A city finally has to face up to it's shame

The bloodiest race riot in the history of the United States took place in Oklahoma in 1921. Tulsa's white residents have managed to bury the ignominy for 78 years, but it's now being brought into the light of day.

by Jan Cienski, National Post

[6/5/99 - TULSA, Okla.] - George Monroe leans back in his armchair, narrows his eyes and travels back 78 years to a time of blood and terror, when he was a boy of 5 in the midst of America's bloodiest race riot.

"We were at home and my mother looked out the front door and she saw four white men with lighted torches at their side coming toward the house. When she saw them coming, she told all of us to get up under the bed.

"The men came in the house and went straight to the curtains hanging on the wall and they set the curtains on fire. After they set the fire and was on the way out one stepped on my finger. My sister put her hand on my mouth to keep me from screaming."

The cry was stifled and the four men walked out, never realizing that a terror-stricken family lay hidden inches from their feet.

"I can see that happening today," said Mr. Monroe, his eyes opening again.

The Monroes lost their home and their business, but they were among the lucky ones. As many as 300 people, almost all black, were killed in the Tulsa race riot of 1921 and the whole black section of town was razed.

It was the bloodiest event in U.S. history since the Civil War, surpassing the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the fiery deaths of religious fanatics at Waco, Tex., deaths in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

But those events have been engraved on the consciousness of Americans, while Tulsa's bloodletting has been forgotten, erased from history by whites ashamed at what they had done.

Until now.

In 1997, the state government set up a commission to study the riot. Now researchers armed with video cameras search for the few people with any memories of the riots, and archaeologists roam local cemeteries with ground-penetrating radar looking for evidence of mass graves. State history books have been updated to include information about the riot.

"Every city in North America has a skeleton in its closet and Tulsa is the only one that's confronting its past," said Scott Ellsworth, a historian assisting the commission and author of a book about the riot. "We have the door open and we're looking in."

For decades, the riot was a taboo subject among whites, while blacks simply wanted to move on and leave the ugly past behind.

Don Ross, the state representative who pushed through the bill authorizing the commission, remembers growing up as a black man in the racially segregated Tulsa of the 1950s.

"I had never heard about the riot growing up," he said. "My teacher mentioned it in a class and I didn't believe it. I was convinced it could not have happened. The very next day he brought pictures from the riot. It was so deadly and destructive I could not forget it."

In the 19th century, Oklahoma became an almost mythical place to blacks. The territory was settled mainly by Indians deported from Florida, the Carolinas and other Southern states in the 1830s.

Many of the Indians had adopted Southern ways and owned slaves, but they treated them better than whites did. The area became a magnet for escaping slaves.

Blacks flooded into Oklahoma when it was opened to non-Indian settlement at the end of the century and there was even some hope of making it an all-black territory.

The discovery of oil in 1905 turned Tulsa into a boomtown. White oil barons amassed most of the wealth but the good times also attracted blacks from across the country.

Despite being segregated on the north side of town, blacks managed to create a prosperous enclave that civil-rights pioneer Booker T. Washington dubbed "the negroes' Wall Street."

Racial tensions began ratcheting up after the First World War when the Ku Klux Klan became a power in the land while blacks who had tasted racial equality in France during the war came home demanding better treatment.

That incendiary mixture was ignited when a 19-year-old black shoe-shine man, Dick Rowland, went to the only office building in the white section of town that had a black bathroom. He tripped in the elevator and brushed against the white girl operating the lift. She screamed and he fled and was later arrested.

The Tulsa Tribune published a front-page story titled, "Nab Negro for Assault on White Girl," and an incendiary editorial, "To Lynch a Nigger Tonight."

On May 31, 1921, a white lynch mob showed up outside the courthouse. Groups of blacks, some armed and dressed in their First World War uniforms, rushed to defend Mr. Rowland.

Shooting broke out and the outnumbered blacks were quickly bested by the white mob.

Armed whites then poured into Greenwood, the black section of town. Gangs of whites brandishing rifles and pistols cruised the streets in cars, shooting blacks who tried to escape from burning buildings. Planes circled overhead dropping sticks of dynamite and raining bullets on Greenwood.

On June 1, martial law was declared and the governor sent in the National Guard. Both blacks and whites were arrested and blacks were hustled off to detention centres. By June 2, order had been restored.

Shocked by the violence and anxious to avoid sullying their city's reputation, white Tulsans immediately embarked on an exercise in collective amnesia.

"The city fathers realized they had a great public relations problem," said Mr. Ellsworth. "There was a curtain of silence that descended after the riot."

Most of the black riot dead were quickly buried, without paperwork. Witnesses talk of bodies dumped into unmarked graves in the city-owned cemetery.

The death toll was put at 35 and the blame for the disturbance was placed on the blacks.

"In this old 'Niggertown' was a lot of bad niggers and a bad nigger is the lowest thing that walks on two feet," editorialized the Tribune.

No whites were ever charged; one black man was convicted of illegally carrying a firearm. Mr. Rowland was freed.

Over the years most of the records dealing with the riot conveniently disappeared. The National Guard files for those days in 1921 are missing. In archive editions of the Tribune, the two articles that called for Mr. Rowland's death are neatly cut out and the commission has been unable to find a copy of the lynching editorial.

Attempts to publicize the story in 1971, the 50th anniversary of the riot, didn't come to much because people who had participated were still alive. But now the only people alive were children in 1921 and passions have cooled.

"It's easier with a little bit of space to talk about very painful episodes," said Bob Blackburn, chairman of the race riot commission.

Stories from riot survivors have led the commission to three sites where there may be mass graves. If any bodies are found, they will be examined by Dr. Clyde Snow, a forensic anthropologist who has investigated massacres in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Balkans.

The commission is also using real estate records, census records and maps to try and put a dollar amount on riot losses. Its final report, due in January, will also examine the issue of reparations for survivors or their descendants. The state never compensated burned-out blacks for their lost property and most insurance companies refused to honour policies.

"Reparations could be anything from an apology all the way to cash payments," said Mr. Blackburn.

While the commission is helping Tulsa face up to its bitter past, divisions between the races, both social and economic, remain. The white section of town has graceful houses and wide lawns while the 10% of Tulsans who are black still live in the north of town in smaller and poorer homes.

"It hasn't changed that much here," said Mr. Monroe, his face tightening in anger. "You walk down the street in some parts of town and they'll call the police. You don't belong in that area and you better keep your black ass out of there. That's Tulsa Oklahoma."

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[posted Thu, Jun 10, 1999]