#5 - The Tulsa Race Massacre pt. 1: An Inside Job

TRANSCRIPT

ADAM  0:39 

So quick history quiz, there have only been two times that Americans were attacked from the air, on US soil. One of them is very well known to all of us. And the other one got covered up and almost entirely forgotten. So what are those two times?

TONY  0:56 

Most people would probably come up with 9/11?

ADAM  0:59 

Yes, for sure.

TONY  1:00 

Right. But the other incident was not so obvious. Some folks might guess Pearl Harbor.

ADAM  1:08 

That's a good guess. But Pearl Harbor happened back when Hawaii was not a state. So that was not American soil.

TONY  1:14 

So the only other time was the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 - 80 years before 9/11.

ADAM  1:21 

Yep, that's it.

TONY  1:22 

It's hard to describe in words, how horrible that massacre was: the size and scope, the damage and destruction that was levied upon a thriving community. It's the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history. Yeah, an entire 40-block community was burned to the ground. Airplanes were dropping bombs from the sky. People were shot indiscriminately. Houses and businesses were destroyed. It was more like a scene from a war overseas than something that we could have imagined happening to Americans on American soil.

ADAM  1:59 

Yeah, exactly. It's really hard to wrap our minds around what happened in Tulsa. This was an actual war waged against an entire black community, basically a black city, in Oklahoma. It's really not talked about so much that this was a government operation, that the Tulsa race massacre was planned and orchestrated with military precision by government officials.

TONY  2:24 

Yes.

ADAM  2:25 

So we're going to have a special two-part episode on Tulsa. And in this first part, we're going to look at the events of 1921. What actually went down, what led up to it, and what came after. So for part two, we're going to look at what's being done in the area of reparations, and an exciting new lawsuit that is going on in the courts right now.

TONY  2:45 

So we're going to be joined by three incredible guests who will share with us about Tulsa: Kristi Williams, a community activist and resident; law professor Eric Miller, who's part of the team fighting that new case in the courts; and a man named Hughes van Ellis, he's 101 years old, and one of the only three living survivors of the 1921 massacre.

ADAM  3:03 

But first you and I are going to lay out what happened in 1921. And get this story rolling.

TONY  3:09 

What really happened.

ADAM  3:14 

So part of the backdrop for Tulsa is the unique history of Oklahoma, which Tony you and I've been doing sort of a crash course and learning some of this really unique and interesting history. Around the turn of the last century, right?

TONY  3:27 

Seriously.

ADAM  3:28 

A large number of black people who were fleeing the terrors of the Deep South, and Oklahoma was a territory, there were Native peoples that were already living in Oklahoma, and some who were forced out of a lot of other places and, you know, forced to go to Oklahoma and and set up lives there as well. So it was interesting how you had these black and native people who were getting pieces of land there. And it was very undesirable land as the government saw it at the time.

TONY  4:00 

Right. Yeah. And let's also, you know, place it in the historical context of what was happening across the country. This, you know, this was the era of Jim Crow segregation, right. And at least with respect to black people, for the most part, had to be 100% self-sufficient, which led to, you know, thriving black communities in various parts of the country. The ultimate example of that was Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Greenwood district of North Tulsa, which became known as Black Wall Street - was an entire thriving world unto itself. There were over 200 businesses in that 40-Block community, doctors, dentists, lawyers, tailors, there were two newspapers, luxury shops, restaurants, hotels, fact one of the finest hotels in the country. Theaters, nightclubs, there was a skating rink, post office bank hospital I mean really was an entire universe. You know, that's hard to to even envision now.

ADAM  4:59 

So another piece of the puzzle here is the discovery of oil. And Tulsa eventually became sort of like the oil capital of America, there was just a lot of that black gold under the ground that was being discovered. And a lot of these plots of land, some of the black people who came to Tulsa had gotten, turned out to be suddenly very valuable, right? This is a time when the automobile's coming in. And there's all these other uses for oil in industry. And so there was a lot of wealth that was coming in. And so Greenwood, that community you were describing was kind of a tough pill to swallow for the power brokers of white America, right, you have the story of white supremacy that they're trying to sell to the masses, but it's kind of hard to square that with this community and some others like it, right, where a lot of black people were able to be successful and thriving.

ADAM  5:54 

So the triggering event used as the excuse for this massacre was shockingly small and flimsy. On May 30 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland was working in downtown Tulsa, shining shoes. Downtown Tulsa was an area that was only for white people, only whites were allowed there unless you're working. And if you're a black person working, you couldn't use any of the bathrooms in downtown except for one location in this one office building that you had to take an elevator to get up to. So at some point, Dick Rowland had to use the restroom and went on this to a whole separate building was taking the elevator up. And at some point, it appears that he stumbled and may have bumped into a young white woman who was operating the elevator. He was soon arrested and being held on a very flimsy charge that even the law enforcement there didn't really take seriously, about having assaulted the young woman. But meanwhile, the Tulsa Tribune, the largest newspaper in town, just made up a story that Dick Rowland had attempted to rape the young girl. And it ran an editorial the very next day encouraging white people to quote "Lynch a negro tonight." And soon after that, a mob of white people started gathering at the courthouse where Mr. Rowland was being held.

TONY  7:19 

Just to back up for a hot second. The fact that there was only one bathroom in all of downtown Tulsa for black people to use is mind boggling. And that was the catalyst if you will for this taking place right if Dick Rowland, you know, had access to the other bathrooms including the building within which he had a shoeshine stand, none of this would have happened. He wouldn't even been in the in the elevator with Sarah Page, the white girl who was involved? Yeah, so at that point in time, a group of black men are realizing what was about to take place, gathered, you know, at the courthouse. That's 75 Black defenders, many of them World War One vets went there to protect Dick Rowland from being lynched, because they knew what was about to happen. At some point in time, a fight broke out between the two groups. Gunshots went off, about a dozen people were killed, some black and some white. And then all hell broke loose. The black men that were there retreated to Greenwood, and set themselves to defend and fortify the neighborhood because they knew what was likely to come. Right. The Tulsa police arrived and amazingly distributed guns to random white people. Yeah, deputize them, you know, to act under color of law.

ADAM  8:46 

Yeah, it is crazy how the police were just giving out giant numbers of guns to white people to just go and start killing folks.

TONY  8:54 

Just willy-nilly, like here's a gun, right. Do what you have to do. White mob assembled and grew which included police officers, descended upon Greenwood for what has been described as an orgy of violence that took place over the better part of two days. One estimate of the size of this mob was you know, as high as 25,000 people.

ADAM  9:18 

So meanwhile, the local police got some help at the state level as well for their massacre. The governor of Oklahoma declared martial law and called in the National Guard. Now National Guard. Obviously their job is to keep the peace and protect people but in this case, they did the opposite. They participated in the massacre. They cleared out Greenwood, they emptied out the homes, forcing black residents to evacuate so the entire area could be burned to the ground. They participated in the killing of black people who were just trying to evacuate.

TONY  9:49 

After the burning and the looting the military occupation of Greenwood took place - black citizens of the area were marched with hands in the air to various detention camps under armed guard. At that point, family separation took place, men were placed in some camps and women and children were placed in other camps. They were required to provide labor without pay. Right forced labor and the only way that they could leave the camps was to have a white person come and vouch for them. Then all this harkens back, you know, and ties to to slavery, right?

ADAM  10:28 

Totally.

TONY  10:28 

Yeah, yeah, black people didn't have control over their own movement, their own their own bodies.

ADAM  10:35 

Yeah, it's such a recurring theme in our history that you see these just outrageous, horrible things happen. And then the victims blamed - and, you know, punished and treated like criminals for what had happened. If you look, you'll see these pictures of these black people being marched through the streets with their hands over their heads after this had happened. Like it's so close

TONY  10:55 

To them.

ADAM  10:56 

Yeah, just completely backwards.

TONY  10:58 

Mind-boggling.

ADAM  10:58 

And so these events that happened, were immediately erased from the books. And literally, in the case of the daily newspaper, which actually went back and changed the text on the front page of the paper; they had initially reported some of the actual stuff that went down, but they changed that. And, you know, to this day, most people have never really heard about the Tulsa race massacre.

TONY  11:24 

Most accounts of what happened then and now portrayed the massacre as this, you know, spontaneous reaction to the elevator incident. You know, which is some bullshit really, you know, the real reason is that, you know, Greenwood just couldn't be allowed to exist, black prosperity posed such a threat to the system of white supremacy, you know, Greenwood had to go.

ADAM  11:49 

It's hard to really imagine the scope of this devastation, the scale: to have 40 city blocks, just absolutely burned to the ground looking like some photo out of World War One or World War Two. The the entire black population of Tulsa, about 10,000 people, left homeless, just like, right, yeah, a large number of people were killed. And there's a big dispute and continuing dispute over the over how many people were killed. And we'll get into that a bit later. And kind of amazing that for all the death and destruction, not one white person was ever charged with any crime related to the massacre.

ADAM  12:26 

So to give some perspective on these events from the personal level, we're going to read a few brief quotes from an amazing book that was written shortly after the massacre by a reporter named Mary Parish, who was there and who interviewed people and witnessed a lot of things herself. She published an eyewitness account called The Nation Must Awake.

TONY  12:48 

So a passage from Mary Parish. "I was informed that the dead were so quickly disposed of on that night and day that it was impossible to ever get an exact record of the dead and wounded. I was further informed that the enemy was well prepared as a conquering army going out to battle, with ambulances and trucks to pick up and care for the dead and wounded."

ADAM  13:10 

And this is from James West, a high school teacher. "About five o'clock a very peculiar whistle blew. This seemed to have been a signal for a concerted attack by the whites for immediately a terrible gunfire began. Airplanes also began to fly over very low. What they were doing I cannot say for I was in my room."

TONY  13:30 

This graphic description by a person who went by the initials of A.H. "Several Negroes were tied to the backs of automobiles, and dragged through the streets, while bullets were being fired into their bodies. Women were being chased from their homes naked with clothes in their hands, and volleys of shots fired at them as they were fleeing, some with babies in their arms. These things and many others, which I will not be able to mention, were done in America, which makes its boast of true democracy."

ADAM  13:58 

And this is again from the reporter Mary Parish. "The primary rooms of the Booker Washington School were converted into an emergency hospital. I can never erase the sights from my first visit to the hospital. There were men wounded in every conceivable way, like soldiers after a big battle, some with amputated limbs, burned faces, others minus an eye or with heads bandaged. There were women who were nervous wrecks and some confinement cases. Was I in a hospital in France? No, in Tulsa."

ADAM  14:32 

We spoke with Kristi Williams, a local activist in Tulsa who's still fighting to keep pressure on the city to do the right thing. Kristi is also the great-niece of a woman who survived the Tulsa massacre and lived to tell about it and passed on stories to the family. So Kristi Williams, thank you so much for being here and welcome to pay the tab.

KRISTI  14:52 

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

ADAM  14:56 

We are super excited to talk to you. Not only as a leading activist in the Tulsa community right now, also because you have a close family connection to the Tulsa race massacre and the events of 1921.

KRISTI  15:10 

Well, yes, I am. I'm a community activist. I am a love advocate. I love my people. I love my community. I have a close history to the story in Tulsa, Greenwood - Black Wall Street. My great aunt Janie was in the Dreamland Theater when the massacre happened.

ADAM  15:32 

Right. So maybe you can, we can start off by you telling us a little bit about, I guess, first of all, your relationship with your great-aunt Janie Edwards. And I believe you said she actually babysat you when you were little. And so you knew her pretty well.

KRISTI  15:48 

She was a real nice woman. But you could tell she cared a lot of pay.

ADAM  15:53 

Right. And I think you said she. She told you about this incident when she was a teenager where she was on. Was it like a secret date or something?

KRISTI  16:04 

Yes, she was on a date. It was not supposed to be on this date. It was not supposed to be in the Dreamland Theater. And can you just imagine, you know, being in that age and sneaking out. And the time that you sneak out a massacre occurs like, you know, but her and her date they escaped. They ran to Claremore which is like 30 minutes from Tulsa, 30 minute drive. So I don't know how long it took them to get there by foot. But that's where she went. And she stayed there for eight years. She was just so afraid to come back to Tulsa because of what happened. And as she said there was just white people killing black people and bullets flying everywhere, and she could hear the bombs as they drop bombs.

TONY  16:57 

We also spoke about the massacre with Eric Miller, a professor at Loyola Law School. He's a leading scholar on reparations and co- counsel in the big new reparations lawsuit in Tulsa. Here's a bit of our conversation with Professor Miller.

ADAM  17:10 

So Professor Eric Miller, welcome to pay the tab.

ERIC  17:13 

Hi, thanks for having me.

ADAM  17:14 

I think a lot of people may not realize just how much of the massacre, how the government was in the middle of all that, right. And we're talking about government agencies that were doing that.

ERIC  17:24 

The short version is to recognize to a certain extent, this was a military and police action. And so the sheriff's department and the police department, deputized hundreds, if not thousands of white civilians to engage in this massacre. If you look at the photographs, you've got rows and rows of neatly parked Model T Fords opposite the train tracks from Greenwood. And you have a group of people who've been armed and deputized by state and county officials to go in and engage in killing and burning and looting. And so the National Guard went in and cleared the ground in a way that made it possible for everybody else to go in, and loot and burn and destroy. And then you can see pictures of National Guardsmen or at least uniform people in military uniform, on trucks that are either loaded with the black survivors or behind which black survivors are marching and they're being marched to baseball park, the convention center. Family separation happens.

ERIC  17:24 

We also asked Professor Miller about the real motives for the Tulsa massacre.

ERIC  18:43 

A real question that's that's worth thinking about is, was this - if you think about it in the context of a riot, you think, oh, Dick Rowland is in an elevator, the white woman, and then there's the standard story. She screams, he's threatened with a lynching and then everything kicks off. I think the better way to think about it is the white power structure in Tulsa was waiting for an opportunity to find a patsy who could be, who could be lynched. In order to allow them to engage in an even greater sort of genocidal attack than they had needed to engage in to seize the oil fields. Now they were getting rid of what, if it still existed, would still be the third largest town in Oklahoma. And so that's the state... that's the scale of the destruction.

ERIC  19:36 

Imagine what it would be like if Oklahoma had a thriving Native American and African American community that was sending Congress people and Senators, you know, to the federal government, in the 1920s and 1930s. And when you try and imagine that, you understand why it's unimaginable. Why this massacre in some ways, from the perspective of the white people, had to happen, in order to prevent that sort of power being held by people of color in that state.

ADAM  20:13 

We talked with Kristi Williams about this subject as well.

KRISTI  20:16 

The sons of the Confederacy had a a convention here. I believe, like a month prior to the massacre, maybe a few months prior to the massacre. And there's a story that says that they asked the mayor, you let your niggers live like this? And then May 31, 1921, this massacre happens. And it was too organized to, for this, you know, it was premeditated. There's just no way this black kid trips on an elevator, you know, assaults, this white elevator operator, and then all of a sudden, a massacre happened, you destroy 40 city blocks in one night. No way.

TONY  21:09 

And when you say "live like this," obviously meaning living prosperously, and joyfully and experiencing some degree of success, or a lot of

KRISTI  21:17 

Exactly, exactly, that's one of the pieces that I think, you know, a lot of people we talk about it, but we center it in Greenwood, and I understand why - centered in Greenwood, but... Oklahoma was almost a black state. And it was it as the kids say it was lit, you know, you had all these black townships, and there were other towns just like Greenwood, just as prosperous. And they also seen the voting power that had started taking place, they just could not let happen.

ADAM  21:58 

Can you tell us a little bit about Greenwood at that time like before 1921? I think you had described like, that was sort of the place to go, right - like that was the happening place in the area. And so people like your great aunt Janie would, you know would go there for a special occasion or just to have a kind of an exciting place to go, right?

KRISTI  22:20 

Right. Greenwood was the place to go. For people who didn't live in Greenwood. If you lived in the neighboring towns and townships. You went to Greenwood to buy the the latest, you know dresses or hear the latest jazz bands, the movie theaters, the food, visiting friends. That's what you did. It was just the place to be.

TONY  22:49 

You've been quoted as saying that Greenwood was "a blueprint for what was possible across the United States." What do you mean by that? What was, you've talked about a little bit what was special about the community and what aspects were lost as a result of the massacre?

KRISTI  23:02 

Those ancestors left a blueprint of how to create an economy within an economy. And and it started with community you know, with someone who wanted to start a business, those elders of Greenwood: O.W. Gurley, J.B. Stradford, O.B. Mann... You would go pitch your business to them. And they would fund it and help you get started. You know, that's how you start to build an economy within an economy. And we kept our money with each other. And again, we had those shared principles and values that we agreed on.

KRISTI  23:05 

What can you tell us just about that period, like right after the massacre? We're talking early June of 1921. Was there like you know, the city government and white individuals just confiscating some of that land?

KRISTI  23:55 

Yeah, they were taking the land. They took, matter of fact I used to ask Otis G. Clark, Why did no one talk about the massacre? And he said, Well, you had to live and work among the same people that came in and robbed you and killed your family and your friends. So you know you didn't say anything because you were afraid that it would happen again. And so not only did they take land but they had to walk around and see white people in their things.

TONY  24:26 

You'd mentioned at some point when we spoke before that there's a or maybe I heard this you say this - that there's a special feeling that you get when you set your feet on the soil there. Can you share a little bit about what what that means to you? What is it?

KRISTI  24:40 

Oh, yeah, when you when you walk through Greenwood. You can feel just the energy from those ancestors. You can feel the pain. You can feel like a cry, you know, for help. You can feel it. I mean, especially at night you walk through there, you can just feel it. And it's the energy that kind of pulls you in. And it gets you involved. It's really hard to explain, but it's a it's a very strong spiritual energy.

TONY  25:18 

Thank you for sharing that.

TONY  25:23 

You know, one thing that really stands out to me, is just how awesome Greenwood was.

ADAM  25:29 

Yeah.

TONY  25:30 

You know, in what an example of black excellence, Black Power before that was even a term but really, you know, black people just living prosperously and not bothering anybody. Right, you know, like, like, yeah, a community unto their own,

ADAM  25:54 

Completely self contained. Yeah.

TONY  25:56 

Completely self contained - and basically ordered to be self contained.

ADAM  26:01 

Right, right, by law had to be.

TONY  26:03 

By law segregated from living in other parts of Tulsa from, you know, utilizing facilities in other parts of Tulsa from you know, even entering various stores in other parts of Tulsa. So doing their thing, not bothering anybody but ballin out, and this, you know, we saw this in the Bruce's beach episode as well, right? Where a thriving Black Enterprise that was not fit fiddling with white people at all. But that was such a threat that, you know, it had to be erased, it couldn't, couldn't be allowed to stand and continue.

ADAM  26:09 

You know, one of the effects of Jim Crow and the sort of Nazi style apartheid that we've had in this country for so long, was that, you know, since black people were forced to be self sufficient and independent, you had a lot of community, you had a lot of connections, they talked about the number of times a dollar changed hands within Greenwood. It's the kind of thing that's really hard to imagine now.

ADAM  26:59 

One of the things we heard from, from these accounts was how, you know, black people who had had their, their homes looted and destroyed would then be working in the homes of some of the white residents and see their stuff, right in the white people's houses, but not be able to say anything, because then you know, you wouldn't be able to work and you just be screwed again.

TONY  27:19 

So you had no recourse anyway, what are you gonna do?

ADAM  27:22 

Exactly, yeah. And when we've heard also, the talk that a lot of black people in Tulsa, were so completely traumatized and devastated that a lot of people, maybe most black people just didn't talk about it anyway.

TONY  27:35 

Didn't talk about it to the point that, you know, generations of black people who came up after the massacre, didn't know much about it, because it wasn't spoken about even within their families.

TONY  27:47 

Another piece of this, which is, you know, doesn't get as much shine as it probably should, is just the loss of what could have been. Given that Tulsa was such a shining star and a symbol for black people across the country, but also for for descendants of folks who were killed in the massacre, just imagine the generational wealth, that could have been transferred to hundreds or thousands of Tulsa residents, if Greenwood had been allowed to exist and continue to thrive. So that you know, so it doesn't doesn't get discussed a lot. But I think that's another another harm that needs to be, you know, put into the calculus when we're talking about paying the tab.

ADAM  28:30 

Speaking of the tab, we're gonna have a second part of this Tulsa episode where we look at reparations for Tulsa. This is such a massive event with so much damage, so much harm, like you say the generations of harm that came after. And still now in the 2020s, there's no action being taken by any government body to address reparations.

TONY  28:54 

Not only has there been no action by Tulsa to make reparations of any kind, in fact, it has been just the opposite. Right, government officials have continued to perpetuate harms against the black community there. Meanwhile, the city is profiting off the massacre through what has been described as "massacre tourism." Right. And there's this bogus charity that's basically pimping the massacre, to rake in more than $30 million - not a single penny of which is going to any of the survivors or descendants. It's really a damn shame.

ADAM  29:25 

But there's a new lawsuit for reparations going on right now in the courts of Oklahoma. These lawyers are on the cutting edge of the national fight for reparations, and we'll hear a lot more about their case in part two, where we look at reparations for Tulsa. We will also talk to a man who is one of only three living survivors of the massacre named Hughes van Ellis. He's 101 years old and will give us some deep perspective on the events and on reparations for black America.

TONY  29:56 

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ADAM  30:04 

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TONY  30:12 

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