Greenwood District, Tulsa Oklahoma "Black Wall Street" May 30, 1921

[Neto]

This Sunday marks the 100 year mark for the "Tulsa Massacre", when White mobs ransacked the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, sometimes referred to as the Black Wall Street. I have seen articles about it recently, and was going to post the article from the BBC, but unfortunately it ends with a bunch of BLM hate talk.
I will just respond to some claims made in that piece. They claim that it was hushed up, and no one ever spoke of it. In fact, I have known about this terrible event since the early 70's, when I was just 15 or so. I had thought that it happened in 1920, but as is stated in the news piece, it was actually 1921. I also remember hearing that the young Black man (historically, it would be more proper to refer to him as a Negro, but that may not be acceptable now) was the elevator attendant, while this story says that the white girl was the elevator attendant. Those details aren't the central facts for what I want to point out.
Considering that I remember the huge spread of articles about that appeared in the local paper in our nearby small of Collinsville as coming out in the early 70's, it must have been in 1971, the 50 year mark for this evil event. The articles I recall mentioned the Tulsa event, but then went on to expose the reactionary killing of local Black people in our area there outside of Tulsa. (Collinsville is about 20 miles north of downtown Tulsa, so it would be about 16 miles north of the Greenwood district of Tulsa.) Just to mention that the local sheriff in Collinsville is said to have arrested the local Blacks, and shot many of them to death, running others out of town. (His way of dealing with drunks in town was to put them in a box car heading out of Collinsville for some major city, where they would be discovered by the trainmen. Then sobered up, they would find their way back home, or if they were drifters, on to some other place.) This was all reported back there in 1971, 50 years ago.
So what is my point? Historical facts matter. It's important to acknowledge that this happened, but responding with inflammatory hate talk does nothing to prevent some terrible thing happening again. (It was also not the "worst massacre in American history" - that unfortunate distinction belongs to the many massacres carried out by even government forces against native Americans.)

[Joy]

Or the daily massacre of defenseless preborn children in this country.

[Bootstrap]

This Sunday marks the 100 year mark for the "Tulsa Massacre", when White mobs ransacked the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, sometimes referred to as the Black Wall Street.

The articles I recall mentioned the Tulsa event, but then went on to expose the reactionary killing of local Black people in our area there outside of Tulsa. (Collinsville is about 20 miles north of downtown Tulsa, so it would be about 16 miles north of the Greenwood district of Tulsa.) Just to mention that the local sheriff in Collinsville is said to have arrested the local Blacks, and shot many of them to death, running others out of town. (His way of dealing with drunks in town was to put them in a box car heading out of Collinsville for some major city, where they would be discovered by the trainmen. Then sobered up, they would find their way back home, or if they were drifters, on to some other place.) This was all reported back there in 1971, 50 years ago.

As far as I can tell, 1971 was the time that the first significant accounts came out, 50 years after the event happened.

The first significant opening came in 1971 when a Tulsan named Ed Wheeler published an article titled “Profile of a Race Riot” on the 50th anniversary of the event. About 10 years later, in 1982, Ellsworth published his comprehensive book, Death in the Promised Land, further bringing the events of the massacre to light. Perhaps the biggest breakthrough came in 1997, when the state created the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The commission’s report, issued in 2001, received international attention because it created an official historical record for the event and addressed mass graves and reparations.

Here is the report they refer to above:

Tulsa Race Riot

[Bootstrap]

I have seen articles about it recently, and was going to post the article from the BBC, but unfortunately it ends with a bunch of BLM hate talk.

So what is my point? Historical facts matter. It's important to acknowledge that this happened, but responding with inflammatory hate talk does nothing to prevent some terrible thing happening again. (It was also not the "worst massacre in American history" - that unfortunate distinction belongs to the many massacres carried out by even government forces against native Americans.)

Yes, facts do matter. And it is definitely true that a lot of the facts came out in 1971. Because you did not link to the BBC article, I cannot evaluate it, but I think the title and subtitle of the Vox article I referred to above are justified:

Why it took 100 years for America to learn about the Tulsa massacre
The long-hidden racist attack on “Black Wall Street” and its residents is finally in the open — and raising questions about all that Americans don’t know and have tried to hide.

Yes, a lot of this has come out in 1971 and subsequently, but even now few Americans know about it, and there was clearly an effort to cover this up and keep it out of the history books students use in Oklahoma schools. It's in their history books now.

It's a rather vivid and important event. And there were others like it.

The sky above Tulsa, Oklahoma, swelled with a thick, dark smoke on the evening of May 31, 1921.

That night and over the next 14 hours, white Tulsans, aided by local law enforcement officials and National Guard troops, destroyed 35 square blocks of segregated Black Tulsa and its affluent Greenwood community, which stretched for more than a mile and was home to an estimated 10,000 Black residents. When groups of hostile white invaders entered the area — incensed by a rumored assault of a white girl by a young Black man, which was later proven false — they looted and set more than 1,250 homes ablaze, according to an official government report commissioned almost 80 years later.

They razed what had been considered a promised land for Black Americans who traveled from afar to reach it. The elite enclave included doctor’s offices, butcher shops, drugstores, tailor shops, shoeshine parlors, cafes, restaurants, beauty parlors, barbershops, newspaper headquarters, a confectionery, a theater, hotels, billiards halls, dry cleaners, and grocery stores that were all burned down. Essential community spaces — a library, Dunbar Grade School, Frissell Memorial Hospital, and churches — were charred to bits, and even the trees that lined the once-bustling streets became sooty figures drooping over a wasteland.

Many of the people who had toiled for years to build Greenwood Avenue into what Booker T. Washington reportedly called the “Negro’s Wall Street” were shot and burned beyond recognition. Some reasonable estimates put the number of people killed between 70 and 300, historians told Vox. According to the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 report, bodies were dropped into unmarked graves in a city cemetery, while others, according to some oral histories, were thrown into the Arkansas River, and still others were hauled off to unknown locations. More than 800 people were treated for wounds and 8,000 were left homeless.

[Joy]

I expect events like this put a curse on cities or communities.

[Neto]

I don't know if it was in the Tulsa World back then, in 71, because we didn't get that newspaper. We didn't normally get the Collinsville Chronicle, either (as far as I can recall), but I do remember seeing the front page article. And in fact, that whole issue was about the events of that time, both in Tulsa, and also in Collinsville, specifically telling the part the local sheriff had played in the racist response.

I imagine that it is true that most Americans didn't know about it, but then, in that era, events in a city in Oklahoma were not of national importance. Oklahoma was still regarded as a sort of back-water area, perhaps especially in the East, where they had acquired statehood a hundred years before Oklahoma (statehood in 1907). But I would maintain that no one who was not still a child back then in 71 has any excuse for not knowing about it. (In June of 71 I was still only 15. I don't remember if I knew about it before that time.)

I DID have some of the facts messed up - I had remembered that the young man was the elevator attendant, not the (white) young woman. I have, in years past, searched for an archive copy of that issue of the Collinsville Chronicle, but no longer remembered when it was - I also had the date confused, thinking that it was in 1920, not 21.

Perhaps if someone had written a book about it, it would have been in the national consciousness. (Like Wounded Knee.) I think that (1971) was also the general era when the AIM (American Indian Movement) was very active, but perhaps that was also overlooked by the Easterners. When did you hear about Wounded Knee? I don't even see much at all in the national media about the OKC bombing when the 'anniversary' of that sad event rolls around. Only folks from Oklahoma seem to remember it. (But then I also lost a relative in that, so I'm not a fair judge of that.)

Edited to add:
I just remembered why I started looking for the articles I had seen back in 71. It was around the time that MD was starting up, and I was already a member of another Mennonite forum, one run by the Mennonite Brethren General conf of Canada. (Sudsy was also a member there.) I'm pretty sure it was through that forum that I got in contact with someone who was compiling a history of race-related violence in the States. I mentioned the events of that time in Collinsville, and he asked me for collaborating evidence, but I was not able to provide any. This is the reason I posted this thread - to point out that these things happened on a much wider scale than just in the Greenwood District of north Tulsa. I suspect that there were similar massacres in a number of other small towns around the Tulsa area. This current news focus is only on that one area. I wanted to call attention to those who had died in the larger region.

[Bootstrap]

Perhaps if someone had written a book about it, it would have been in the national consciousness. (Like Wounded Knee.) I think that (1971) was also the general era when the AIM (American Indian Movement) was very active, but perhaps that was also overlooked by the Easterners. When did you hear about Wounded Knee? I don't even see much at all in the national media about the OKC bombing when the 'anniversary' of that sad event rolls around. Only folks from Oklahoma seem to remember it. (But then I also lost a relative in that, so I'm not a fair judge of that.)

I learned about Wounded Knee in my high school history class. I have very vivid memories of the Oklahoma bombing, I hear it mentioned in the news and in podcasts with some frequency when people discuss terrorism in the United States, I don't know how to compare that to coverage of the massacre of 1921 - but surely the 1921 event is worth covering too. There are important lessons to learn from each.

I know about the 1921 event mostly via podcasts and articles.

Here are some books about it:

• Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Scott Ellsworth (1992)
• The Burning Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, TIm Madiagan (2003)
• The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, Mary Parrish (2021)
• The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice, Scott Ellsworth (2021)

I have not read them. There are LOTS of Youtube videos about this. Can anyone recommend one?

[Ken]

There have been may atrocities in this country that have more or less been erased from history and fallen into the memory hole. Some were race-related like Greenwood and the other similar race riots or massacres that happened in the early 20th Century.

Others were not race-related but labor related. Like the 1897 Lattimer Massacre in Hazelton PA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattimer_massacre

Or the 1914 Ludlow Massacre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

And, of course, many dozens of Indian massacres. Especially those that didn't' happen in the plains states during the more famous Indian wars.

This is actually a theme of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's famous novel "100 Years of Solitude" in which a Columbian Army massacre is erased from memory over time. Until no one believes that it ever happened.

I think Falkner got it right when he wrote: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

[Neto]

Because you did not link to the BBC article, I cannot evaluate it, ....

Here is the article that appeared on the BBC on May 27th. I have been favoring the BBC for news recently, because in general they seem to be more balanced than other news outlets. (I say that, but it's more like they have some writers who are leftists, and others who are 'rightists'.)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57244863

[Szdfan]

Because you did not link to the BBC article, I cannot evaluate it, ....

Here is the article that appeared on the BBC on May 27th. I have been favoring the BBC for news recently, because in general they seem to be more balanced than other news outlets. (I say that, but it's more like they have some writers who are leftists, and others who are 'rightists'.)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57244863

I’m confused. I don’t see any references to BLM or anything I would consider “hate speech.”