Erasing the Past: The 1921 Tulsa Massacre

by James Burkinshaw 

Aftermath of the Tulsa Massacre, 1921

This week marks the centenary of one of the worst racial atrocities in American history, the Tulsa Massacre, in which an estimated 300 Black men, women and children were murdered by a White mob on 31 May and 1 June, 1921. 

I say “estimated” because the brutal attack was almost immediately erased from the official public and historical record. The massacre had been sparked by inflammatory reports in the local newspapers that a 19-year-old Black man, Dick Rowland, had assaulted Sarah Page, a White elevator attendant, aged 17. A lynch mob, initially focused on Rowland, rapidly metastasised into a frenzied assault (led by members of law enforcement) on the whole Black community, resulting in the physical destruction of 1,256 homes, as well as hundreds of businesses, from hotels, shops and theatres to churches, a hospital and a school. The photograph above shows the appalling scale of the devastation. 10,000 Black residents of Tulsa's Greenwood District were left homeless ("We were refugees in our own country" recalled survivor Hughes Van Ellis). Afterwards, the same newspapers that had fanned the flames led the cover-up, erasing almost any references to the massacre. Police and governmental documents disappeared and most of the victims were buried in unmarked graves. Whenever it was mentioned, it was labelled 'The Tulsa Race Riot', implying a two-sided confrontation rather than the equivalent of a war crime. So effective was this cover-up that, when, in 1995, white supremacist Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, the local, national and international media described it as the first terrorist attack in the state’s history. 

The massacre was, of course, remembered by its traumatised survivors and by the wider Black community in Tulsa. Teacher and journalist, Mary E Jones Parrish self-published an account, Events of the Tulsa Disaster, which included her personal experiences alongside photographs and eyewitness accounts from others, as well as the efforts made by the authorities to hinder attempts by the Black community to rebuild afterwards. However, its circulation was limited - to the extent that Parrish's own grand-daughter, Anneliese Brunner, only became aware of the Massacre in the 1990s, when, in her thirties, she discovered a family copy of her grandmother's long-forgotten book. 

Remarkably, several survivors of the Tulsa Massacre are still alive one hundred years later. Last week, they gave testimony to a congressional committee. Viola Ford Fletcher, 107, said, “I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our house. I still see Black men being shot, and Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I live through the Massacre every day. Our country may forget this history. I cannot. I will not. The other survivors do not. And our descendants do not."

The trauma that the survivors underwent in the aftermath of the Massacre is almost beyond imagining - and the impact was felt by future generations. Anneliese Bruner finds it difficult to disentangle her pride in her grandmother's memoir from her painful memories of Mary's subsequent alcoholism: "There are people whose psyche is still affected generationally; trauma after trauma after trauma just continues to build on itself. And none of it gets resolved if you're in a system that sometimes has the unequal application of law and/or opportunity." Indeed, it is quite obvious that such an act of terror against a White community would have been dealt with entirely differently. There would not only have been extensive (and shocked) reporting, but also severe punishment for the perpetrators and justice for the victims, including financial compensation for the survivors and for the families of the dead. Speaking to the congressional committee last week, Hughes Van Ellis, 100, said, "You may have been taught that when something is stolen from you, you can go to the courts to get justice. This wasn't the case for us. The courts in Oklahoma wouldn't hear us . . . We were shown that in the United States not all men were equal under law. We were shown that when Black voices called out for justice, no one cared." 

In 1921, the Greenwood district of Tulsa was one of the most  affluent, accomplished and empowered Black communities in the United States. 75 of the residents were veterans of the First World War, proud of their service overseas. In Events of the Tulsa Disaster, Mary Parrish meticulously recorded the value of the property destroyed in the attack (including her own home and business). A recent investigation concluded that the property destroyed was worth $20 million in today's terms,  Not only were the victims, and their descendants, left uncompensated, but many of their White neighbours, and their descendants, benefited economically from the Massacre. One survivor, quoted in Parrish's book recalled seeing White people with shopping bags going into the homes of Black neighbours that evening, taking clothing, silverware and other items. She heard one man say, "These damned Negroes have better things than lots of white people." It was the very prosperity and pride of the African-American community of Greenwood, Tulsa, that made it such a target: driven by an unholy mixture of prejudice, fear, resentment and greed on the part of many of their White fellow-citizens. 

While it is extraordinary that this atrocity was erased from American public consciousness for the best part of a century, Jelani Cobb makes the unsettling point (in the New Yorker) that George Floyd's murder (another grim milestone being marked this week) was also nearly erased from the official record. The initial police report claimed that Floyd had died due to a "medical incident during police interaction" - omitting the essential detail that the "incident" had been caused by Officer Chauvin's knee pressing down for more than nine minutes on Floyd's neck. Had it not been for Darnella Frazier's video of the murder, it is likely that the official narrative would have been accepted, effacing  yet another example of racial injustice from the historical record. 

At the end of her memoir, Mary Parrish wrote impassionedly, "My soul cries for justice. How long will you let mob violence reign supreme?" A century later, Viola Ford offered this plea: "I am 107 years old and have never seen justice. I pray that one day I will. I have been blessed with a long life -- and have seen the best and worst of this country. I think about the terror inflicted upon Black people in this country every day." The words of Mary Parrish, Viola Ford and others remind us, a year after George Floyd's murder and a century after the Tulsa Massacre, that we have barely begun to acknowledge the truth about our tragic racial legacy or to offer adequate redress. 

Sources

https://wamu.org/story/21/05/24/a-century-after-the-race-massacre-tulsa-confronts-its-bloody-past/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/george-floyd-the-tulsa-massacre-and-memorial-days