The Smoke From Tulsa
It still hasn’t cleared, has it? That smoke from the burning of Greenwood, the Black Wall Street, still hangs in the air, acrid and black – the smoke produced by the burning of all manner of substance, all that comprises a living, working, vibrant community. The smoke from a city on fire. Movie theaters, banks, doctor’s offices, homes, all razed to the ground. I imagine the flames were furious, and the smoke billowed into the air, visible for tens of miles, like the eruption of a volcano. A fire unlike any we have seen, maybe comparable to the burning of Atlanta, or the Chicago Fire. No, the smoke hasn’t cleared, has not been driven away by clean winds, though the fire has been out for over a hundred years. A fire lit by hatred and stoked by racism.
Three hundred people killed, maybe more, making this properly termed a massacre. Not the phony “riot” it was labelled back then, a term which gave insurance companies the excuse to deny compensation to the citizens of Greenwood. Three hundred people killed, because some whites couldn’t stand the thought of Black success. Three hundred Black Americans killed by whites, many of which had been deputized by local law enforcement to do just that, while other whites brought their children to witness the spectacle, just as often occurred at lynchings.
It is, at the same time, chilling, abhorrent and infuriating. I cannot fathom the hate that prompted and facilitated this. Slavery, the “human stain” as Thomas Jefferson (a slaveholder himself) called it, that “peculiar institution”, had been abolished some 50 years prior to this, but only after a civil war showed it the door. Only after millions of white men took up arms against our country to defend that barbaric practice, chattel slavery, which was absolutely crucial to the economy and culture of the white South. Of course, it wasn’t over (and still isn’t). The massacre at Greenwood in 1921 was, and is, the largest massacre of Black American citizens since the Civil War.
The coverup and whitewash that followed erased the event from memory, until a dogged reporter-writer and editor brought the story to light in the 1970s. The 100th anniversary of the massacre has shed welcome light on it, and raises a host of questions, not the least of which is, what does justice now look like, in regard to this massacre? And does it include the R-word, reparations? Residents of Greenwood lost lives, livelihoods, homes, and any chance of economic success, and that had ripple effects for their descendants. As did slavery as a whole. Black Americans of slave descent, as well as other Black Americans, have been permanently disadvantaged by that brutal practice and the economic and cultural chains, the systemic racism, that has shackled them since.
Other, very specific instances of slavery and/or racism have prompted acknowledgments, apologies, and in some case, reparations; these include the holding of slaves by universities, the torturing of Black citizens by Chicago police in the 1960s and 1970s, and, in a case closer to home for me, the forced taking of Black-owned resort property in Manhattan Beach, California. In each of these cases, there is an affirmative responsibility to, as Spike Lee would say, do the right thing. Slavery and racism are baked into our history, and any attempt at justice starts with a full accounting, an eyes-wide-open view of it. Yes, it is important to learn about Greenwood, and what kept that story under wraps for 50 years. It’s important to learn how integral slavery was in the establishment of the Republic of Texas and its annexation into the United States (despite Texas legislators’ current attempts to Anglicize and sanitize Texas history in state textbooks), and indeed, how important it was in the founding of our country. And it’s far too easy to cry “critical race theory” in regard to this; like cries of “cancel culture” or “fake news”, that’s a bogeyman, a red herring. The truth is far deeper than that. And the smoke of Tulsa isn’t going away anytime soon.
