The Tulsa Massacre Was Just the Tip of the Iceberg
The Tulsa
Massacre Was Just the Tip of The Iceberg
Junious Ricardo
Stanton
“For the first time
anyone could remember, black men took out weapons and fired back. Whites
returned fire in volley after volley.”- Description of one of several race
riots in Philadelphia from the book Tasting Freedom Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America by Daniel R. Biddle and
Murray Dubin page113.
As we pause
to remember and reflect on the centennial anniversary of the May 31, 1921 riot
and massacre that occurred in the Greenwood
section of Tulsa Oklahoma, we have to put that vicious
terroristic event into proper historical perspective. The white rioting
looting, plunder and murder that occurred on May 31, 1921 was not the only
attack of its kind that happened in America; in fact it was characteristic
of the racial animus that permeated this society for centuries!
The planned
and coordinated Tulsa Oklahoma riot is part of the suppressed
history of violence perpetrated on people of African decent in this country,
whether it was on individuals (see the book Without Sanctuary Lynching Photography in America), families,
neighborhoods and communities. This is the history US history books ignore and
eschew teaching and discussing; it’s what opponents of “critical race theory”
want to keep secret and unknown.
But truth crushed to earth shall rise again
and that brutal history will become known. The truth is, within five years the
Blacks who remained and returned in Tulsa had
rebuilt Greenwood
bigger and more prosperous than it was at the time of the massacre.
The April
2021 edition of Smithsonian magazine www.smithsonianmag.com
has several articles on the Tulsa Massacre and in 2019; BET News did an article
on not just Tulsa
but a handful of other communities that experienced devastating racial and
politically motivated violence. https://www.bet.com/news/national/2019/12/17/not-just-tulsa--five-other-race-massacres-that-devastated-black.html.
That article only mentioned: Colfax Louisiana
1873, Wilmington North
Carolina 1898, Atlanta Georgia 1906, Elaine Arkansas 1919, Rosewood Florida 1923, but there
is so much more.
As enlightening as this information
is, it omits places like Philadelphia that experienced annual race riots from
1829 to 1844, or white mob violence in East St Louis Illinois and Houston Texas
in 1917 or numerous white instigated urban riots in 1919 part of a wide ranging
pattern of racial violence and attacks by whites against Blacks following WWI.
“‘The Red Summer’ of 1919 marked
the culmination of steadily growing tensions surrounding the great migration of
African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North that took
place during World War I.
When the war ended in late 1918, thousands of servicemen returned home from
fighting in Europe to find that their jobs in
factories, warehouses and mills had been filled by newly arrived Southern Black
people or immigrants. Amid financial insecurity, racial and ethnic prejudices
ran rampant. Meanwhile, African-American veterans who had risked their lives
fighting for the causes of freedom and democracy found themselves denied basic
rights such as adequate housing and equality under the law, leading them to
become increasingly militant…In this fraught atmosphere, the white
supremacist Ku Klux Klan organization
revived its violent activities in the South, including 64 lynchings in 1918 and
83 in 1919. In the summer of 1919, race riots would break out in Washington,
D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee;
Longview, Texas;
Phillips County, Arkansas;
Omaha, Nebraska and–most
dramatically–Chicago.
The city’s African American population had increased from 44,000 in 1909 to
more than 100,000 as of 1919. Competition for jobs in the city’s stockyards was
particularly intense, pitting African Americans against whites (both
native-born and immigrants). Tensions ran highest on the city’s South Side,
where the great majority of Black residents lived, many of them in old,
dilapidated housing and without adequate services.” https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/chicago-race-riot-of-1919
We are woefully ignorant of not
only our own history as Black people but also the foul history of this country
when it comes to its treatment of indigenous peoples and people of color. We do
not have time to get caught up in the whining of Negroes and whites fearful of
the truth. The truth will make us free, free to do the necessary work to rid
ourselves of the fear and hostility deeply rooted in this nation’s history,
free to personally and collectively transform ourselves into better human
beings who can create a better world; but until we know the truth we are inextricably
doomed to repeat that sordid history generation after generation.
-30-
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