If you haven’t read about the Tulsa Race Massacre of May 31/June 1, 1921, I recommend learning about it. One of the worst race-based killings in American history, it illustrates how simmering bigotry, fear, and mob violence can erupt quickly and cause lasting harm. It also showcases the critical role that historical memory plays in either allowing wounds to fester or to heal.
The Massacre took only about eighteen hours, but left hundreds of African-Americans dead, and thousands homeless after white armed mobs attacked and demolished a wealthy Black district in Tulsa called Greenwood, aka the “Black Wall Street.” The spark that drove the mob action was an insubstantiated rumor about a young African American named Dick Rowland, accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. However, it was the pre-existing extremely hostile racial tensions which laid the true groundwork for the white violence. Jim Crow legislation, an active KKK, and countless other aggressions fostered the actions of armed whites who invaded Greenwood and effectively burned it to the ground, as this image shows.
Horrifying to me as a historian was the deliberate suppression of the Tulsa Race Massacre in the decades that followed. The _Tulsa Tribune_ took out the front-page news story from its records, and scholars also discovered a gap in police and state archives. After half a century, survivors and some Oklahoma officials began to publically address what had happened. In 1996 the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission (originally called the Tulsa Race Riot Commission) began an investigation, and ended up recommending substantial financial restitution to the injured (this has not yet been accomplished). Important progress has been made, such as legislation demanding that Oklahoma students study the Massacre, and initiating an archaeological search for mass graves.
The recent scheduling and then retraction of a presidential campaign rally in Tulsa demonstrates the continued need to study the painful parts of our history. “The past is never dead,” wrote novelist William Faulkner. “It’s not even past.”
Source(s): @tulsahistory.org, “1921 Tulsa Race Massacre,” _Tulsa Historical Society and Museum;” @history.com “Tulsa Race Massacre, ” March 8, 2018, by History.com editors; @okhistory.org, “Tulsa Race Massacre,” _Oklahoma Historical Society_, by Scott Ellsworth; “Tulsa finally decides to address 1921 race massacre with search for mass grave,” _Los Angeles Times_, by Kurtis Lee, Feb 4, 2020.
