Tulsa
The Tulsa massacre almost got buried. One future historian got curious.
The white schoolboy Scott Ellsworth of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was left to wonder what the city’s darkest secret could be.
“As a 10- and 11-year-old, I would occasionally hear older adults, neighbours, talking about what we then called ‘the riot’ and they would always lower their voices or change the subject,” recalls Ellsworth, now 67. “I started to catch wind of these stories about bodies floating down the Arkansas River, machine guns on the roofs of town, but you couldn’t really find out anything about it.”
All that changed one day in 1966 when the local library installed a microfilm reader and Ellsworth and friends fed in daily newspapers from 1921. “We were just gobsmacked: hundreds die, martial law declared,” says the author and historian. “We weren’t sophisticated enough to put it all together but I knew at that point that the skeleton in the closet was true.”
The truth that could no longer be denied was that, on 31 May and 1 June 1921, a white mob had attacked Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, killing an estimated 300 people and wounding 800 more while robbing and burning businesses, homes and churches. Planes dropped explosives on the area, razing it to the ground. It remains one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history.
Ellsworth got the academic credentials and then he interviewed survivors.
“They had never been interviewed before. They didn’t talk about the massacre in their own family. I ended up being their witness. It didn’t have to be me. It could have been you or somebody else. It just happened to be me. That was one of the highest professional moments of my life.”
Conversely, Ellsworth found it almost impossible to get any white person to admit they had been involved in the carnage (none faced criminal charges). On one occasion he visited a white police officer who was happy to talk about his career but became taciturn when the subject came up.
Naturally not. The Nazis moved to Argentina; the Tulsa genociders just sat tight and became taciturn.
When Ellsworth’s Death in a Promised Land – the first comprehensive history of the massacre – was published in 1982, the survivors threw a launch party but the book was mostly ignored by the local white media. However, the author notes: “For a number of years it was the most stolen book out of the Tulsa City county library system. They’d even steal the branch copies. So once a year, I just sent them a box of books.”
Tulsa’s secret was out and could not be forgotten again. The massacre’s 75th anniversary in 1996 received national media attention. The Tulsa Race Riot Commission was formed a year later to carry out a long overdue investigation and make the case for reparations.
A lot of our history is long overdue.
There are bills in many states, as we know, to prevent the teaching of Critical Race Theory (including Oklahoma) because that would be “divisive” and the excuse is that CRT is propaganda to teach our children to hate America. But, I honestly can’t see how one can be truly patriotic, if we can’t even talk about our history in an honest way. If people are kept ignorant of such horrific examples of racial violence and hatred, how can we make sense of events such as last summer’s protests? If we’re ignorant of all of the ways in which black communities worked to fit the American Ideal only to have their successes destroyed because of the false accusation by a white women, then we have to explain that the protests were more than about the murder of one man by a cop. Sometimes to deaf ears.
Thanks to Ellsworth for sticking with this project, and for the makers of The Watchmen series, for keeping these stories alive. We also need to tell the stories of the neighborhoods destroyed to make way for the freeways, such as the Rondo district in St. Paul, in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Once Greenwood started to rebuild, it was knocked down again by “Urban Renewal” in the post-war era.
Don’t even try to tell me that there is no systemic racism in America.
Extremely pedantic point: If a newspaper quotes someone, should it use the spelling of the paper, or of the person being quoted?
Oh I think news organizations (this is the BBC, which publishes news online but isn’t a newspaper) get to use their own (regional) spelling. It would probably be more distracting not to.
It is a question I pause over often, because I’ll be summarizing or referring to something from a UK source and hesitate over, say, minimize v minimise. I don’t have a consistent policy on it.
Updating: oops no it’s not, it’s the Guardian. Something earlier was from the BBC. Never mind.
Answering pedantry with pedantry: the person being quoted here is speaking, not spelling. The reporter gets to use the correct spelling – I mean, the spelling that is considered correct in their part of the world, even if the person being quoted would spell certain words weirdly. Differently! Otherwise, how would a reporter spell anything if they were quoting someone who can’t read or write?
Substituting words in quotes is off the table though. If they said elevator, you can’t spell it “lift”.
Ha!
I’m not sure anyone’s accused the Grauniad of spelling before.