The Tulsa Race Massacre JEMIMA

THE TULSA RACE MASSACRE

By Jemima

As the whole world knows, in May 2020, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by Derek Chauvin, a serving US police officer. The killing shocked the world and galvanised the Black Lives Matter movement. But 99 years earlier, the single worst incident of racial violence in US history took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Greenwood district of the city was completely destroyed, and hundreds of African Americans were killed. So, why has it taken 100 years for us to find out about it? The late 1910s and early 1920s were a very dark time for race relations in America. Segregation was increasing and in 1915 there was a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, the largest and most powerful terrorist group in US history. Race riots and lynchings were commonplace.

On the afternoon of May 31st, 1921, the Tulsa Tribune, one of the city’s white daily newspapers, published an inflammatory frontpage story claiming that a 19-yearold African American shoe-shiner named Dick Rowland had sexually assaulted a 17-year-old white female lift operator in an office building. The story was entitled “To Lynch Negro Tonight,” and within half an hour of the newspaper hitting the streets, a white lynch mob began to gather outside the courthouse where Dick Rowland was being held in a cell.

When the town of Greenwood found out later that evening that the white mob was planning to storm the courthouse, 75 African American World War 1 veterans went peacefully to the courthouse and offered their services to the sheriff to help protect the prisoner. But as a white man attempted to disarm one of the veterans, a shot was fired and the massacre had begun. The Tulsa police then arrived, and instead of stopping the violence, they provided members of the lynch mob with arms, inciting them to attack the peaceful African Americans.

For the next few hours, crowds of white people murdered innocent African Americans throughout Greenwood, taking part in drive-by shootings in residential streets, firing into parlours and children’s bedrooms, setting fire to houses and looting businesses owned by African Americans, killing any who resisted and imprisoning those who did not.

Not only did the police and local National Guard units fail to stop the white lynch mobs, they also fired on African American citizens using machine guns, even dropping sticks of dynamite from private aeroplanes. Before the violence finally ended the following afternoon, more than 1,000 African American homes were destroyed and over 10,000 were made homeless, their homes reduced to ash and rubble.

To this day, it is still not known how many were killed, although estimates suggest it was as many as 300. Initially the massacre was front page news across the US, and it was even mentioned in British newspapers. But the white politicians and businessmen who ran Tulsa soon realised that the massacre was a big public relations problem and so they planned to bury it. Official records were stolen, incriminating articles were cut out of archive newspapers, and photographs were seized. For 50 years, the city’s white newspapers did not mention the riots or resulting massacre, and anyone who attempted to talk about it or write about it was threatened, some even with their lives.

But the massacre wasn’t discussed, at least not in public, in the African American community either. Many survivors suffered from PTSD for the rest of their lives, and many did not want to burden their children and grandchildren with the painful recollections of what they had endured. So, they just didn’t talk about it.

Many of the African Americans killed were hastily buried in unmarked graves, while their family members were still being held under armed guard in detention camps. 99 years later, a mass grave was discovered in Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa, containing the bodies of some of the victims, and the process has now started to extract DNA from some of the bones, so that some of the victims may be identified by name, and honoured, and crimes against them acknowledged and apologised for.

The African American citizens of the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were let down by their city, their state, their country, but worst of all, by their fellow human beings. Even the insurance companies refused to honour their claims, leaving families destitute for generations.

It is up to our generation to stop the hatred, to stop the violence, and ensure that nothing like the Tulsa Massacre, or the death of George Floyd 99 years later, can ever happen again.

REFERENCES

“The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City’s Search for Justice” by Scott Ellsworth www.cnbc.com/video/2021/05/28/cnbc-black-wall-street-tulsa-race-massacre-documentary.html www.history.org.uk

Images from: USATODAY.com, bbc.co.uk, vox.com, latimes.com