Today, Explained - The Tulsa massacre, 100 years later

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

It was one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history, but for a long time very few Americans learned what happened to the Black residents of the Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Guest host Jamil Smith explores why — and how — that’s changing. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. I'm Vox Senior Correspondent Jameel Smith, sitting in for Sean Rumsperm. Back in 1921, if you were Black and lived in Tulsa's Greenwood District, you pretty much never needed to leave. You would find hotels, beauty salons, barbershops, movie theaters, dance halls, pool halls, grocery stores, restaurants, haberdasheries, clothing stores, shoeshine shops, jazz clubs, and a number of service providers, including doctors, lawyers, accountants, and dentists.

It was dubbed Black Wall Street, but a better moniker would have been Black Main Street, since these were mostly small businesses and, again, professionals, service providers. That's Hannibal Johnson. He's an author, attorney, and he serves on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. Now, Greenwood was one of many communities throughout the former Oklahoma Territory that was founded after the U.S. government and others parceled out former indigenous tribal lands to formerly enslaved Black people. That ability to own land set the foundation for Greenwood to become one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States until Memorial Day of 1921. The incident happened on Monday, May 30th, 1921, which happened to be Memorial Day.

Dick Rowland was at work shining shoes. He needed to use the restroom. Tulsa was a highly segregated city. He knew that his options were limited. He knew of a restroom in a downtown building called the Drexel Building on an upper floor. He walked over to the Drexel Building, entered the building, boarded the elevator. Something happened on the elevator. We'll never know exactly what it was, but it apparently caused the elevator to jerk or to lurch. Dick Rowland bumped into or perhaps brushed up against Sarah Page. She overreacted, began to scream. The elevator landed in the lobby.

Dick Rowland, frightened, ran from the elevator. Sarah Page, distraught, exited the elevator, and she was comforted by a clerk from Renberg's, a locally owned store. She told him of being assaulted in the elevator. He was concerned, and he called the police. She would later recant, retract that original version of the story, refuse to cooperate with prosecutors after they arrested Dick Rowland for the attempted assault. The next day, May 31st, 1921, the Tulsa Tribune ran a story entitled, Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator.

It was a false narrative of an attempted rape in broad daylight in a public building in downtown Tulsa. A large white mob, mostly white men, gathered on the lawn of the courthouse, and there were rumors among the white mob that they were going to attempt to overpower law enforcement and lynch Dick Rowland. Eventually, a group of several dozen black men marched down to the courthouse, intent on protecting Dick Rowland from what they thought would be a certain death by lynching. As they approached, words were exchanged between the much larger white group, which numbered ultimately in the thousands, and the smaller black group, several dozen men. A white man tried to take a black man's gun. The gun discharged. And in the words of one of the survivors of the massacre, all hell broke loose after that. So the violence lasted roughly 16 hours. And black men put up a vigorous, robust defense

initially, but it was short-lived because they were outnumbered, outgunned, overmatched. The teeming white mob spilled over into the Greenwood community, the black community, Black Wall Street, destroying everything in sight, burning, shooting, looting. Many of the men in the white mob had been deputized by local law enforcement. They prevented the Tulsa Fire Department from putting out the fires that raged. Airplanes flew overhead, officially on reconnaissance missions, but according to a number of eyewitnesses and survivors, the planes either strafed the community with bullets and or dropped some sort of incendiary devices on the community, bombs, some sort of devices that may have been dynamite, may have

been kerosene, may have been nitroglycerin, something that caused the fires to spread more rapidly and burn more brilliantly. When the dust settled, most people who have looked at this believe somewhere between 100 and 300 people, most of them black, were killed. Hundreds more were injured. At least 1,250 homes in the black community were destroyed, as were scores of businesses

and other commercial establishments. Property damage conservatively estimated at the time was $1.5 to $2 million. Again, that's a lowball estimate, but even that translates to well over $25 million today. Many Black folks spent days living in internment centers throughout the city. Very much like people of Japanese ancestry were interned during World War II. The real narrative here, though, is that of the indomitable human spirit. Because even as the embers from the massacre still smoldered, the black community began to rebuild. And rebuilt sufficiently by 1925 to host the national meeting of the National Negro Business

League, which is Booker T. Washington's Black Chamber of Commerce. By the early to mid-1940s, there were well over 200 documented Black-owned and operated businesses back in the Greenwood District. So this is the story of the human spirit. What happened to the black community in Tulsa, this pogrom? I mean, it's not something I learned about in school. Same goes for a lot of Americans. Can you tell us how you first learned about this and how you view the silencing of this particular tragedy? I would say first that we don't do a good job here being in America more generally in talking about hard history, history that is not pretty. We tend to

want to sanitize history and marginalize the history of people of color, let's just be honest. And Tulsa is no exception. There are a number of psychological dynamics that really feed into that tendency to silence or erase this history. And Tulsa specifically, think about 1921, what was Tulsa doing? Tulsa was on an upward trajectory toward becoming the self-described oil capital of the world. So the leaders of Tulsa, these were white men, didn't want this stain on Tulsa's reputation. They were trying to position Tulsa as a cosmopolitan city. So they wanted to create a pristine reputation for the community.

So not talking about this, pretending it never happened, was part of that desire. There was also, in 1921 after the massacre, shame in sectors of the white community. Shame that they had allowed this to happen here in Tulsa, a city that they took great pride in. In the black community, there was post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and fear associated with the event. Fear that the event could recur if they would step outside their place. When you talk to some of the survivors, many of the survivors were living 20 years ago. There was a commission that studied these events and interviewed survivors between

1997 and 2001. I was here then. I had the privilege of meeting some of the survivors who had really vivid memories of the event. The bullets were just raining down over us. The airplanes were up, just raining down the bullets. And I could see them, and I heard them. And I was so frightened, I pulled away from my parents and ran into this chicken coop with all the other people. And I got into the corner of that, just scared as I could be. But my father came in there, and I had to leave out with him so I could stay with my family. So that was it. And many of them talked about that in their families, the history wasn't talked about because the elders were concerned

about burdening the children and somehow hobbling the children with this torturous history. So they decided not to talk about it. So for many years, this history went undercover, sub rosa. It was not incorporated in the textbooks. Think about how do we know what we know in terms of history? We know it because typically we learned it from school and it was included in our textbooks. If you want great swaths of folks to know something, then you put it in the textbooks in the public schools. That didn't happen for many, many, many years. You've been writing and lecturing about

what happened in Tulsa for two decades now, but when did it really become a larger part of the public consciousness? Is that moment now or was it back in, say, 2019 when Watchmen, the HBO show, depicted the massacre in its first episode? I think it was the release of the report by the Riot Commission in 2001. It's not, I don't think it's recent events. I mean, there's renewed attention. More people are learning about the history. But there was a great deal of attention given to that report, international attention, to

the report in 2001. And that's when curriculum began to change, when public discourse began to include this, when people in Tulsa began to talk about how do we repair the damage that remains from the massacre, what is the legacy of the massacre, these types of questions. So, recent events obviously have broadened the acknowledgement of these events. And popular culture, the Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, their use of this history as part of their narrative arc has been important because it's a gateway for people to begin to learn about the actual history.

You're going to go attack on Lydia and they're going to get you someplace safe. How you doing, Joe? We're going to be right behind you. And the fact, of course, the 100th anniversary of the massacre has drawn incredible media attention. It's yet another opportunity for us to leverage this history to create positive change in the community and uplift what was once a destroyed community, physically destroyed, the Greenwood District, Black Wall Street. In Oklahoma, we also have, there's the House Bill 1775 that bans

teachers from teaching certain concepts of race and racism. And of course, there are similar efforts by lawmakers in Republican-led states across the country trying to keep people from, I mean, we use the term critical race theory, but really the heart of it is that they're trying to get people to stop thinking critically and learning about how this country's past influenced the present, as you mentioned. Is the effect of these laws more to really just completely erase the history or to intimidate people from even thinking critically about it? Both. The Oklahoma law, House Bill 1775, it's mainly problematic because it's ambiguous.

Because teachers, it's not clear that teachers will be able to discern what's permitted and what's proscribed. And because of that uncertainty, it's likely that the law is going to have a chilling effect on teachers. They're going to not teach things that they think might be problematic, whether they're told they can or not. They're still going to have some doubt as long as the law is on the books. And if they do teach things that they think might be problematic, there's a substantial risk that they will teach them on such a superficial level that it won't be meaningful and won't be an honest, vigorous, robust discussion. That's the problem with this legislation. We've been talking about the ways in which the history of Tulsa in this event

were suppressed. Why do you think it's important to remember this history? Is remembering the history enough? It's necessary, but not sufficient. So, and why is remembering the history important? Ask people in the Jewish community why remembering the Holocaust is important. It's no different. It's no different. I think the universal point of all this is that we must recognize our shared humanity. We must recognize our shared humanity. We ignore that imperative at our own peril. So, if we recognized

our shared humanity, the Holocaust would not have happened. If we recognized our shared humanity, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre would not have happened. If we recognized our shared humanity, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre would not have happened. If we recognized our shared humanity, there wouldn't have been lynching in the United States. All these things are connected, and they're connected by the way that we relate one to another and the dignity and respect we accord one another. And it is hoped that through teaching this history and teaching the causative factors that bleed into this history, we avoid future missteps. There's certainly no guarantee that we will,

but that's the hope. Hannibal Johnson is the author of Black Wall Street 100, an American city grapples with its historical racial trauma. After the break, a member of Congress tries to open the courts for descendants of the survivors. Thank you. save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC, terms and conditions apply.

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but they tried to get compensation for all the property and businesses that had been destroyed. They filed insurance claims and lawsuits against the city, but very few people were ever paid. In fact, this massacre was investigated early on by a state grand jury. Congressman Hank Johnson, representing Georgia's 4th District. concluded that it was a race riot and the race riot was precipitated by the Black people whose community got burned. And so based on that finding, all of the claims that were filed by the Greenwood victims, they were denied any kind of insurance coverage and, of course, any kind of compensation for what had happened to them. Last week, Congressman Johnson introduced the Tulsa-Greenwood Massacre Claims Accountability

Act, legislation that would give the victims and their descendants another shot at restitution. It's going to take an act of Congress, literally, in order for them to have the courthouse doors open so that they can press their claims in accordance with federal law. Why do we need legislation as a remedy to this problem? Under the law, a case can be time barred because one waited too long in order to assert the claim. And so it's a technical defense that's available to every defendant who gets sued. And so we have to have a law that would waive that statute of limitations period, not for any reason other than the fact that the delay was induced by fraud. And it was not at the fault of the plaintiffs that they could not assert their claims in a timely manner.

It was because of state action. So we need to undo that state action and also give these claimants an opportunity to claim damage under law that did not exist at the time. And of course, this legislation opens the federal courthouse doors, not the state courthouse, but the federal courthouse doors for litigation by these claimants. Right. I think that's an important distinction that you make here is that you're not guaranteeing any kind of reparation here. You're just simply opening up the available avenues people can pursue this accountability through the courts. You're just making it available to them. Is that correct?

That's exactly right. This legislation is not about an award of reparation. It's about opening the courthouse doors so that the claimants can go into court and, in accordance with the law, assert their claims for damages. And the damages that flow from what happened 100 years ago can be quantified. And so the personal property, the real estate, the lives of the people themselves who were killed. The descendants of those who were killed have causes of action to assert for the value of the life of those who were killed. And then when you start talking about the generational wealth, these descendants could have benefited through generational wealth transfer, which did not happen as a result of everything going up in smoke and being denied compensation at the outset. So for all of these

years, you can quantify the effects of the loss, and they would be, in my opinion, substantial. Is there support in Congress for your bill, in particular amongst Republicans in the House and in the Senate? I don't think we have any Republican co-sponsors in the House, and we're still working on a leader in the Senate to sponsor this legislation there. But momentum is building in the House. Every day, we get more and more co-sponsors. Congressman, you held a hearing on this legislation a couple weeks ago, and you heard the testimony, as we all did, from three centenarians who shared their remembrances of surviving the Tulsa massacre. What did you make of their testimony? Yeah, their testimony was poignant.

Mr. Van... You're talking about the veteran? Yes. He actually got choked up during his testimony. A hundred years later, you know, and he is still visibly affected by what happened to him. We aren't just black and white pictures on a screen. We are flesh and blood. I was there when it happened. I'm still here.

The ladies who testified reminded me of the elderly people in my family that I have known, my grandmothers, you know, my aunts, and. And they never let us know what they were talking about. But we found out later what had happened. The night of the massacre, I was awakened by my family. My parents and five siblings were there. I was told we had to leave, and that was it. I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home. I still see black men being shot, black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived

through the massacre every day. A country may forget this history, but I cannot. You know, it was really a strong sense of appreciation for what these folks have been through, what they have endured, and what they have accomplished in their time on this earth, and for them to be able to appear before Congress in a hearing that was televised to the nation, and I felt, you know, it was deeply motivating for me and I'm sure for my colleagues who were there with me. Thank you very much, Congressman. I appreciate your time and I appreciate your work on the behalf of these survivors and we'll be sure to stay in touch. Yes, sir. You have a great day and thank you for allowing me to be on today.

Filling in for Sean Rahm's firm, I'm Jamil Smith. It's Today Explained. you