Reflections on the Centennial of the Tulsa Massacre

 

Reflections on the Centennial of the Tulsa Massacre

May 30, 2021

 

These days we are marking, but certainly not celebrating, the centennial of the murderous destruction of the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black part of that city known as the Black Wall Street, by a mob of whites who leveled Greenwood only because most of the district’s residents were Black. No one knows for sure how many people died. Estimates run as high as three hundred. This tragedy is often called a race riot. Perhaps it was, but it was the white people of Tulsa who rioted against Black residents of the city not Blacks rioting against whites. The Tulsa massacre was one of the worst cases of racial violence in US history, but in my experience at least it is one of the most covered up. I never heard of it until year or two ago. Why? Why isn’t it universally known as one of the worst consequences and manifestation of the racial hatred of whites toward Blacks in our country’s sordid history of racism?

I can think of only one answer to that question. The Tulsa massacre was not a case of Blacks rioting against whites. It was a case of white rioting against Blacks. White Americans have always controlled the mainstream media and the teaching of history in this country. The white media and white textbook writers (whose book are always written to be acceptable to conservative white racist authorities in Texas) don’t like to discuss things that make white Americans look bad. Instead of the truth we get coverage like the banner headline in the Tulsa newspaper The Tulsa World after the disaster: Two Whites Dead in Race Riot. Perhaps orders of magnitude more Blacks died in that attack by vicious whites against unusually prosperous Blacks, but that was not the local white newspaper’s headline. The death of two whites was. There you have white racial centrism in a nutshell. Who gives a damn about the Blacks? They aren’t really human anyway. It’s us whites who matter. So our media have reported. So our history has been told.

The Tulsa massacre is finally getting the recognition it deserves. There is however one truth that most Americans don’t know. History matters. The parts of history that matter most are the ugly parts we’d rather ignore. The parts we’d like no one to remember. The parts many of us which hadn’t happened. Yet knowing them is indispensable for understanding much of anything in the world today. History matters everywhere. No one can understand contemporary Germany without knowing about Hitler, the Nazis, the Holocaust, and World War II. No one can understand contemporary Russia without knowing about the reign of the tsars, Stalin, Communism, and World War II. Contemporary Germany is formed by its past, both the good parts (of which there are many) and the bad parts (of which there are far too many). The same is true of contemporary Russia.

Our present American reality too has been formed by our past too. There are many good things in that history. The United States Constitution, at least since the addition of the post-Civil War amendments and the 19^th Amendment in 1920, is perhaps the best foundational document any nation has ever had. It guarantees civil liberties to an extent no constitution did before it and few have done since. In many ways the United States has been the envy of the world. The standard of living is high by world standards for most (though certainly not all) Americans. We have those constitutionally guaranteed rights. The technological and intellectual cultures of the United States rival those of any other nation. There is much that is good in American history.

It is equally true and substantially more important however that there is also an enormous amount of bad in that history. Many of the worst parts of our history stem from the fact that our country was founded by racists as a racist nation. There were Black slaves in America before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The US Constitution originally considered a Black person to be only three-fifths of a person, and it only outlawed slavery after a brutal civil war in which the states that made up the Confederacy fought for nothing so much as to preserve the sinful, brutal, and inhumane institution of slavery on which their economies depended. Yet it wasn’t just the old Confederacy that was racist. Northern racism took different forms than did southern racism, but it was every bit as sinful. It too blighted the lives of millions of people.

American racism oppressed Black people from our nation’s beginning. It still does, yet Blacks weren’t its only victims. White Americans killed American Indians to an extent that we can only call genocide. Hitler thought we couldn’t object to what he was going to do to the Jews because of what we had done to the Indians. The Indians we didn’t kill we forced onto small reservations, almost always breaking some treaty we had signed with them in the process. We tried to rob them of their culture and make them more like us. We took their children and put them in institutions where they were not permitted to speak their native languages or engage in their own religious practices. We forced them to become Christians.

And most white Americans don’t know this history, won’t admit to it, and deny that the country is racist. Yet we see an illustrative example of the functioning of American racism in that headline in The Tulsa World that I mentioned above. What mattered to white Tulsans was not the massive death and destruction they had inflicted on their Black fellow residents of that city but only that two white people died in the mayhem. As members and propagators of racism we white Americans have turned a blind eye to the suffering and even the very lives of our Black compatriots. Beyond that, for decades if not centuries we characterized Black people in print and in all the media as only semi-human, portraying them as being as much ape as human. We’ve excluded them from the corridors of power in business, academia, and government. That President Obama identified himself as Black and served eight years in the White House changes that truth not at all. He was after succeeded by the clearly racist Donald Trump, who thinks there are fine people among white supremacists. Those hundreds of Black people who died in the Tulsa massacre? Who cares! What matters is that two white people died. To most white Americans those two were the only ones who mattered. That’s how racist our country has been in its rather inglorious past. It is how racist it still is.

Black Americans have been struggling for freedom and equal rights for at least the last two hundred years, yet most white Americans noticed that struggle only in the late 1950s at the earliest. We have made some progress, but we have not made nearly enough progress in overcoming our country’s legacy of racism and the slavery and racial discrimination that flowed from it. Is another Tulsa massacre likely? Perhaps not, but it isn’t impossible either. Were it to happen most white Americans would blame the Blacks regardless of what the facts were. Most of us white Americans have learned of the Tulsa massacre only recently. May we allow our new knowledge of that vicious example of American racism inspire us to continue, indeed to strengthen our efforts at overcoming the racism in which our nation was born and which it still struggles.