Some thoughts on the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre:

Army surplus airplanes like those used to bomb Greenwood

-The white rioters were initially blocked from entering the prosperous Black business and residential district of Greenwood (Black Wall Street). Black veterans  of World War 1 had learned from the recent history of racist violence. White rioters invaded Black communities in East St. Louis; Chicago; the Arkansas Delta; Wilmington, NC; Charleston, SC; and countless other cities and towns to murder, loot, and burn. Then the courts prosecuted Black survivors, apparently for the crime of not having been murdered during the first round of white supremacist violence. The Black vets of eastern Oklahoma set up a highly-organized, armed defense of Greenwood, especially along the railroad tracks that divided white from Black Tulsa. They were successful enough that the white supremacist mobs instead began dropping incendiary bombs from about a dozen airplanes to gain entry to the neighborhood. They were aided by the Oklahoma National Guard which was called up to “stop the violence”, by which the governor meant the armed self-defense of the Black community.

Attorney BC Franklin in his temporary law office

-Despite the countless murders and the aerial bombing that incinerated over 35 square blocks, Greenwood was not emptied of Black people. Attorney BC Franklin reopened his law practice in a tent while smoke still hung in the air to ensure that Black property owners retained their titles. (Yes, BC Franklin was the dad of the great historian John Hope Franklin. John Hope Franklin was six years old at the time of the massacre.) The uncompensated destruction of so much Black-owned capital in the form of hotels, office blocks, businesses, and homes meant that Greenwood couldn’t be rebuilt on the grand scale it had before the white-supremacist assault. Some of the families who fled the violence never returned. Some of the most successful Black entrepreneurs, now broke and broken, left, too.

Detroit Avenue after the aerial bombing

-Eastern Oklahoma offered a special case for several reasons, but the pattern of white resentment and envy of successful Black people existed throughout America. Maybe white people filed fraudulent lawsuits to steal Black people’s property, which were upheld by white judges. Maybe white people stole that property (or destroyed it) by totally extralegal means, but were then protected by those white  judges and juries. But the common thread is that property was robbed or burned and the owners were murdered or imprisoned. Historians will tell you about property records in counties all over this country which are unavailable for research because of “mysterious” fires many decades ago. This pattern also existed in South Texas where landowning families of Mexican descent - most of whom had lived in the area before the American Revolution - had their property stolen by Anglo newcomers. The entire history of Native treaties with the US is about land set aside for Indians because Anglos thought it was worthless, only to be stolen later when some new resource was discovered there. During the same time as the Tulsa massacre, hundreds of Osage Indians were murdered in Oklahoma for their oil lands. Then white judges appointed white receivers to “manage” the properties.

Prosecuting and convicting the police who murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis is a start. But it does not put us in a post-racial era. We have hundreds of years of white supremacist murder and arson to confront. There is an entire system of white supremacist law to overturn.