History
I graduated from good old Wyoming High School in 1974. I grew up watching violence on television, from the Bloody Sunday beatings and tear-gassing of civil rights protestors on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 to the Chicago Democratic Convention police riots of 1968. Like most Ohio students in that time, I took American History twice, once in eighth grade, and once again in my junior year.
My teachers were my parents’ age, veterans of the Second World War. History class at both levels was the same. We started with settlement, then onto revolution, industrialization, Civil War, more industrialization, progressivism, World War I, Depression, World War II. Anything that happened after World War II was a bonus, and we never got too far into Vietnam, or Civil Rights. Those were current events, not history, I guess.
History class was predictable, and it was very, very, white. It wasn’t until I reached Denison University that I began to find the contributions of people of color in American development, and even then, it was more from self-study than curriculum. So when I graduated from college with a degree in “American Political Studies”, I’d never heard of Tulsa.
Historic Omission
My young friends who are now in the streets protesting today didn’t know about Tulsa either, and they blame me for that. We teachers didn’t teach them about it. There’s a book titled Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. It seems as history teachers, if we didn’t learn it in high school, it’s difficult to accept that it happened. That’s no excuse, but it still seems to be true. Revelations of history are questioned, because they aren’t “a part” of the comfortable body of knowledge we grew up with.
And we’ve passed that onto the next generation, with white “centric” history lessons, because it was passed that way to us.
Tulsa
So what about Tulsa? Tulsa is the site of one of the worst race massacre in American history. And it didn’t happen in some ancient time, when history is vaguely reported. It happened in 1921, when newspapers, radios, and reporters were at their full powers.
In 1915, DW Griffith made an epic silent movie romanticizing the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation. It was so popular, that President Woodrow Wilson had a private screening in the White House, a first. Griffith’s revision of American History made the Union Reconstruction the villain and the Klan the hero. It resonated with an America returning from World War I. The post-war economic recession, and the migration of blacks from the South competing for employment throughout the country, was fertile ground for hate.
1921 was the year of the true ascent of the Ku Klux Klan. They were “above ground”. There were marches in the streets, with thousands of Klan members proudly waving flags (both United States and Confederate) and robes. The Klan became a potent political force, in many states. Running without Klan endorsement was a losing political strategy.
Tulsa was an oil boom city. Highly segregated, the black population was centered in the Greenwood neighborhood. The businesses of Greenwood were successful, earning the nickname “the Black Wall Street”. And in 1921, mob justice wasn’t uncommon in Tulsa. Only a year before, a white teenager was accused of murdering a white taxi driver. A lynch mob took him from jail and killed him. The police did little to stop them.
The Massacre
On May 30, 1921, a black teenager named Dick Rowland, entered an elevator in downtown Tulsa. At the time elevators were operated by hand, with an “elevator boy” at the controls. This elevator had an “elevator girl”, Sarah Page, a young white woman. Somewhere in the ride, she screamed, and he bolted from the elevator and ran.
Rowland was arrested the next day, and the front page of the Tulsa Tribune reported he was charged with sexual assault. An angry mob of white men gathered in front of the Courthouse, demanding Rowland. The Sheriff barricaded the top floor of the building and refused to give him to the mob. Soon twenty-five armed black men, many veterans of World War I, came to offer help protecting the teenager.
The Sheriff turned them away. The white mob attempted to break into the National Guard armory, but failed. By later in the evening, seventy-five armed black men returned to the Courthouse, and confronted the fifteen hundred white men in the crowd, some of whom carried guns. Shots were fired, and the black men retreated back to Greenwood.
The white mob moved on Greenwood. A false rumor spread that there was a “black revolt” going on, but in fact, it was white men rioting. By dawn of June 1st, thousands of white people were burning, looting and killing in the Greenwood neighborhood. The fire department was kept out of the area by armed rioters. Over 1200 homes were burned, and another 215 looted. The National Guard eventually put a stop to the violence and fires, and arrested many black people. 6000 ended up under guard at the local fairgrounds.
Scrubbed History
The official death total was listed at 36, with 10 whites killed. Dick Rowland was quietly released, and left town. The Greenwood community eventually was rebuilt, and the KKK got even stronger.
Evidence of the riot was scrubbed from the record. The state and National Guard records were literally erased from the volumes. The newspaper headlines and front pages were removed from the bound records. It was only in the 1970’s that the Massacre was publicly “remembered”, and years after that the true scope of the damage was revealed.
In 2001, the Race Riot Commission concluded that between 100 and 300 people were killed and over 8000 made homeless in the riot. There are historians still looking for mass graves in the Greenwood area (History).
Trump Campaign
So why bring up Tulsa today?
President Trump is having a campaign rally in Tulsa on June 19th. That day is “Juneteenth”, the day celebrated by Americans for the revealing of the Emancipation Proclamation to slaves. The combination of Tulsa and “Juneteenth” for the first Trump Rally in the COVID and “I Can’t Breathe” era is one of two possibilities.
Either the President’s staff is so ignorant of the history that they don’t realize the contrast they are creating. Or, more likely, they know exactly what they are doing. They are using the contrast to further polarize the electorate. The Trump campaign will use the outrage over their lack of sensitivity (they’ll call it “political correctness”) to further “fire up” their base.
They want this first rally to be “the best”.
