Certainly, the Tulsa race massacre can possibly be one avenue for the country to “acknowledge” historic and ongoing Black suffering through some kind of truth, reconciliation and reparations process. I’m skeptical for several reasons. For one thing, we keep repeating the mantra that this story is unknown. Although it was front page news in 1921, and although a resident/survivor Mary E. Jones Parrish self-published an eyewitness account in 1923, and although Black residents filed 193 unsuccessful lawsuits against the city and various insurance companies for just compensation, we still talk as if this is all new and shocking knowledge. The Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (now called the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Centennial Commission) was created 24 years ago. The indefatigable historian, Eddie Faye Gates, spent years collecting oral histories of survivors.
“60 Minutes” ran a devastating segment on the massacre in 1999, and I swear, every year since, journalists (print and broadcast) have announced the discovery of this terrible history and found some Black person to interview who has never heard of it. Meanwhile, literally dozens of books have appeared on the Tulsa race massacre, going back at least to the 1970s when Lee E. Williams and Lee E. Williams II published Anatomy of Four Race Riots (1972) and a white history professor, Rudia Halliburton Jr., published a short book aptly titled, The Tulsa Race War of 1921 (1975). Then in 1982, Scott Ellsworth released Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, followed by a parade of very fine books by James Hirsch, Hannibal Johnson, Tim Madigan, Alfred Brophy, and so on…
The point, of course, is that for at least 40 years, there was no shortage of public information. Even before these texts appeared, it is not hard to find mention or detailed yet flawed accounts of the Tulsa massacre in the pages of leading Black scholarly journals — Journal of Negro History, Phylon, Journal of Negro Education, etc. (Rudia Halliburton’s book began as an essay in The Journal of Black Studies published in 1972). Besides stacks of books — scholarly, popular, photographic, fiction and young adult — there have been plays written about it as well as several documentary films, some bearing titles, such as Tulsa’s Secret; Terror in Tulsa: History Uncovered; The Tulsa Lynching of 1921: A Hidden Story; all before Watchmen and Stanley Nelson and Marco Williams’s brand new and powerful film, Tulsa Burning.
The fact is, the Tulsa race massacre is the most thoroughly studied and discussed incident of all of the 20th century racial pogroms, with the possible exception of the East St. Louis massacre of 1917. I’ve been in the business of teaching Black history for over three decades, and every colleague I know includes Tulsa in their general survey courses. So why do we continually repeat the assertion that this history is completely unknown, a secret, or so shameful no one wants to talk about it? Because the issue has never been about not knowing; it is about a refusal to acknowledge genocidal, state-sanctioned racist violence in the United States, a refusal to recognize the existence of fascism in this country. This is not to say the violence is simply denied by the status quo. No, rather it is disavowed by the white propertied and political classes and displaced onto “ignorant” white racist workers. This narrative obscures how the violence, fomented and promoted by the press and business interests, became a pretext to take the land — an attempted land grab that continued for decades after 1921.