author letter
DEAR READER, What if our history isn’t really our history? What if some of the most important parts were deliberately buried, hidden, kept out of sight? And what if nobody would talk about them? Welcome to my youth. Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1960s and 1970s, I had heard the whisperings from time to time. There were bodies, it was said, floating down the Arkansas River. Machine guns on rooftops. Airplanes dropping bombs. These were things that the grown-ups said before changing the subject. There was something called a race riot, but it was almost impossible to find out anything about it. Especially where I grew up. I lived in an all-white neighborhood, went to an all-white church, and up until the ninth grade, attended all-white schools. But three years earlier, during the summer after the sixth grade at Robert E. Lee Elementary School, I discovered that the rumors were true, that my hometown had experienced a great tragedy. Later, as a college student in the 1970s, I started researching and writing about Tulsa’s once-buried race massacre. And once I did, my understanding, not just of my hometown’s hidden past, but of the sweep of American history, changed forever. Today, the Tulsa race massacre is no longer hidden. It has appeared on the front page of the New York Times, on network news programs, and is the subject of several forthcoming documentaries. Schoolchildren from Massachusetts to California have heard of Black Wall Street, while fans of HBO’s Watchmen series are well aware of what happened in Tulsa in 1921. But what many people don’t know, is that the story is ongoing. It has not found its final words. I’ve now been researching and writing about the Tulsa race massacre for the past forty-five years. In the 1970s, I started interviewing older Black adults who had lived through the horror, and who told me things that you couldn’t find in history books. In the 1980s, I wrote Death in a Promised Land, the first comprehensive history of the massacre. In the 1990s, I launched the search for the unmarked graves of the victims. And this past October, the team of archaeologists and forensic scientists that I’ve been helping discovered a mass grave at a Tulsa cemetery. But even more important were the courageous survivors and eyewitnesses who kept this story alive. This book tells their story. How to tell this story has been both a great challenge and a great joy. The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice, is part history, part contemporary journalism, and part personal narrative. It’s a story that ranges over nearly a century, and to tell it—I hope!—the most effectively, I’ve borrowed some techniques from everything from journalism to film. There is no question, since the mass protests that were launched following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, that we, as a nation, are at a turning point, one of the key elements of which is how we see our past, and how we engage with it. In Tulsa, as you will soon see in The Ground Breaking, the work is continuing. I hope that you’ll join me on this journey. With best wishes,
SCOTT ELLSWORTH
Q&A
©J
a re d
L a z a ru s / D u k e
A CONVERSATION WITH
Scott Ellsworth
Your first book, Death in a Promised Land, was also about the Tulsa race massacre. Why did you decide to write another book on this topic?
There was a larger story about the massacre—how it was covered up for more than fifty years, and then uncovered by a courageous group of unknown people—that needed to be told. But I also wrote the book to help show others how to wrestle with the difficult pieces of our past, and why it’s necessary to bring them out into the open. What did you know about the massacre when you were growing up in Tulsa, before you did your own research while in college?
As a child growing up in Tulsa in the 1960s and 1970s, I would occasionally hear older people talk about the massacre—only to have them lower their voices or change the subject when I entered the room. I had also heard stories of bodies floating down the Arkansas River, which was located only a block from my house. By the time I was twelve years old, I knew that something big and dark had happened in my hometown, but it was almost impossible to learn what, or how, or why. In The Ground Breaking, you describe how difficult and frustrating it often was to try to find accurate accounts of the massacre due to a variety of factors, including the destruction of paperwork, news articles, and other contemporary written evidence, as well as the suppression of speech about the massacre for many decades. What motivated you to keep digging even though you seemed to be hitting roadblocks at every turn?
Because the more I learned, the more I wanted to know. The real turning point for me happened during the summer of 1975, when I was researching my undergraduate thesis. I had come back to Tulsa to research the massacre, but ran into one dead end after another. Then I met a remarkable seventy-year-old African American man named W. D. Williams with whom I did my first ever oral history interview at his home in Tulsa. What he told me about the massacre that day changed, forever, my understanding of what happened. As you address in the book, navigating the process of researching and writing about the Tulsa race massacre as a white Tulsan is far from simple. Can you speak a bit about how you handled the complexities and sensitivities of this process and how you were able to gain the trust of sources who were personally impacted, or whose ancestors were impacted, by the destruction of Greenwood at the hands of white Tulsans?
Un i
ve
rsi t
y
Well, first off, we wouldn’t know the history of the massacre today had it not been for a group of African American massacre survivors, and a handful of white observers, who kept the story alive, decade after decade, sometimes under considerable duress. I can’t speak to why the survivors and their ancestors ultimately decided to talk to me, but I did everything in my power to show them I was sincere in my efforts to uncover the truth, and that I really wanted to learn about them, and their lives, and what they had seen and experienced. What was it like to be a part of the Race Riot Commission from 1997 to 2001? Was your understanding of the massacre altered by your experiences serving on the commission?
The Race Riot Commission was both an exhilarating and a frustrating experience. It was during this time that we launched the search for the unmarked graves of massacre victims, and we made great progress in piercing the curtain of silence that had hovered over the massacre for decades. But our efforts also got caught up in petty politics, and our first attempt to find the remains of massacre victims was shut down. In October 2020, the committee you are chairing discovered a mass grave that is thought to be connected to the 1921 massacre. What did it feel like to find something so significant after months of searching in vain? And what are the latest developments in the process of exhuming and identifying the individuals whose remains were discovered?
To be honest, when we discovered the twelve coffins at Oaklawn Cemetery I couldn’t help but think of George Monroe, Elwood Lett, Robert Fairchild, and some of the other now-deceased massacre survivors, and how I wished that they had been there to witness the discovery. All of us at the dig site—the archaeologists, the forensic investigators, and myself—stand on their shoulders. As to what
happens next, our hope is to exhume these remains in the late spring, identify them as best as we can, and to re-bury and to properly memorialize them. Can you share any recent updates about the ongoing efforts to secure reparations for survivors of the massacre and their descendants? Do you expect that the work that you and others are doing right now to find the remains of victims will have an impact on these efforts?
A new lawsuit, Lessie Bennington Randle v. City of Tulsa, was filed in Tulsa County District Court in September. It seeks to win restitution for massacre survivors. My feeling is that our efforts to find the graves of massacre victims has, in general, served the cause of reparations, as they have made the massacre much more widely known. What is the site of the massacre like today in Tulsa? What lessons do you draw from it, as a historian?
A number of the key sites in the massacre—such as the Drexel Building, where the alleged elevator incident occurred, and the Tulsa County Court House, where the lynch mob gathered— have long since fallen to the wrecking ball. But other locations, such as Vernon AME Church, whose pre-1921 foundation still stands today, are still there. Ultimately, the National Park Service needs to come to Tulsa and help protect and tell the story of both Greenwood and the massacre. What happened in Tulsa in 1921 is a story of national significance. What contributions do you hope The Ground Breaking will make to our understanding of and conversations about the Tulsa race massacre?
Right now, in the United States, we are living in what I call the Age of Reevaluation. Old historical truths are being challenged, statues are getting toppled or hidden away in storage, old heroes and heroines are
getting tarnished, while new ones are rising up to take their place. While the subject of The Ground Breaking is Tulsa, it’s really a book about America, our history, and how we need to have a new reckoning with it. That won’t be easy, but it’s absolutely necessary and long, long overdue. What big-picture insights or lessons about racism and race relations in America do you think we can learn by studying the Tulsa race massacre?
One thing I’ve learned is to be careful about making assumptions about both the past and the present. Oklahoma is, by far, one of the most conservative states in the country. And yet it is here where, for the first time in American history, a unit of government has actively gone searching for the remains of victims of racial violence. We all have a lot to learn.
Front page of The Topeka State Journal days after the Tulsa race massacre: The Topeka State Journal, (Topeka, KS) June 3, 1921. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/sn82016014/1921-06-03/ed-1/.
Discussion Questions 1.
How did you first hear about the Tulsa race massacre? How has this book changed or confirmed what you knew about the events in Tulsa on May 31–June 1, 1921?
2.
The massacre was covered up for more than fifty years through the destruction of paperwork, news articles, and written evidence, as well as the suppression of speech about the massacre. What do you think are the lasting impacts of having this history purposefully erased? Why do you think this history needs to be told?
3.
Discuss Ellsworth’s definition of history as not “just a chronicle of events . . . [but] a mirror of both who we are and who we want to be.” What is the relationship between identity, memory, and history?
4.
According to Ellsworth, “we are living in what I call the Age of Reevaluation. Old historical truths are being challenged . . . while new ones are rising up to take their place.” What do you think that means? Why is reckoning with difficult pieces of our past necessary today?
5.
What can the Tulsa race massacre and the ongoing investigation teach us about racism in America? What can it teach us about reconciliation?
6.
Consider some of the ongoing efforts in Tulsa to memorialize the Tulsa race massacre and its victims. How do these efforts fit into your idea of justice? What could justice for the Black victims of the Tulsa race massacre and their descendants look like?
7.
There are ongoing efforts to secure reparations for survivors of the massacre and their descendants. What effects could reparations have? Ellsworth points out that reparations were paid to Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. How could that serve as a model for Black residents of Greenwood and their descendants?
8.
The events of 1921 remain the same, but the way we refer to them has changed from “riot” to “massacre.” What are the connotations of each term? How does renaming the event change our perception of it?
9.
We still grapple with anti-Black violence today. How has the presence of technology (cell phones, social media, television) impacted the way we experience and learn about these events? What possibilities does having a historical archive allow?
10.
The Tulsa race massacre was depicted in the popular HBO television shows Watchmen and Lovecraft Country. What role do you think fiction properties play in raising public awareness about social issues and buried or forgotten history?
11.
What did Greenwood look like before and after the massacre? Discuss the lasting impact of Jim Crow laws, the massacre, and systemic racism.
Further Recommended Reading Events of the Tulsa Disaster by Mary E. Jones Parrish Death in a Promised Land by Scott Ellsworth Fire on Mount Zion: My Life and History as a Black Woman in America by Mabel B. Little “Angels of Mercy: The American Red Cross and the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot” by Robert N. Hower They Came Searching: How Blacks Sought the Promised Land in Tulsa by Eddie Faye Gates Riot on Greenwood: The Total Destruction of Black Wall Street by Eddie Faye Gates Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District by Hannibal B. Johnson Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples with Its Historical Racial Trauma by Hannibal B. Johnson Final Report of Findings and Recommendations of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Tim Madigan Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy by James S. Hirsch Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921—Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation by Alfred L. Brophy Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre by Randy Krehbiel The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History by Karlos K. Hill