called Cyber Ninjas looking for bamboo ballots from China.  On Fredrick Douglas Boulevard, marchers invoke the name of John  Lewis  and demand an end to suppression. 

Loyalty to the deposed Don in his Mar a Lago Elba remains the Republican litmus test as they prepare to drive out Liz Cheney, a true conservative, from her leadership position for the unforgivable sin of refusing to support a lie.

This undercurrent reminds  me that there is the reality like the 45% of Chileans still preferring Pinochet three decades after the return to democracy. That reality is still there, not even under the surface. 

A year ago, I cherished each day of spring as it passed. Marked subtle daily changes and embraced the quiet and sound of birds. Even on the midst of Central Park medical emergency field tents.  I could  imagine  a healed earth. 

Today the days rush by, melting one into the other and it's May  already and I continue to, as they say, languish. So far from flourishing.

I wrote in a song:

Like buds waiting to bloom

We ease our heads back into the open

What’s gone is gone, won’t come again

What will be is not yet seen

We are living  somewhere in between

It’s been a year

And we are here.

This is what it’s like. In the in between.

Living in coronavirusworld 263: Fifth Sunday in Easter

5/2

The egret is back....

 

On sunny mild Sunday, I meet with my friends from Beverly Church over the phone to preach and lead communion.  Having prepared, of course, over latte and cherry danish at my Venezuelan cafe....

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia!

When I lived in Pittsburgh, the Greek Orthodox priest in my neighborhood would greet me with those words all 50 days in Easter. And I would respond in kind. I think of him today as my Orthodox friends celebrate Easter. (Our accompanist Irina got up early to stop at the Russian church first before our service......)

My egret has returned to Morningside Park. The turtles are sticking their heads out and basking in the sun.  And like the turtles, we too are slowly sticking our heads out ,checking things out  to see if it might be safe. I was at a birthday party last night with a room fun of real people, not virtual on ZOOM.  Things are changing. Slow, but sure. 

We need to be preparing for the long journey. To an as yet uncharted territory.  

What’s gone is gone and will not come again, What will be is not yet seen. We are living somewhere in between. It’s been a year, and we’re still here. We are here.

So how do we prepare for the long haul? Jesus has words for his disciples today that are good for us as well. They come in-between healing one blind form birth and raising Lazarus from the dead.  (We often forget the one....or Orthodox friends have as Lazarus Sunday) In our liturgical year, we are win that in between space…in-between the resurrection and Jesus’ ascension, his post resurrection time on earth.

In that respect, these words are preparing us for when Jesus will no longer be with us in the flesh.  And the answer Jesus provides for us is “abiding.”  This is also known as the “vine and branches” passage.  It’s a passage with roots in Psalm 80 where Israel is the vine and God the vine dresser. Here Jesus is the vine and we the branches.

And it seems like we are to bear fruit. Any branches that do not produce fruit are “cut off.” And those that do, are “pruned” so that they may bear better fruit.

We are to abide not with, but in him. How do we abide in Jesus? It’s all related to our idea that post resurrection, post ascension, we are the body of the risen Christ. Abide in him. What does that mean? I think it has something  something to do with following his commandments, which first and foremost means living a life of love. 

And it means “bearing fruit,” which to me means making love real through our actions. By their fruits you shall know them.....dangerously close to what Luther criticized as works righteousness, wanting to argue for grace exclusively. 

I love the vine and branches imagery. In some communion liturgies, which we celebrate  today, these words are said with the sharing of the cup…I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. 

So I have some questions and issues….have we been pruned? Or put another way, what pruning could you use to bear better fruit? What do we carry around with us that we would be better off without? 

He says “You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.”  Do you feel cleansed by what he has told us?  Can we allow ourselves to feel that? 

And I’ve got some issues…."apart from me, you can do nothing”…..how does that make us feel when we hear that? I know we want to feel capable and that we have agency. Maybe here’s where the grace comes in, but I do have to confess that there are big things in my life I simply can’t…or won’t…accomplish without that grace…

I am always troubled by language like Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch….I believe in a God of love…I don’t want to “abide in Jesus” out of fear of  punishment. The only way I can deal with that is if bearing fruit is its own reward, then refusing to abide and not bearing fruits, living a life apart and separated from others, is its own punishment.

The second half of that sentence is even more of a challenge.. ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you…..Really? Does that really work? As a friend once said to me, remember, it’s prayer, not magic..Some commentators will say Well, if we are truly abiding in him....and he in us, we won’t ask for anything contrary to his word…that seems like too easy an answer…mans we all know those emotional moments when we pray our pleading prayers…. O God, pleeeeeease…and sometimes there are “miracles” and sometimes not. Sometimes we get a parking place and pass  the test but then cancer doesn’t go away, And sometimes it does.  

I can’t answer that one. And in the end, that’s okay. I find myself agreeing with Iris De Mint who sings:

Everybody is a wonderin' what and where they all came from

Everybody is a worryin' 'bout where

They're gonna go when the whole thing's done

But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me

I think I'll just let the mystery be

I think I'll just let the mystery be

For this one, I can let the mystery be. 

And get back to where I started. Bearing fruit. We’ve got challenging days ahead as we negotiate how we’re going to live. What this new place is going to feel like. Let’s try not to worry, Let’s focus on abiding in Jesus…and him in us…and bearing good fruit…that will bring its own reward and that we can be sure of…

Let those with ease to hear, hear…

Amen

Gospel John 15:1-8

1“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. 2He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. 3You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. 4Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. 5I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. 6Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.