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.