Out of the Shadows: Bringing the Tulsa Race Massacre to Light in Our Classrooms

Shelley Martin-Young

Out of the Shadows: Bringing the Tulsa Race Massacre to Light in Our Classrooms

Introduction

Take a walk in the Greenwood District of Tulsa today and you will be in the heart of the African American community. Here you can experience art, culture, theater, music, and more. You can visit the Greenwood Cultural Center or walk the labyrinth and view the bronze sculptures at the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park. You can visit The Black Wall Street Gallery, eat lunch at Wanda J’s and even get a haircut at Tee’s Barbershop. However, you can also see burned bricks and a fragment of a church basement that serve as two of the very few reminders of the atrocities that happened here 100 years ago. On May 31 and June 1, 1921, 35 blocks of what was then known as Black Wall Street were looted and burned to the ground by white residents and society leaders. This event, the Tulsa Race Massacre, has been called “the single worst incidence of racial violence in American history” (Ellsworth, 2009).

The Tulsa Race Massacre

From the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, you can learn the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In short, on the morning of May 30, 1921, there was an incident in an elevator between a young black man, Dick Rowland, and a young white woman, Sarah Page. The exact story of what happened in the elevator differs depending on the person. Some say Rowland and Page were in a relationship. Some say Rowland stepped on her foot and Page screamed. Some say Rowland tried to rape Page. Whatever you believe about the story, the headline in the Tulsa Tribune newspaper on May 31 read “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.” Tulsa police arrested Rowland on May 31 and began investigating the incident. The headline from the Tulsa Tribune fanned the growing flames of racism in Tulsa, and a confrontation between black and white armed mobs happened at the courthouse where Dick Rowland was being kept. Shots were fired, and the African Americans, being outnumbered, began retreating to Greenwood.

On the morning of June 1, 1921, Greenwood “was looted and burned by white rioters. Governor Robertson declared martial law, and National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa” (Ellsworth, 2009). The Guardsmen helped put out fires and removed African Americans from the custody of the vigilantes, gathering up all other blacks, imprisoning over 6,000 people at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrouns for up to eight days. Twenty-four hours later and it was over:

• 35 city blocks were burned to the ground. • 191 businesses, several churches, and a hospital were destroyed. • 1,256 houses were destroyed and another 215 were looted but not burned (Willows, M., 1921). • What was once reported as only 36 deaths are now believed to be over 300.

Currently, mass graves are being searched for in Tulsa.

The Massacre was not a random event. The fires of this event had been smoldering for a long time. “Jim Crow, jealousy, white supremacy, and land lust, all played roles in leading up to the destruction and loss of life on May 31 and June 1, 1921” (Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, n.d.). Further, Chris Messer states, “[t]he destruction of the community was rationalized as a necessary and natural response to put them back in their place” (Fain, 2017), “them” being the prosperous African Americans in Tulsa. How do we keep this from happening again? Education.

Why Is This Important?

As a lifetime resident of Oklahoma, specifically Tulsa, and a 30-year veteran teacher, I was shocked when I learned of the Tulsa Race Massacre. I was 50 years old, at the beginning of my PhD program, and attending Oklahoma State University Writing Project in the summer of 2016 when I discovered the atrocities that had happened in my own back yard. I learned about this event on a field trip to the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park. There on a plzque, I read the story—the story of an even I had never learned about, an event I had never taught. I received my public education from first Tulsa Public Schools, then later at schools in surrounding districts all in Tulsa County. In the surrounding school districts, I was immersed in an education that can only be described as White. Despite attending schools in Tulsa County, I had never learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre. It wasn’t in the textbooks I learned from. It wasn’t mentioned by the White teachers that taught me. Growing up White in a predominantly White place, attending predominantly White schools, being taught by predominantly White teachers—something was missing—a connection to locally relevant issues (Taylor & Silvis, 2017). Teachers have an incredible opportunity, whether it is in science, social studies, or English language arts to situate their students in community issues that have consequences for their daily lives (Jurow & Shea, 2015).

The Tulsa Race Massacre is one such community issue that still has consequences for teachers and students today, 100 years later. This topic was covered up and left out of state standards and textbooks for at least 80 years. As we near the 100-year commemoration of this tragic event, discussion of the Massacre, inside and outside of classrooms, has become more prominent in the community. Many new resources are available to share with your students. The following are my favorites.

Units of Study

The Zinn Education Project (2021) houses many strategies you can use to teach your children abou the Tulsa Race Massacre. One contributor, author Linda Christensen, shares one of my favorite resources. In “Burned Out of Homes and History: Uncovering the Silenced Voices of the Tulsa Race Massacre,” Christensen encourages teachers to teach students that events of the past still impact communities today. In this unit of study, Christensen introduces the different players of the Tulsa Race Massacre through a dinner party (described below). This strategy allows students to gain the perspectives and stories of many different people involved in the Massacre from Dick Rowland and Sheriff McCullough, to a Mexican immigrant that lived in the area. The unit also includes reading and writing of both poetry and historical fiction. Christensen

also includes survivor stories and leads students in a discussion of reparations. Finally, the author share titles of books and documentaries that she uses to teach this unit.

The Tulsa Race Massacre Dinner Party Mixer, created by Linda Christensen, is a strategy that assigns each student a person involved in some capacity in the Tulsa Race Massacre. Christensen wants to make sure that all voices from that time are heard, so she includes people of different cultures, ethnicities, education levels and socioeconomic statuses. Each student is given background information on their person. Students learn about their individual, and then the class has a “dinner party.” Students walk around the room asking questions of each other (suggested questions are included). In this way, students learn how each person, whatever their station, was involved. Christensen says, “These roles allow students to understand that even in moments of violence, people stood up and reached across race and class borders to help” (Christensen, n.d., p. 3). The Dinner Party Mixer can also be found on the Zinn Education Project website.

Dr. Shanedra Nowell from Oklahoma State University created a lesson entitled “The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and Its Legacy: Exploring Place as Text” (Nowell, 2011). As a social studies teacher in Tulsa, Dr. Nowell was surprised when most of her students had never heard of this event that happene within five miles from where she was teaching. Nowell developed this unit to teach students about Oklahoma before the massacre, during the massacre, and especially how the segregation that is still in Tulsa today comes from the horrific happenings on May 31, 1921. Nowell says, “I believe the lessons from Tulsa’s past, present, and future extend beyond its borders, and serve as an example of Americ’s struggle to rise above our ethinic and cultural divisions in order to create a more united United States” (Nowell, 2011, para. 4). This unit includes the jigsaw strategy to analyze primary sources. Four groups are created, and each group is responsible for one of the following: photographs, narratives, newspaper articles, or government documents. Another strategy is Ekphrastic poetry, which is poetry written in response to artwork. The final activity is for students to create maps of need and desire focusing on the development of north Tulsa.

The Oklahoma History Center has a short lesson on teaching about Tulsa before, during, and after the Massacre. They link the lesson to Oklahoma Academic Standards. The lesson uses an interview with Olivia Hooker, one of the last survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, to set the stage for this unit of study. The students are then directed to the Oklahoma Historical Society (n.d.) website that has a section dedicated to the Tulsa Race Massacre. The final project from this unit is the completion of an argumentative presentation.

Literature

A great way to introduce the Tulsa Race Massacre on a level that everyone can understand is through the digital graphic novel The Massacre of Black Wall Street (Chang, n.d.). Created by Natalie Chang and The Atlantic’s Marketing Team and paid for by Watchmen on HBO, this graphic is a blow-by-blow account of what happened during the Tulsa Race Massacre. The well written account ends with an interview with Dr. Scott Ellsworth, a leading scholar on the Tulsa Race Massacre. It also incudes a section of recommended readngs if you want to learn more about the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre (2021), written by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Floyd Cooper, is a brand-new picture book that brings the success of Black Wall Street to life for young students. Children then learn about the horror that also visited this affluent area of Tulsa. The book end with images of Reconcialiation Park.

Opal’s Greenwood Oasis (2021) written by Najah-Amatulla Hylton and Quarayash Ali Lansana and illustrated by Skip Hill is another new picture book that celebrates the joy and resilience of Greenwood. Students can experience Greenwood through the eyes of another child as she celebrates all the people in her community that look like her. Enjoy a conversation with the author and illustrators at Brown Bookshelf. Author Quarayash Ali Lansana, a Tulsa Race Massacre scholar, who is a professor at Oklahoma State University, uses books like this one to help teach empathy in children. Lansana wrote an article for Tulsa Kids Magazine, sharing how you can use picture books to teach empathy. You can rad the article here.

Two older books that I use in the workshops I teach are Tulsa Burning (2002) by Anna Myers and Dreamland Burning (2018) by Jennifer Latham. Both Latham and Myers are Oklahoma authors and are easily available to come speak to your classes. Both women spoke at my last workshop, and they have great information to share. They spend time speaking about being white women writing about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Tulsa Burning was one of the first books written about the Massacre. Myers shares that there wasn’t much information available when she started to research for the book. Latham’s book is written for a little older group. Both are fictionalized accounts of the events in Tulsa in 1921.

Other books to use when learning about or teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre are listed below.

Fiction Books:

• Fire in Beulah by Rilla Askew (New York: Viking, 2001). • If We Must Die: A Novel of Tulsa's 1921 Greenwood Riot by Pat Carr (Chaparral Books, 2002) • Magic City by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Harper Collins, 2011) • Up From the Ashes by Hannibal B. Johnson (Eakin Press, 2000) • Holocaust in the Homeland by Corinda Pitts Marsh (2017)

Non-fiction Books:

• Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Scott Ellsworth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). • The Tulsa Race Riot: A Scientific, Historical and Legal Analysis by John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth, eds. (Oklahoma City: Tulsa Race Riot Commission, 2000). • Riot on Greenwood: The Total Destruction of Black Wall Street by Eddie Faye Gates (Austin, TX.: Sunbelt Eakin, 2003). • They Came Searching: How Blacks Sought the Promised Land in Tulsa by Eddie Faye Gates (Austin, TX.: Eakin Press, 1997). • "Angels of Mercy": The American Red Cross and the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot by Robert N. Hower, (Tulsa, Okla.: Homestead Press, 1993).

• Events of the Tulsa Disaster by Mary E. Jones Parrish, (Tulsa, Okla.: Out on a Limb

Publishing, 1998). • The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Tim Madigan (St. Martin's Press, 2001) • Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and

Reconciliation by Alfred Brophy (Oxford University Press, 2003) • Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy by James Hirsch (Mariner

Books, 2014) • Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa's Historic Greenwood District by

Hannibal Johnson (Eaking Press, 2014) • Tulsa's Historic Greenwood District (Images of America) by Hannibal Johnson (Arcadia

Press, 2014). • Long Road to Liberty: Oklahoma’s African American History and Culture by Oklahoma

Tourism and Recreation Department (2000).

Other Resources

The Rudasill Library in Tulsa has a Tulsa Race Massacre Teaching Kit that teachers can check out. The kit includes videos, photographs, newspaper articles and more. Rudasill Library also houses the African American Resource Center that includes an entire section on the Tulsa Race Massacre. This section includes both children’s and adult books, photographs, maps, DVDs, and online resources.

The Tulsa Historical Society has many resources available. They have books, reports, archives, photographs, many oral histories, and a curriculum you can use to teach the massacre. They also have a traveling exhibit available for teacher, library or organization check out. It is only available for the Tulsa area. The traveling exhibit is free of charge, and volunteers will deliver, install and pick up the exhibit. The exhibit is two-sided and contains the history of Greenwood on one side and the Tulsa Race Massacre on the other.

Oklahoma State University-Tulsa and the University of Tulsa both have digital collections. Students can take a virtual tour of John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park. They also have a big collection of lesson plans. Oklahoma State University Writing Project, in conjunction with Reconciliation Park, also has a host of resources and lesson plans.

Videos:

The Night Tulsa Burned (History Channel, 1999) can be found on various YouTube sites, such as https://youtu.be/98mO9qkPwcQ.

The Tulsa Lynching of 1921 (Cinemax Reel Life, 2000) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDtrJos7scE.

The resources I have shared here are some of my favorites. There are many more resources available to teach the Tulsa Race Massacre to any age of student and can be easily incorporated into English Language Arts classes along with social studies. This is an important

event that students in Oklahoma need to learn about. Learning about the past prepares students for the present and the future.

Shelley Martin-Young is a doctoral candidate and graduate teaching assistant at Oklahoma State University. She can be reached at dawn.martinyoung@okstate.edu.

References

Chang, N. (n.d.). The massacre of Black Wall Street. https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/hbo-2019/the-massacre-of-black-wallstreet/3217/

Christensen, L. (n.d.). Burned out of homes and history: Uncovering the silenced voices of the Tulsa Race Massacre. https://www.zinnedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Tulsamassacre.pdf

Ellsworth, S. (2009). "Tulsa Race Riot". The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Archived from the original on June 13, 2020. Retrieved February 15, 2021.

Fain, K. (2017, July). The Devastation of Black Wall Street. JSTOR Daily. Retrieved from https://daily.jstor.org/the-devastation-of-black-wall-street/

Hylton, N. & Lansana, Q.A. (2021). Opal’s Greenwood oasis. Calliope Group.

Jurow, A.S., & Shea, M. (2015) Learning in equity-oriented scale making projects. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 24(2), 286-307.

Latham, J. (2018). Dreamland burning. Little Brown Books for Young Readers.

Myers, A. (2002). Tulsa burning. Fitzhenry and Whiteside.

Nowell, S. (2011). The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and its legacy: Experiencing place as text. https://teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/search/viewer.php?skin=h&id=initiative_11.04.08_ u

Oklahoma historical society. (n.d.) The Tulsa Race Massacre. https://www.okhistory.org/learn/trm

Taylor, K.H., & Silvis, D. (2017). Mobile City science: Technology supported collaborative learning at community scale. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 1, 391-398.

Tulsa Historical Society and Museum. (n.d.) 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/#flexible-content

Weatherford, C.B. (2021). Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre. Carolrhoda Books.

Willows, M. (1921). Disaster Relief Report: Riot June 1921. Red Cross. Retrieved from https://www.tulsahistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/1921-Red-Cross-ReportDecember-30th.pdf

Zinn education project. (2021). Teaching people’s history. https://www.zinnedproject.org/

[As]Chris Messer states, “[t]he destruction of the community was rationalized as a

necessary and natural response to put them back in their place” (Fain, 2017),

“them” being the prosperous African Americans in Tulsa.