I went to the University of Tulsa, so I first learned about it in the 1970s. About 15 years ago, I was assigned to write an encyclopedia entry on Tulsa. I did a fair amount of further reading about the riot, but had to boil the incident down to two paragraphs:
African-Americans, hoping Oklahoma would be less overtly racist than the Deep South, had created a thriving business district along Greenwood Avenue by 1920. Though the new state had not directly inherited pre-Civil War notions about race, it quickly adopted Jim Crow laws and eventually became fertile ground for the revived Ku Klux Klan.
The arrest of a young black man on dubious assault charges June 1, 1921, set the stage for one of the nation’s worst race riots. Blacks, fearful that the jailed man would be lynched, approached the courthouse to find a large crowd of white men. Violence broke out and the white mob marched on the Greenwood district, indiscriminately shooting residents and setting fire to buildings. An official death toll of 36 is believed to be much higher, and some 35 blocks of businesses and homes were destroyed.
I’ve never understood the “Black Wall Street” appellation, and the assumptions people seem to make about what that indicates. So far as I know, Greenwood was a prosperous Negro business district—but not much different than would have been found at the time in Kansas City, Dallas, Houston, or Memphis. Tulsa had grown very rapidly in the preceding decade (oil!), and so the commercial buildings were probably newer and fancier than in other Negro districts of the mid-South, but I don’t think it was any sort of regional banking or finance center, even for African-Americans. Certainly nothing like Chicago, which already had black-owned banks and insurance companies.
I have not see the Watchman series so I didn’t know about it from there. I did hear about it long ago. Long enough ago that I would have a hard time remembering any details.
I live in Tulsa and have known since High School in 1978…if anyone cares, the narrative about the military dropping bombs didn’t seem to appear until the early 90’s*
*First it was ‘nitro dropped from crop-dusters’. That quickly vanished…i assume because the idea of farmers with nitro going down a bumpy runway was ludicrous. Now it varies between private planes and military planes (no planes were stationed within range) with some sort of tar…sticky bombs. I’m dubious. And there certainly wern’t pilots flying at rooftop heights with a springfield rifle in the cockpit picking off people with Deadshot accuracy.
I did know a guy who wanted to probe various spots for mass graves in the early 90’s and he was called a conspiracy nut. NOW officials have plans to do this very thing.
Bumping this because CBS News Sunday Morning had a story about this today. Like others, I first heard of the events when they were portrayed in the Watchmen series on HBO. But I was surprised by how the story was suppressed, in Tulsa and among African-Americans there.
I found about it in readings a little over a decade ago, quite independently from fiction but also only out of sheer chance.
BTW stuff like how something this big was essentially papered over is why many do indeed have an issue with trusting “official histories” even if prepared by otherwise legitimate and respectable media – and why some of our more nefariously inclined factions feel it is entirely fine to just provide “alternate facts” and essentially say it’s up to the public which version is accepted, since it has worked before for them.
I am well acquainted with the 1919 race riot in Chicago which started between crowds at side by side segregated beaches after a black teenager drowned after being hit in the head by a rock thrown by a white guy.
I learned about it form watching The Watchmen. At first, I assumed that it was a fictional event, because there’s no possible way that something like that could happen in real life, right?
I’ve been re-visiting Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem” and have, in doing some background reading, learned about the Harlem Riot of 1935 and the Harlem Riot of 1943. The 1935 riot is interesting (for a given, angry-making version of “interesting”) for not only being the first “modern race riot” focused on property damage but also for just how easily one person spreading lies turned a tense situation into all-out chaos.
This. I didn’t see an option in the poll that reflected, “I didn’t know the specific name/reference to Tulsa, but am aware of numerous instances of a racist pogrom/massacre 99 years ago in the United States where the authorities essentially turned a blind eye followed by a cursory attempt to prosecute the guilty - given the place as Tulsa I’d assume it was against black people, as opposed to Native Americans or Chinese or something further west”.
I’ve been reading about the Red Summer and the Elaine, Arkansas massacre in particular, although the list of incidents is shockingly long. And, unsurprisingly, the post hoc blame was assigned to the victims in the media.
" Two months ago, an archaeological team unearthed a mass grave in Tulsa that may answer questions that have troubled the city’s sleep for a century. The time-consuming forensic analysis required to definitively link the dead to the massacre could begin next year. Nevertheless, the team has a “high degree of confidence” that this previously unrecorded burial site is one of the locations that it had been searching for. The fact that burial workers installed stairs in the trench suggests that there were quite a few dead to move.
Kary Stackelbeck, the Oklahoma state archaeologist, estimates that the grave shaft could contain 30 coffins — and perhaps more if the coffins uncovered in this phase of the excavation are resting upon another row. Speaking during a presentation in November, Ms. Stackelbeck described the scene as “haunting,” adding that the stairs allowed her “to visualize people moving in and out of that space to put these coffins in place.”"