Yesterday was the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a horrific event in which the Greenwood district of Tulsa was destroyed by a mob of whites, including by the use of private planes dropping kerosene bombs.
I’m not intending to rehash those events (there are plenty of other threads in which to do so) but this is an event I only first heard about a few years ago and many of my friends are telling me now they’ve never heard of.
So I was curious: how well-known is this event? Did you know about it?
I’m glad you added the Watchmen option because that’s exactly how I heard of it. After seeing the first couple of episodes, I read more about it on Wikipedia and was pretty shocked that I had never heard anything about such a horrific incident.
Technically, I’ve heard of it. But the last time I had thought or talked about it before Watchmen, was in Social Studies class when I was in 5ft grade, going to school in Tulsa Oklahoma.
I went ahead and picked “Watchmen” since I’m not even sure if I’m remembering correctly.
I’ve known about it since I started reading about the history of white supremacism (mostly starting with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing). I think I started reading that stuff about 10 years ago. I called that “relatively recently”, since I didn’t learn about it in school (this obviously should be taught in school), but others may think that’s a long time.
The first account I read of it was in a book about riots that I checked out of my junior high library circa 1976. Tulsa wasn’t an outlier. In the first 20 years of the Twentieth Century there were equally brutal events in New Orleans, St. Louis, Wilmington, and Chicago; much of it the result of white resentment of the newly arising black middle class.
I knew of it. My grandmother lived in Yale, OK at the time, not too far from Tulsa. I’m sure she approved of the actions taken to keep “those people” in their place. Sadly, she was a product of her time along with being impoverished and needing someone to consider ‘beneath’ her.
Fortunately her husband and daughter (my grandfather and mother) thought differently.
I’m British and I’d heard of it a couple of years ago, I think from a magazine story. Then just recently it was included in a PBS documentary series on Reconstruction and more generally the legacy of your Civil War (yes, there’s a PBS showcase channel on our main free-to-air platform, just as there’s a BBC America)…
I don’t remember when I first learned of it, but it wasn’t in high school or any time before that. I don’t even think I was in college. I became a bit of a history buff in grad school, so I’m guessing it was during that time when I first learned about it. Could be I learned about it more recently, though, because it was right around 2010 when I read a library book that discussed how messed-up the year 1919 was for black Americans. The book talked about all the major race riots around that time period. Tulsa was one of them.
Having said that, “Watchmen” brought home to me how horrible it really was. Like, I didn’t know that white folks shot at people from airplanes and dropped bombs on them until I watched the show. Airplanes were state-of-the art technology back then. We tend to think of racists being a bunch of poorly educated hicks. If only they had more opportunities and more book learnin’, they would be decentfolks, right? Well, no. The people who were behind the Tulsa massacre weren’t a bunch of yokels who were just jelly that the fancy black folks were doing better than them. Look at the advanced technology that was used. Imagine if a city today was attacked by weaponized drones. We wouldn’t be blaming Bubba and them for that. Cuz we would know that only a government could get away with some shit like that.
The vanguard of white resentment at the time was white servicemen returning from WWI, the most effective proving ground for high tech violence in human history.
In spite of living for more than four decades just a few hours north of Tulsa, the first I even heard of the event was in the “American History Tellers” audio podcast.
Nope. Doesn’t sound like something that would be covered in AP US history, I don’t even remember Spanish Flu being covered. It was pretty much a rush from WW I to Prohibition to the New Deal to WW II.
In college, I took Florida history, American history from colonial times to the Civil War and European history from the French Revolution to about World War II.
The phrase rang a bell for me, but I couldn’t have told you anything about it without looking it up. That’s probably a best fit for “haven’t heard of it”.
It was an HBO series from last year, presented as a sequel to the “Watchmen” comic book miniseries (which was later made into a film). The HBO series takes place 34 years after the events in the comic and is based in Tulsa; the events of the 1921 riot are a key early plot point.
Were these white serviceman wealthy enough to have their own airplanes? I’m asking because I honestly don’t know. How commonplace were aircraft outside of the military in 1921 Oklahoma? Was it like owning a late-model, fully equipped luxury autombile–too expensive for the average person, but no big deal for the anyone inhabiting the professional class? Or would a private citizen have to be very rich and well-connected to have airplane in that particular time and place?
If a similar thing were to happen today and weaponized drones showed up on the scene, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that that veterans of the Iraq War were operating them. But I would be very surprised to find out that these folks owned the drones, unless they were big muckity-mucks in the military.