National Guard and wounded during 1921 Tulsa race riots (Tulsa World/Wikimedia Commons).
A brief look at Tulsa’s history, and it’s not at all a good one.
The black neighborhood in Tulsa was known as “Greenwood” because Greenwood Avenue ran through it. Approximately 10,000 African Americans lived there. While there were large numbers of black people who lived in poverty in the area, the business district was its own complete city. There were dozens of black-owned businesses. Every kind of small business — grocery stores, beauty shops, jewelry stores, photography studios, tailor shops, and much more — a large number of restaurants, and a 750-seat theatre, the Dreamland Theater “that offered live musical and theatrical revues as well as silent movies accompanied by a piano player.” There were two black-owned newspapers. There were 15 African American physicians’ offices. A hospital. A large number of churches. A library. And a 54-room hotel, the Stradford Hotel.
[…]
During the night and the following day, the white mob invaded Greenwood. They pulled residents out of their homes and beat and killed them, including old people and children. They torched every building. Black people escaping Greenwood were arrested by the Oklahoma National Guard, who locked masses of them up in holding centers and only released them when white people stepped forward and vouched for individual black people.
The best estimates are that 300 people died during the riot, and 1256 structures were torched. While the Red Cross provided relief efforts for those thousands of people who had been burnt out of their homes, for which the city and county paid into the Red Cross relief fund, no compensation was paid to the victims of the violence. In addition, not a single white person was held accountable for any of the crimes committed May 31-June 1.
I had never heard of this before, and it’s unconscionable that to this day, it’s barely acknowledged, and no restitution or compensation was ever offered. Tulsa’s history with people of colour is a dark and shameful one. It’s time to bring it all out into the light in the spirit of change, and one of those should be a vow to stop murdering people of colour. It’s been going on much too long, as the recent murder of Terence Crutcher demonstrates all too well.
Tulsa was known as the “black Wall Street” for a reason, and it was the same reason why it was burned to the ground, its reconstruction prevented, and, years later, why there is a birther movement in the USA -- angry white people can’t suffer a successful black person.
Tusla was one of the many examples of US state sanctioned pogroms, the same pogroms that the Russian Empire was famous for at the time and it followed the same pattern: silence on the national level, but active incitement by local authorities (80 years later it was affirmed that the city did indeed conspire with the white mob, including preventing the sounding of fire alarms, police assistance and even aerial bombardment, pdf) and no repercussions to the murderers and looters.
It was eventually offered (80 years later when there was no living person from that event left) in 2001. See the pdf above. But,
this is spot on. This intentional ignorance is the reason why racist morons can claim that we’re living in a “post-racial America” and not be laughed out outright.
It is important to note how white peoples’ view of black men as predators triggered this.
The article also mentions that Sarah Page, as sole actual witness to what actually occurred in the elevator, was ‘kept quiet’, which again makes me think of men co-opting the narratives of women in order to bend them to their own purposes, often violent. In this case, exacerbated by the fact that Sarah Page was white and Dick Rowland was black.
I learned about the Tulsa Race Riots some time ago on Twitter, which is why I still love that platform.
I’m wondering how many black men were killed for consensual love affairs with white women and how many white women were hushed up by their families and communities for the sake of their “honour”
Giliell:
I often hear white people talk about the barbarity of honour killings, but I’m betting there were plenty of those in the States.
I don’t think they ever stopped. It’s just that the perpetrators shifted from family of origin to male partner. Damn, if I could remember where I read that post about “honour killings” in families of Middle Eastern origin.