Tulsa

Yesterday and today mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

I don't know when I first learned about this event, but my awareness is relatively recent. Certainly, it was not covered in any history book I read in school. I'm thinking I became a bit familiar with it during the last ten years or so. 

Over the course of my life, I've read plenty of history, but never came across this. Much (probably the majority) of my reading of history has been related to WWII. So I was familiar with the 1943 Detroit race riot. Just not Tulsa.

What I knew about Tulsa was Woody Guthrie, oil derricks, and the song Take Me Back To Tulsa (I'm Too Young To Marry) - Asleep at the Wheel's cover, not the original Bob Wills.

What I knew about Black history in general was the Cliff Notes version, the highlights real. Leaving out entertainment, literature, and sports - other than #42 - for the moment, here's most of who and what I know about Black history:

Slavery. Crispus Attucks. Benjamin Banneker. Harriet Tubman. Frederick Douglass. Civil War. Reconstruction. Booker T. Washington. George Washington Carver. W.E.B. Dubois. A. Philip Randolph. Tuskegee Airmen. Jackie Robinson. Rosa Parks. Emmett Till...And then on into my period of lived history: Thurgood Marshall. Malcom X. Birmingham church bombing. Thurgood Marshall. School desegregation. Freedom Summer. SNCC. Medgar Evers. Martin Luther King. Civil Rights Act. Black Panthers. Watts (and other urban riots). Rodney King, and so on, up to Barack Obama, BLM, George Floyd et way too many al., and Kamala Harris. 

And of the earlier stuff here, I'm going to say that the only items mentioned in the history books I studied from were slavery, Civil War, and George Washington Carver. The rest I learned on my own.

As for any mention of Tulsa? Zip, nada, zilch.

By now most of us are familiar with the rough outline:

An outburst of racial violence, directed at Black citizens, that resulted in the destruction of Greenwood - the Black section of Tulsa - which was one of the country's most prosperous Black communities. Over a thousand homes and businesses were leveled, thousands fled for their lives, and, while the true number is not known, a reasonable estimate is that more than 100 people (the majority of them Black) were killed. There were lives lost, but also lives lost. People lost friends and family. They lost their homes (10,000 people were left homeless), their personal property, their businesses, their sense of belonging, their sense of community, their sense of security. Generational impacts, all.

(The image: reminiscent of photos of Hiroshima, no?)

What kicked the massacre off was a pretty familiar story. (C.f., the murder of Emmett Till.)

As best those trying to piece it together can tell, a Black teenage shoe shiner worked for a business that did not have a toilet that "coloreds" could use, so the proprietor made arrangements with for his Black employees to use the facilities in a nearby commercial building. Dick Rowland - the teenage shoe shiner - was hurrying into the building when he tripped. To right himself, he grabbed on to the arm of a White teenage elevator operator. She screamed, and someone called the cops, reporting an assault (i.e., a rape). Next thing you know, a lynch mob was assembling outside of the jail.

A group of Black men showed up to defend Rowland, and fighting broke out. A dozen men were killed: 10 White, 2 Black. 

Next thing anyone knew, Whites were rampaging through Greenwood.

And the rest, as they say, is history. History most of us know too little of. 

(By the way, the elevator operator never pressed charges because, after all, there were no charges to press.)

For a country that styles itself as "the land of the free, and the home of the brave", when it comes to acknowledging the role that race and racism have played in our history, we are almost ludicrously blind-eyed and chickenshit. Until we start unpacking this, we're never going to become the country we could/should/would/wanna be. Tulsa's as good a place to start as any. Let's get moving. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Info on Tulsa comes mostly from Wikipedia.