On Sunday, May 29th, days before the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, racially segregated congregations gathered to worship. Churches were filled with Black Tulsan parents and guardians of the soon-to-be graduates, the communities that celebrated the students’ success, and who leaned upon their faith in praise and for strength throughout the Jim Crow era.
Hymn and testimony, no doubt, passed beyond the walls of historic places of worship like Methodist Episcopal Church (est. 1887), the African Methodist Episcopal Church (est. 1905), the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (est. 1905), the Paradise Baptist Church (est. 1912), the Metropolitan Baptist Church, the Union Baptist Church and the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
Faith, as professed by white Oklahomans at the time, embraced the same marks of orthodoxy, edifices, gospels, hymnals and other representations including The Ten Commandments.
And yet, the stark contrasts in practice, specifically the legal regard for all human life, could not have been be more apparent to the BTW graduates of 1921. Or to the graduates of today.
The Gospels, with which most orthodoxies were aligned in Oklahoma, were objectively not applicable to Black Tulsans. Segregation, lynchings and mass murder were the justified responses to perceived encroachment and entitlement. No Black Tulsan man, woman or child was deserving of dignity, as represented in the state’s constitution, yet faith, Christianity, was regarded as the foundation upon which all were governed.
BTW graduates of 1921 were subject to both the legal cruelty of the state and a demand to accept that faith, a faith unlike their own, was the state’s moral foundation upon which life was governed, without objection.
That ugly history is repeating itself this year, as the State Superintended of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, with his self-styled moral clarity, and a platform from which historic rhetoric is often spewed, announced that all Oklahoma schools must provide Judeo Christian Biblical doctrine.
A humble prayer before segregation and suffrage
Black Tulsans, parents of the 1921 BTW seniors, were well-aware of threats to their freedoms for more than a decade prior to the accomplishments of their children.
Racial segregation in the Christian State of Oklahoma during the late 19th century, inclusive of education, was well established and supported by legal precedent. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision upholding racial segregation under the guise of “separate but equal” legal doctrine, was sufficient justification for Oklahoma’s poorly resourced and funded schools.