Tulsa Burning

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The Tulsa race massacre, which was largely forgotten or ignored by history until recently, began one hundred years ago today.  The bloody riots completely destroyed the black-owned Greenwood section of Tulsa, burning it to the ground, and left as many as three hundred of the city's black citizens dead and buried anonymously in large mass graves.  Hundreds of others were injured, and thousands were left homeless.  The Greenwood section of the city was also known as "Black Wall Street" because of its many thriving businesses.  It was an example of economic success that undoubtedly caused resentment among some of their white neighbors who were not as well off.

The trouble began when a nineteen-year-old black shoeshiner got on an elevator that was being operated by a seventeen-year-old white girl.  Someone said they heard a scream from within the elevator, and the black man was dragged out and arrested.  The girl refused to press charges and the police determined that no crime had taken place, but at least one white-owned newspaper ran a headline which suggested "Lynching the Negro."   A mob of more than two thousand white men showed up at the courthouse where the black man was being held, and around seventy-five black men were there to protect him.

The trouble spread into the streets, and the rest, as they say, is history - or at least it is finally history now.  Growing up less than a hundred miles from Tulsa, just across the line in Missouri, I never heard of the Tulsa race massacre, and, quite astoundingly, it was apparently not even discussed or taught in Oklahoma schools.  (Being a history major in college, I also had three college level courses dealing with the United States in the 1920's, and the Tulsa race riot was not mentioned in any of those classes either.)  The Tulsa riot - an upheaval engineered and carried out by white people - was something best forgotten.

Now the story is out and it is spreading faster than racial hatred on a hot night in May.   It is being featured in documentaries, across internet news sites, and is even the cover story of the current issue of National Geographic magazine.  An effort is also being launched to exhume bodies in one of the mass graves and try to identify the remains through DNA testing.  

The timing of this anniversary and subsequent publicity is particularly fortuitous in that there is currently a push on in roughly a quarter of the state legislatures to limit the ability of public school teachers to  teach about the history of racism in the United States.

More than a dozen states are actively legislating to keep teachers from promoting what is being called "critical race theory" in their classrooms.  Proponents of critical race theory argue that federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people based on race, and that they country was founded on the theft of land (from native Americans) and the theft of labor (from slaves).  Ironically, Oklahoma is one of the states involved in the current push to limit what teachers can teach about the history of racism in America.

But controlling the news and shaping history today will likely prove to be infinitely harder than it was a century ago.  

It's time to quit distorting the past and to face the world as it really is.   Anything less continues the horrible wrong that was done to the black citizens of Tulsa a century ago - and helps to maintain racism as an open, festering wound in America.