There is a good deal of discussion and debate over Black history these days. What should be included, and what events have been downplayed or even somehow forgotten? The most astonishing of the many events which were, it seems, forgotten or covered up is the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. This was not a micro-aggression; this was a stupendous catastrophe. That situation has been rectified. Victor Luckerson, raised in Montgomery and two times editor- in-chief of the “Crimson White,” has written a history of those events so monumental, so thorough, that no one can remain ignorant.
The Greenwood section of Tulsa was a vibrant cultural and financial success. There were many businesses, a movie theater, clubs, a fine hotel, professionals of all stripes—doctors, lawyers and so on. Wall Street is not a perfect metaphor. There was no actual stock exchange, etc., but there was prosperity and optimism. Then disaster struck. In a minor, unimportant incident in an elevator in downtown Tulsa, a young black man, Dick Rowland, perhaps lost his balance, perhaps touched the white elevator operator, Sarah Page. She perhaps screamed. The city paper distorted the incident into a possible attempted rape. Rowland was arrested and rumors quickly spread that he would be lynched.
One of the important themes in Luckerson’s book is the determination in the black community not to be passive victims. A number of black men, perhaps 50-75, many armed, marched to the jail to protect Rowland. I say marched because many were WWI veterans, and had military training. A white mob also gathered. In a scuffle, a shot was fired, a white man was shot and within hours the virulent racism of white Tulsa manifested itself and a pitched battle ensued.
White police, instead of seeking to regain order, fraudulently deputized others and joined the mob in attacking Greenwood, with machine guns and possibly even incendiary bombs dropped on black Tulsa from an airplane. The district was burned and looted: hotel, theatre, businesses, gone. Estimates of deaths ran up past 175. How could such an event drop out of history, out of popular memory? The white city government was certainly happy to have this disgrace forgotten and many Black Tulsans, traumatized, did not speak of it, but the Black press, especially the “Oklahoma Eagle,” covered racial violence, and kept the stories alive.
Luckerson could have ended his narrative in the 1920s but continued the story to the present, showing how Greenwood was, in a sense, attacked twice more, by perhaps well-intended urban renewal projects and then by the interstate highway system. Highways and housing projects get built somewhere—usually in the backyards of the poorest and politically weakest. Reparations for injustices before 1860 seem unlikely, but the 1921 Tulsa events were well documented with dozens of pending lawsuits. It will be interesting to follow these cases through the courts.
