The Compound and Friends - The Burning of Black Wall Street

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

This week on The Compound Show, Josh talks to journalist and author Tim Madigan about his book The Burning, which chronicles the rise and fall of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which happened 100 years ago this June. Tim tells us the true story of one of the darkest days in American history - and it's a story you've likely never heard before. If you like this week's episode, please leave us a rating and review, they go a long way. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, JB. Today's show is the final episode in what we've been doing all through February, which is commemorating Black History Month by talking about the history of African Americans in this country as it relates to the economy, the stock market, et cetera. And I think I really saved the most impactful episode I wanted to do for last. So what we're going to talk about today is a book called The Burning. And The Burning was written by Tim Madigan about 20 years ago, actually almost to the week or to the month. And he's a journalist, worked at a big newspaper in Texas and was assigned an article. And upon being assigned the article, he basically ended up in a situation where he had to research something that he almost didn't believe could have possibly happened.

And this is the true story of the burning of Black Wall Street. the true story of the burning of Black Wall Street. And this episode really means a lot to me because when I first became aware of this event in US history, I said the same thing. I said, how could this have happened? And nobody's aware of it. Two things. First, how could this have happened? But second, how come nobody even knows the story? How come we've never been taught this story? So you're going to learn a lot today about an episode in American history that is starting to get more attention. But for decades and decades, it was almost something that it was always something that was too terrible to speak of.

And so teachers didn't really teach it. You didn't learn about this in school. And now all of a sudden, there's this kind of awakening around this event. And so I really want you to just kind of absorb it the way that I have and carefully consider the takeaways from this. But Tim's going to come on in a second. And his book was published 20 years ago. But the event that he's chronicled actually took place in June of

1921. So it's almost June of 2021. So the 100th anniversary of this terrible, terrible day in American history is coming up this summer. And by listening to this episode of The Compound Show, you're going to have a really good understanding of what went on. And I think you're going to be shocked if you haven't done the research and you haven't read about this on your own. I really think you're going to be shocked at what you're going to hear. So I'm really appreciative of all of you taking this journey with me over the last few weeks and allowing me to cover this topic and to make it relevant to today, which I really tried hard to do.

And we will get back to our regularly scheduled programming next week of stock market and economic mayhem. But for right now, I want you guys to settle in, listen to my discussion with Tim Madigan, the author of The Burning, and learn about the day that Black Wall Street was destroyed. Thanks for listening, guys. Here's the music, and then we'll get right into it. The Compound Show with Downtown Josh Brown. How you doing? What a funnest financial podcast on Wall Street. How we're helping millions of people to make smart decisions, Welcome to the Compound Show with downtown Josh Brown. Josh is the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management.

All opinions expressed by Josh or any podcast guest are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Okay, Tim Madigan is here. How are you, sir? I'm terrific. How are you? I'm doing great. I'm so happy to have you here today. Just a quick introduction,

but you spent about 30 years writing for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper, among many other publications. And then one day, an editor assigned you a story, and it's a story about probably the worst racial massacre in US history. And you realize that you really hadn't heard anything about it beforehand. There were not much about it. Is that right? It was stunning. That is absolutely correct. I guess it was around early in the year 2000, and my boss came up to me and handed me a wire story about the Telstra Race Riot Commission. And in that story, it said up to 300 people had been slaughtered, most of them African-American, by this white mob. And I looked

at her and I go, what? If this is indeed true, how could we not have known about this? You would think that'd be one of the watershed moments of our history. And she said, I had the same reaction. So she sent me to Tulsa. It was, again, it was 20 years ago. And fortunately at the time I could interview several survivors and the people who were working really hard to try to restore this to history. And I came back to Fort Worth and I wrote a piece that ran under the headline of Tulsa's terrible secret. And that ultimately led to the book. All right. So I found the book after having, like most Americans who recently became aware of this incident in American history, last October, HBO had a series called Watchmen,

which debuted, and it was very highly anticipated, great cast. A lot of people were familiar with the graphic novels, which I guess were from the 80s. So the first scene of the first episode of the show is a dramatization of this Tulsa massacre. And I think like the entire country went on Twitter and then went on Google all at once and said, wait a minute, what the hell is this? This can't be real. Like this cannot have happened. And the HBO version didn't really seem very far off from the version written in your book,

which I ultimately found. Because I was just like, wait a minute, the KKK, the US Army, World War I era biplanes, firebombing, how could this have really happened? And no one's ever learned about it before. But I feel like America just had this collective experience. Now your book turns this month, I think, 20 years old. Your book is called The Burning. And the event itself turns 100 this June. Have you been thinking a lot about that recently? Yeah, I mean, that's probably an understatement. To your point about Watchmen, even after my book was written, there continued to be this collective amnesia regarding this issue and so much of our issues regarding race. And

I think part of the deal in my book was published is that the nation just wasn't ready to have this discussion yet or look at it. And I always felt like it was going to be something like a movie that was going to be necessary to introduce this to a mass audience. And so sure enough, Watchmen happened. And the reason Watchmen happened is because one of the producers had the same experience I did, finding out about it, thought it was horrible, wanted to do something with it. David Lindelof, who had produced Lost and many other hit TV series. Correct. And part of their research was my book. And they used the book as significantly for their source material.

And it was kind of interesting to see a lot of the things I'd written about come to the screen like that. But I talked to Nicole Castle, the director, about that and about this whole thing with Tulsa. the night of, or the night of, within 24 hours after the premiere of that pilot episode, that there were something like 500,000 Google searches on the Tulsa race massacre. I believe it. The biggest question was, did this really happen? And of course, we know the answer to that. So it does take a movie or a TV show often to make people aware of things that they weren't taught in school and then to make them really care about them. And I think that scene, as hard as it is to watch, was extremely effective

in getting people to the point where they're like, wait a minute, this can't be real. But we're going to go a little bit deeper because we're going to work with your book, and we're going to tell everyone today a story that they have not really been taught. And we're going to tell everyone today a story that they have not really been taught. And probably their only exposure to it was the opening scene of season one of The Watchmen. And we're going to give people a little bit of a better idea of the context in which something like this had happened. And we'll talk about some of the misconceptions. And then we'll talk about the aftermath. So your story really begins.

I mean, it's hard to pick a beginning. You can pick the Civil War, but I feel like it really kicks off when somebody discovers petroleum oil in, let's say, 10 or 20 miles south of Tulsa, which at that time is what maybe like a fort left over from fighting the indians or what what is really in tulsa at the time it was um very much just a village essentially okay a trading a trading village uh for native americans um on the on the river uh it had started to pick up a little bit because of some railroad activity in the area. And it was in, I think, in November of 1905 when there was this huge oil strike and then turned into one of the most productive oil fields in history, frankly. So Tulsa becomes a boomtown, like a Western boomtown. Like almost overnight, it becomes this boomtown. Skyscrapers sprout almost overnight, it becomes this boomtown, skyscrapers sprout almost overnight, people are making money hand over fist. There is this kind of symbiotic relationship that developed between the white, the affluent white people and the black people who eventually formed a community

just north of the railroad tracks. in that these people would know that the affluent whites would need gardeners and maids and chauffeurs and shoeshine boys and et cetera, et cetera. And so they would go north across the tracks to work every day, be paid very well relatively, and then come back home with money in their pockets. Right. And they would need, and then to serve those people, this very prominent professional class, entrepreneurial class developed with doctors, lawyers, hoteliers, newspaper people, drugstores, just a complete kind of self-contained economic community there to the extent that Booker T. Washington, I think, was the one who, after he visited, called Tulsa the Negro

Wall Street of America. And so it had become known, it had had a reputation across the country as the place to be if you're an African-American. Okay. So this is Greenwood and this is basically a lot of the money that's coming out of the oil business for Tulsa is finding its way into the banks and into the pockets of people who lived north of the tracks and their African-American communities. And a lot of them had come from places where they really were looking for that kind of boomtown and they wanted to be amongst each other. They'd been chased out of places like Memphis and some of the characters in your story, all real people who lived and photographs of them. They finally found a place where they could do business, own a home, do business with banks, work across the tracks with whites and blacks.

And it was how long did that go on for? Is it 20 years? Well, it went on. You know, it really started in 19, started in 1905 with the arrival of a guy named John Stratford and O.W. Gurley, a couple of very enterprising entrepreneurs who basically saw the potential here. And they're the ones who really started this. And so from 1905 until 1921, you know, just things grew and grew and grew. But your point is very well taken in that so many people came to Greenwood, came to Tulsa for precisely that reason. In fact, one of the chapters in my book is titled Beyond Hatred's Reach. They figured that they had left the worst of the Jim Crow South behind, that they could come to this place and make money and just kind of live their

lives, raise their families, and, you know, in peace without, without fear of the terrible violence and, and, and Jim Crow policies that were in place in so many other places. Because Tulsa is the West, Tulsa is not the South. And it's a frontier. Is it even a state at this? When does it achieve statehood? You know, that's a good question. It was right around this time. I think it was a few years prior. Don't quote me on that. Very soon after statehood, one of the first things that the Oklahoma legislature did was create their own set of Jim Crow laws. And so, frankly, this belief of so many people that came to Greenwood was naive, that in the United States in 1920, there was really no escaping it. Because it was almost inevitable that anything so visible, anything so successful

was destined to run into serious trouble from the white community. Yeah, because you have poor whites who are also attracted to working on the oil fields and you call them the roughnecks. And they do almost like it's on a low boil when we first start hearing about Greenwood in that 1905, 1910 period of time. I don't know the extent to which people in Greenwood really kind of realized that the boiling was happening. But in those days, if you were a successful African-American, you were uppity. I mean, it's not, you know, perhaps not fair to generalize so completely, but that's what these people ran into when they became successful. And so like, who do you think you are? Don't you know where, you know, I'm your better. makes people even more infuriated when they feel as though they've lost their place in society to someone who they deem to be not as worthy as they are. And that whole notion was so deeply ingrained

in our culture at the time of racial superiority. And it was advocated at the highest levels of our government from Woodrow Wilson on down. So, I mean, and, you know, there was this whole debate in the African-American community at the time. On one hand was Booker T. Washington, another hand was W.E.B. Dubois. And, you know, Dubois said, we're going to fight for what we're going to fight to prove ourselves. Washington said, we're just going to be treated the same by being industrious and in

getting educated and working hard but there was that the whole notion of superiority is kind of underlies so much of this right so so washington's basically saying we're going to make ourselves so valuable and so useful to the communities in which we live. Is that the cast your bucket conceit where like they can't live without us because, and then Dubois, I guess is Harvard educated, but a little bit more of a rabble rouser. And he's saying they're not going to take another thing from us after everything we've been through. Okay. So now here's what I want to go next. During this period of time,

we're also seeing the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan. And you tell this story about how during Reconstruction, you basically got some Confederate soldiers laying around, nothing much to do, come up with this idea to start pranking people in white sheets. But then it takes on a life of its own and becomes a political movement. It's quickly squashed by 1870 or in the 1870s. But then it's brought back around this time, and some of the leading citizens in Oklahoma, in Tulsa, some of the leading politicians and wealthiest people have become Klansmen to some level or another. And I think that that really becomes a big part of the backdrop here. Well, it is. And it's unknown

precisely to the extent to which the Klan played a role in this. But the fact that the Klan had become a dominant part of our society in that time is symptomatic of the of the environment that that we were living in at the time and you know it goes back to uh another thing that completely astounded me was the first great cinematic blockbuster in history or what many consider to be is birth of a nation by wd griff Griffith, which is nothing more than a celebration of the resurgent Klan, and it invoked the most vile racial stereotypes you can imagine.

And again, it was endorsed by Woodrow Wilson, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and cheered by audiences in North and South alike. It was Titanic, or it was Gone with the Wind, you know, decades before those films right and so that was so the clan was mainstream for lack of a better way of putting it but that was the that was kind of the cauldron into which uh you know we started to walk towards in the 1920 all right so let's talk about the spark that that leads to the conflagration. It's late May in 1921, so almost 100 years ago this summer.

And there's a fairly inconsequential teenage African-American boy who has a slight altercation with a teenage white girl in a department store elevator. And by the end of that day, the boy's on the run, gets arrested and all hell breaks loose. Can you tell us kind of like how that got started? Well, the boy's name is Dick Roland, a shoeshine boy in downtown Tulsa, white Tulsa, who- I say inconsequential, like he's not important other than as a spark to this whole thing. No, he was, even Greenwood people thought he was kind of a ne'er-do-well, I think. But anyway, he rides the elevator to use the restroom. Something happens where the elevator jolts and he steps on her, grabs her arm or whatever.

And there was some suggestion that the two of them knew one another anyway. Anyway, he runs out. She screams. He runs out. She screams. He runs out. And boy, that is not a good thing if you're a young African-American male to be accused of assault by a white woman, especially a girl.

And he's on the wrong side of the tracks at that time. He's in the white part of Tulsa. Right. And, okay. So they go and pick him up. And the police investigate. And I think the police immediately seemed to come to the conclusion that this wasn't, there was probably no merit to these charges. That I think, you know, my sense of it is that he was being held in custody as much for his own protection as anything. It might have completely dissipated were it not for the editorial in the Tulsa Tribune written by the editor named Richard Lloyd-Jones, who basically was trying to compete in a newspaper war by just kind of playing the race card for the short way of putting it.

But he basically calls for he calls for a lynching in the newspaper and the newspaper is really powerful in that day and age. The headline was to lynch Negro tonight. And within minutes of that hitting the street, crowds started to form at the courthouse because at the time lynching was kind of a spectator sport. And within hours, hundreds of people had gotten to the courthouse. Anyway, word quickly gets back to Greenwood. This paper gets back to Greenwood. This paper gets back to Greenwood. And all of a sudden, you know, the elders of Greenwood and many World War I veterans, African-American veterans say this isn't going to happen here. at this point, race riots or lynchings, they've already heard and read about similar events in DC, in Chicago, right? Like this has happened elsewhere and they say, not here.

Like this couldn't happen here because that's how at home they felt in this amazing community that they've built. So that's the rallying cry. Especially after their service in World War I, where they figured that that would prove own in this amazing community that they've built. So that's the rallying cry. Especially after their service in World War I, where they figured that that would prove that they were worthy of respect and better treatment. So anyway, they take steps to, the crowd grows, darkness comes, the African-American groups take steps to say, we're not going to leave it to this well-intentioned white sheriff to protect this guy. We're going to help. We're going to go down there and make sure that it happens.

And this cadre of up to 70, you know, actually two, one smaller, one larger later on in the evening, go to this, march through this white mob to the courthouse and say, sheriff, we're here to help you. The sheriff says, I don't need your help, boys. You're just inflaming things. But on the second trip to the courthouse. Well, Tim, let's back up because you write this so cinematically. It's amazing the level of detail you have. I don't want to say minute by minute, but hour by hour, these things all taking place in a very specific order to produce what ends up happening. But here you have two or three carloads of armed African-American men ride up to a mob of, let's say, 500 furious, probably drunk because it's the 1920s, white people just after dark who think that there's an attempted teenage black racists being protected inside of this jail?

Right. So having these carloads of armed black men showing up is probably not a great idea. However, there was a lynching the week prior of a white kid. So they knew if they didn't take action that this boy sitting in jail was probably going to be killed. So it's almost like an impossible situation for anyone to stay calm about. Your description is brilliant. I mean, it's spot on. I mean, it was just the heat kept growing and growing and growing because you're right. I mean, there had been a lynching of a white person just a short time before, and it was completely

reasonable for the African-American in Greenwood to think that if they didn't intervene, that it was going to happen again. If they'll hang a white kid, they'll definitely hang a black kid for sure. But there's no question that it was inflammatory to the extreme. You have a protagonist here too. You have a hero. I'm trying to picture what current Hollywood actor would play him. But you have this guy, Sheriff McCullough, who had been haunted by witnessing a lynching years earlier. He's got the kid in custody and he's sitting on the fourth floor of this jailhouse building guarding him. And he's basically saying no matter what i'm not letting another kid get lynched on my watch and he's got to keep this mob uh from breaking in

and and taking uh roland well i cast sam elliott in that role i think i love it uh and you're exactly right he basically told the mob if you're gonna have to kill me to get to this kid. And what he did was, it's on the fourth floor of the courthouse, brought him up there, put him in a cell, disabled the elevator. So the only way up there was single file up the stairs. And I think everyone believes that he would have made good on his promise. So now you've got armed African-American men on the north on the south side of the tracks in in Tulsa, like right in the town square. And you've got armed you've got an armed white mob that by this point have been outside screaming for hours. And it seems as though a shot is accidentally fired. There's an altercation between one member of each side and then a gun goes off and then that's it. Yep. That's it. I mean, that's okay. It was what happens. There was a, uh, the story is an old white guy, uh, tried to grab the gun of one of the African-American veterans saying, what are you going to do with that gun? And the guy says, I'm going to use it if I have to. And the white guy

says, I tell you are. And he grabs it. The shot is fired. But that is like there is no turning back after that, because there was a lot of guns in that crowd on both sides. And I think when the smoke had cleared, there was up to 12 people who were dead at the courthouse. Just in that opening barrage of violence. Yes. People were diving behind trees and cars and buildings to try to get out of the line of fire. And then at some point, the African-Americans initiate what is essentially a fighting retreat, basically fighting their way back north until they can get back across the railroad tracks into Greenwood. And warn everyone.

Like, here's what just happened. They didn't know what was coming yet, but here's what just happened. It's interesting. This is 1921. Besides you've got a lot of people who just came back from Europe and had been trained in things like fighting retreats and sniper, you know, the moment that first shot was fired, as the historian Scott Elzer told me, Dick Rowland became an afterthought. Nobody cared about Dick Rowland anymore. I mean, the ultimate affront had been delivered to the white mob, and that would not go unanswered. So throughout the night, there's gunfire.

You can hear it everywhere. And you've got people in Greenwood who have put down roots and invested and built businesses. And I don't want to say that they think it's the situation salvageable. I think at this point, they realize everything they spent their whole lives building is probably gone. They don't know to what extent yet. But you talk about a lot of these great entrepreneurs in the African-American community in Greenwood. The grocer comes to mind, for example. I forget his name. Obi Mann, I think you're probably referring to. Yeah. So he's one of the most successful business people anywhere in Tulsa. But in Greenwood specifically, he's kind of like a pillar of the community.

People like him have the most – like they have a lifetime worth of material wealth to lose. They don't realize to what extent the loss of life is going to dwarf economic losses at this point, right? Yeah, I don't think anybody could have predicted, even in their worst assessment assessment of this that anyone could have predicted what it ultimately ended up to be. Right. OK, so you have this situation where it's almost dawn and it's been a horrible night and there's been shooting, there's been broken glass, there's been scuffles everywhere, people being chased down. But there's no internet. So people who live in the city, just they hear gunshots. They don't really know the extent of everything that's happening. But in the meanwhile, you've got white people who have been caught up in this mob being deputized by the real police, put like a badge pinned on them. Go get a gun, go kill somebody,

is the order that they're being given. And they're breaking into sporting goods stores to steal rifles, guns, any weapon they can find for this coming incursion into Greenwood. And then you mentioned the whistle, so I'll let you tell the story. But where did the whistle come from? story, but what, what is that? Where did the whistle come from? What did it signify? And is that one of the most consequential sounds ever heard on American soil? I hadn't, it kind of got, gave me goosebumps when you describe it that way, because I'd never thought of it in those terms, but I think it probably was, uh, overnight. And again, how exactly this was organized? No one really knows, but it clearly was. Overnight, these mobs, you know, who had armed themselves in the manner that you had just described, were basically dispatched through word of mouth, picking up the telephone or talking to their neighbors, dispatched to various strategic points along Greenwood. And basically the word was, wait for the signal.

And at 5.08 a.m., there's the shrill whistle, and there's some debate as to whether it came from a locomotive on the railroad tracks or from a centrally located factory. But the meaning of it was clear, which was it was the signal to attack. And so one witness says, from behind every car and tree and building, this white mob came forth firing. And they met fierce resistance at first because a lot of the African-Americans knew what was coming. And they had basically taken their shotguns and their rifles and any weapon they could find and plenty of ammunition and and stuck their guns out the windows. And for a brief while, they did repel them because I think there are several whites who died in the process.

But of course, the numbers are just too arrayed against them in too significant a way. And within a couple of hours, I think Greenwood was overrun. in a way. And within a couple of hours, I think Greenwood was overrun. Well, because then you have, I don't know if it's army reserves or regular army, but you have professional troops show up to augment the mob. And you even have World War I era fighter planes in the sky. I don't know what they're doing. I don't think they're not dropping bombs, but they're doing something. I mean, it got way bigger than just a riot. It became almost military. Well, the National Guard showed up at noon, essentially, when everything was over with.

And the mob pretty much had free reign all morning. The planes. But they're arresting people throughout the rest of the day. They're arresting people and taking them into detainment camps. The planes, the speculation is they belong to local oil companies, weren't just... The people in those biplanes were armed and they were tossing this Molotov cocktail like incendiaries, you know, at all these buildings. And so and one of the deal, one of the that perhaps more than any single thing was what was so terrifying and so dispiriting to the people in Greenwood was because this is this had taken stuff to a whole different level. Plus the fact that the mob had commanded high ground at the corner of there being planes swooping down over a town street and dropping incendiaries, that's like something out of a nightmare.

That's almost like dragons in the sky. There was two stories. The book begins with an interview I did with a woman who was in her late 80s at the time named Eldoris McCondersy. And she was nine years old the morning this happened. And her mother woke her up and said, Eldoris, we need to go. The white people are killing the colored folks. And so her parents drag her out the door and they're headed north along these railroad tracks. And she obviously is confused by it all. But then all of a sudden this plane appears. And she described it to me like fat raindrops falling in the ground around her.

And she realized what that was actually were bullets coming from these planes. The other story was I mentioned John Stratford before and they had a huge hotel there. I'm writing a piece for some Smithsonian magazine about this. hotel there. I'm writing a piece for some Smithsonian magazine about this. And we found his memoirs where he had a group of men who are with him in the lobby of the hotel, willing to fight with him to the death to defend the hotel. But then the plane shows up and it swerves and it swerves at the hotel and tosses something flaming through the transom of the hotel. And all the men except Strapper said, no, they got us. Not going to do this. So the planes were a very, very big deal in all this.

So now that day turns to night. You've got white mob, I guess, mob members. Because they're not full-time mobsters. These are people that are in normal life before this. But so now some of them have taken prisoners. They've tied rope around Greenwood residents. They're sitting watch over them. At what point does this wear off and people say, wait a minute, what the hell am I doing?

What have I just done? How did that play out? Well, an important part of this is kind of the methodology that the mob used in destroying Greenwood. They went from business to business, house to house, church to church, basically forcing the residents out. If the residents resisted, they often were killed. Then the places, the homes, businesses were ransacked, looted. A lot of times women were waiting with their shopping bags to go into these houses and steal anything that they could carry off. And then, you know, when the looting was done, the places were burned. And so at the end of, you know, within a couple hours,

the only things that were left standing essentially were the outhouses because evidently the mob didn't feel like they were worth wasting their kerosene on. So ultimately, there was nothing left to burn. And the National Guard had got there. But by that time, you know, and again, hundreds of Greenwood residents were being marched to the streets to detention in the convention hall or the baseball park. Thousands of people were left homeless. You know, to your question, when did the fever break? I'm not sure the fever ever broke. But the question is, people started to realize that not only was this going to make Tulsa look terrible in the eyes of the world,

which it briefly did, but they were exposed to murder charges. And so then this massive conspiracy of silence begins. You have a photograph in the book, in the middle of the book of, it looks like a 20-year-old man holding a, like a boy to me, holding a rifle or a shotgun, just kind of posing in front of the Dreamland movie theater, which is on fire, which is, the Dreamland movie theater is very important in Greenwood. It's like one of the most important, I guess, cultural institutions. It's a stage, it's where they show movies. So he's standing in front of that, It's a stage. It's where they show movies. So he's standing in front of that.

It's on fire. He's got this look on his face, and I don't want to get political here, but it does remind me of the looks on a lot of the faces of some of the people we saw protesting in early January. It's just this kind of like, look what I did, and I'm not 100% sure why I did it. I was in the moment, and now I'm standing in front of it. And, you know, it's a 20 year old.

It's a man who should be responsible for his own actions. But there's also like almost like an innocence lost. in this riot and then massacre years and years later committed suicide or couldn't speak of it publicly, or just would get this vacant look in their eyes, according to their spouse, when the subject would come up. But to a large extent, like I don't feel as though Tulsa,

at least in your retelling, I don't feel as though the community really dealt with it. Like anytime within the generations after. They didn't deal with it, you know, in any meaningful way at all. I mean, the stories are that, you know, that after it was done, men put notches in their weapons to signify how many blacks they had killed. and there were postcards that were sent all over, you know, distributed widely to various parts of the country with scenes of the, of the massacre. So, I mean, there was a period of time when a lot of people in Tulsa were actually proud

of it. The city, the city leaders, however, knew that this was a bad, you know, for the, as a PR problem, this was a terrible thing. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Houston, papers from all over the country came and reported from Tulsa for a couple of days. And Tulsa leaders were remorseful to them. But as soon as the national spotlight dimmed, what they tried to do was they tried to appropriate the land, the burned out land and you know for white purposes they were repelled in court but you know it became this thing where everybody knew that this is a bad thing for Tulsa and so within a few years you could have moved to Tulsa a few years later and never known this that it happened and that's incredible and the best description of this came from a guy named Bill Williams he told this to a high school student in the 1950s.

Williams went on to be a teacher. And this kid was Don Ross, was one of his students. And Williams spoke of what happened to his students that day and said, you know, 30 years ago when I was your age, this is what happened in Tulsa. And Don Ross jumped up and he says, there's no way this could happen. And let's not know about it. And, well, Williams took the time to show Ross photographs of the bodies and the burned-out buildings and introduced him to other survivors. And so Ross finally says, well, how do you explain that this could be kept a secret

all these years? And Williams' reply was, he said, Black people will talk to you about it if they know who you are. But after now you know what happened, you can probably understand that if you lived through this once, you probably don't want to have to live through it again. And he said the white people were silent, but probably for a different reason. One is that they were ashamed or two, all these years later, they're still afraid of being arrested. And so even though the dynamic of the amnesia, the conspiracy of silence was different, both black and white kind of, you know, in a strange way conspired to make sure that it kind of disappeared from history. history. So we think that something like 300 people ultimately were killed and God knows how many injured and how many dollars in property lost. Is that what we think was the end result? 300 is kind of the conventional figure now. Hundreds, 500, 600, 700 injured and various

estimates of what was lost in Greenwood in today's dollars range from $50 million to $200 million. Was anyone ever arrested? 88 people were indicted. I think there's a number of 57 of them African-Americans. Only one person was ever convicted, and that was the Tulsa police chief for dereliction of duty. And I think that one of the things that happened afterwards is, is that given all the things we've just been talking about, the Tulsa courts just didn't have the stomach or the interest to relive this with with prosecutions. Can you imagine a situation today where hundreds of people are murdered in one day, and no one goes to no one ends up going to trial and being convicted. It seems

inconceivable, but it probably seemed inconceivable to the most of the country a hundred years ago, certainly in places like New York and Chicago. If you told someone that something like that was possible, I feel as though they would have said, no, it's not. But it actually happened that way. Yeah. I mean, that's why it goes back to my incredulity when I first heard about it. And this is one of the great American stories, I think. And as ugly as it is, it's just, it's so incumbent on us to really look at it. A really important part of my experience is I grew up in the upper Midwest, in a small town, no black people. At the day that in 20 years ago, when when my boss brought me that piece, racial issues are completely irrelevant to me. I just... Minnesota?

Yeah, yeah, Minnesota. And, you know, I just wasn't interested. I just figured that race was racial stuff was developing as it should. And then, but when I learned the history, not only for that first story, but in researching a book and learned that what happened in Tulsa was completely consistent for that time in America, different only that, you know, unique only in its degree, it just really changed the way I looked at the world. And I realized that we had this huge problem that we hadn't been looking at. And it changed my heart. And my theory is that there are millions upon millions of other white people like me, people of goodwill, people of intellectual curiosity, as I think a lot of your listeners are,

curiosity, as I think a lot of your listeners are, that if they only learned the history, the real history, in some significant way, then it would change their hearts too. That is my hope and prayer for this book. And since what happened in this summer, it's found a large audience, I'm pleased to say. And I'm really gratified to know that so many white people have read the book, have had the same kind of epiphany that I did years ago. That there's a level of understanding and learning the history that wasn't there before. And I just think that that is so important today. Well, Tim, I'm so glad you said that. And we can end on that note because that's exactly what I want to happen with this episode of the podcast.

I spent, I work on Wall Street. Most of what I talk about is finance and investing. I spent the whole month of February doing podcast episodes for Black History Month, but I wanted to do Black Financial History Month. And we went through stuff like the GI Bill and the inherently racist practices in things like housing and getting mortgages after World War II that effectively kept millions of African-American families from the American dream and being able to compound their wealth the same way that returning soldiers who were white were able to. white were able to. And we covered the first black millionaire on Wall Street, talked about Jeremiah Hamilton in a previous episode, whom also most people have never heard of this man's existence. Unbelievable story. We had a historian from Sydney, Australia, believe it or not, who's an expert on this guy, wrote a great book called The Prince of Darkness. So we've been talking

about black financial history or the African-American experience in America with wealth and the economy and stock market. But I really wanted to end on this note because I thought your book was so powerful. And I agree with you. I think it's so important for people to read this and have their hearts, maybe not changed, but at least affected by it. And so I don't know that there's a more important takeaway. If you read this book, you come across it, you spend a couple of hours and you just say, oh my God, how could something like this have happened? What else have I not really been fully appreciating throughout my life about the struggle that other people have gone through?

So that's what I took away from it. And I'm so glad you came on the podcast this week to tell us all about the story. And hopefully thousands of people buy this book as a result of hearing you talk about it today. So I just want to say thank you very much. Well, I can't tell you personally what it means to me personally, and in a larger sense that you have not only read the book, but internalized it the way you have. It's hard. It's not easy. It's painful, but it's also noble. And I think it's humane to make the effort to try to understand people who are different than us and what their history might have been. So I applaud you and I couldn't be more grateful to be part of this today. Thanks again, Tim. And the book is called The Burning by Tim Madigan. Grab it at

Amazon, find it at your library, buy it at Barnes and Noble, wherever you come across it or wherever you can order it from. I highly recommend reading it. And Tim, thank you again. This is just a really important story. I think you tell it really well. And I think we're going to turn a lot of new people on to find out what actually happened here. So thank you. Thanks for listening. Check us out at thecompoundnews.com for daily investing and market insights. You can watch all of our videos at youtube.com slash the compound RWM. Talk to you next week.