The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

 

It's 100 years since white mobs attacked Black residents descndents of slaves of the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. and inflicted two days of terror. The assault began on May 31, soon after the Tulsa Tribune newspaper published a racially-charged report that a Black teenager had been arrested for allegedly assaulting a 17-year-old white woman in an elevator - despite no formal complaint being made against him by the woman.

The white attackers – some of whom were deputised by civil officials and given weapons – laid siege to Greenwood, home to a thriving stretch of businesses known as Black Wall Street. They indiscriminately attacked Black residents while ransacking and torching homes and businesses. White assailants strafed Greenwood with machine-gun fire from overlooks. The slaughter was even waged from the sky, as aircraft pilots dropped dynamite and turpentine bombs on the district.

When the smoke cleared in June 1921, the toll from the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was catastrophic — scores of lives lost, homes and businesses burned to the ground, a thriving Black community gutted by a white mob. Hundreds of Black residents of Greenwood were killed in the 18-hour orgy of violence directed against them. 

 The nightmare cried for attention, as something to be investigated and memorialized, with speeches and statues and anniversary commemorations.

But the horror and violence visited upon Tulsa's Black community  didn’t become part of the American story. Instead, it was pushed down, unremembered and untaught until efforts decades later started bringing it into the light. No one was held responsible for the massacre , there was no apology from the state and survivors and families of those who were killed were cut adrift. Insurance companies refused to pay claims for the loss of homes and businesses, citing that the attack was a ‘riot’ rather than a co-ordinated onslaught on the black community. 

 Thousands of survivors were forced for a time into internment camps overseen by the National Guard.  Black residents who were left destitute after the attack on Greenwood departed Tulsa and never returned. While parts of Greenwood were rebuilt, by the 1970s all but a tiny part the district had again been razed - this time to make way for a motorway under the guise of ‘urban renewal’. The fight for justice for the 1921 massacre has continued down the generations, against the efforts of state and Tulsa city officials over the years to first cover up and later minimise what happened.Survivors and descendants of those killed, injured and dispossessed by the attack on Greenwood point to a legacy of trauma and the loss of generational wealth, and are leading calls for reparations. They are backed by members of US Congress.  

In 1997, the state Legislature created what was called the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, and it published its final report in 2001. It found that the city of Tulsa had conspired to destroy Greenwood..

"This Commission fully understands that it is neither judge nor jury. We have no binding legal authority to assign culpability, to determine damages, to establish a remedy, or to order either restitution or reparations," commissioners wrote. However, the report suggested that reparations to the Greenwood community "would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional and physical scars of this terrible incident in our shared past."

According to the commission's report, the massacre destroyed some 40-square blocks in Greenwood. Nearly 10,000 people were left homeless as 1,256 homes were looted and burned down. And the thriving commercial district was destroyed — some of the finest Black-owned and operated businesses in the country, including hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, a theater, a roller skating rink, hospitals and doctors' offices, law firms and churches.

In 2001, eighty years after the massacre, Oklahoma approved funds to redevelop the area and build a memorial.Today, the Greenwood Cultural Center stands in the same community where the massacre took place, committed to preserving and sharing the proud and tragic history of "Black Wall Street." 

In 2013, Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan took some responsibility when he apologized for the actions of the police department during the 1921 Massacre: “I cannot apologize for the actions, inaction and dereliction that those individual officers and their chief exhibited during that dark time. But as your chief today, I can apologize for our police department. I am sorry and distressed that the Tulsa Police Department did not protect its citizens during those tragic days in 1921.” However, similar statements of responsibility from other city officials have been notably lacking.,

In 2019. the Emmy winning HBO series  "Watchmen " sparked a wave of interest in the little known tragedy. The show inspired  bu a comic book depicted chilling scenes of what happened there. Viewers were shocked to realize that the assault was a real event grounded in horrifying facts. 

The tireless work of community activists has also brought the Tulsa Race Massacre into new focus. A Centennial Commission has worked on several community and educational projects to commemorate the Massacre, including a successful effort to include the history of the Massacre in the curriculum of state schools. The Reverend Dr. Robert Turner, pastor of the Historic Vernon Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Tulsa, has been among many leaders calling for reparations.

 There is a strong case that the United States is not currently meeting its international human rights obligations as a result of its failure to adequately address past and ongoing racial injustice. The continued lack of accountability for the Tulsa Race Massacre provides just one particularly painful example.

Human Rights Watch released a report documenting the terrible history of the Tulsa Race Massacre and making a powerful case that reparations are long overdue. One of the survivors of the Massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle, at age 105, has joined with the relatives of other survivors in a new lawsuit seeking reparations, including payment for property damage calculated at $50 million to $100 million in today’s dollars. The suit uses legal arguments similar to those that proved successful in holding a pharmaceutical company accountable for the community harm caused by the opioid crisis.

 Despite these important efforts, many obstacles remain to achieving justice in Tulsa. Persistent racial discrimination continues in the form of neighborhood segregation, mistrust by the black community of white city officials and police, and, as described in the Tulsa reparations lawsuit, a legacy of overt public disinvestment in the area. An annual study shows significant and persistent inequality in the city, in particular on issues of law enforcement and access to justice. And in June 2020 a police officer in Tulsa made a painfully racist comment suggesting that police in the city are shooting Black people “less than we probably ought to be.”

 An emotional President Joe Biden marked the 100th anniversary of the massacre declaring Tuesday that he had “come to fill the silence” about one of the nation’s darkest — and long suppressed — moments of racial violence..Linking the white massacre to modern day subjugation pointedly including voters rights suppression. promising survivors their truth will be known.

 “Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try,” Biden said. “Only with truth can come healing.”

Biden’s commemoration of the deaths of hundreds of Black people killed by a white mob a century ago came amid the current national reckoning on racial justice.  

“Just because history is silent, it does not mean that it did not take place,” Biden said. He said “hell was unleashed, literal hell was unleashed.” And now, he said, the nation must come to grips with the subsequent sin of denial.

“We can’t just choose what we want to know, and not what we should know,” said Biden. “I come here to help fill the silence, because in silence wounds deepen.”

The truth of this massacre  was never spoken by a President before and remember that long silences, cover ups and horrible injustices go hand in hand. 

After Biden left, some audience members spontaneously sang a famous civil rights march song, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.”

The events Tuesday stood in stark contrast to then-President Donald Trump’s trip to Tulsa last June, which was greeted by protests. Or the former president’s decision, one year ago, to clear Lafayette Square near the White House of demonstrators who gathered to protest the death of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer..

Looking Back at Tulsa Race Massacre