Many years ago, I heard a story on my local National Public Radio station. The story moved me to immediately buy the book that was being reviewed. (I am that “heard it on NPR” guy.) The book was about an event that happened in an area of Tulsa, Oklahoma. After reading it, I wondered how it was possible that I had never heard of “Black Wall Street” and the infamous events that destroyed 40 square blocks of the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood.
That moment in my life of reading was called to mind by a CBS News “60 Minutes” broadcast on Sunday, May 23rd, which revisited the deaths of up to 300 people by a White mob, and the displacement of about 10,000 more who were forced out of their homes and businesses. That mob, armed and deputized by the local police and the Oklahoma National Guard, employed airplanes to drop flaming turpentine bombs that set fire to the Black businesses that made up the neighborhood that Booker T. Washington had dubbed, “Negro Wall Street.”
Black Wall Street, as it is known today, was home to the wealthiest and most influential African-Americans in a racially segregated Tulsa. The neighborhood of Greenwood was home to Black-owned hotels, restaurants and grocery stores, a theater, a roller-skating rink, hospitals and doctors’ offices, and law firms and churches. It is possible that Black Tulsans felt comfortable in a neighborhood made up of professionals who looked like them, people who did not turn them away because they were Black. All of that changed when a young Black man was accused of assaulting a White female elevator operator. The man was arrested and jailed, and a mob assembled, intent on lynching him. A group of Black WWI vets carried guns to the jail to protect against that crime and things went downhill from there. Shots were fired, and there was return fire. White Tulsans mobilized, and eradicated an affluent area and displaced the persons who had lived and worked there.
Memorial Day originated “in the years following the Civil War.” Originally known as “Decoration Day,” the event was an occasion to remember the fallen soldiers by decorating their graves with flowers and reciting prayers. While it is unclear where the tradition originated, some records show that one of the earliest celebrations of Decoration Day was in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865. The event was organized by a group of formerly enslaved people. Fifty-six years later, on the day after Memorial Day, the descendants of those former slaves had their homes, livelihoods and lives destroyed. The saying that “history is written by the victors” has no undeniable attribution but it can be argued that the statement holds true. Tulsa newspapers called the event “The Tulsa Race Riot,” but Black Greenwood residents were outmanned and outgunned. There are few records of the event written from the perspective of those who were slaughtered; those who were not, were interned in concentration-like camps. And perhaps shame has kept the survivors from recounting the event.
On the first Decoration Day, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery. Five thousand participants “decorated the graves of 20,000 Civil War soldiers. This past Memorial Day, there will have been some who, in addition to weekend trips, parties and barbecuing in the backyard, took time to decorate soldiers’ graves and say prayers. For the African-Americans of Tulsa, there is still an ongoing search to find the unmarked graves and the mass burial ground of the slaughtered from Greenwood. Until that search is done, there is unlikely to be a memorial.
cjon3acd@att.net