Black Birds in the Sky Page 14
The city has plans to continue digging in other areas of Oaklawn, as well as at the former Booker T. Washington Cemetery and around Newblock Park, two other areas where mass graves were presumed to have been dug.
The progress toward resolution has been slow, to say the least, but survivors—of which there are few, a hundred years after the massacre—and their descendants are still looking to move forward.
Hotel owner and Greenwood District cofounder J. B. Stradford had been indicted for charges related to the massacre; his charges were dropped in 1996 after his descendants petitioned the court to reexamine the case. Oklahoma governor Frank Keating also named October 18 of that year “J. B. Stradford Day,” and Stradford, who successfully practiced law in Chicago after the massacre, was posthumously admitted to the Oklahoma Bar Association.
The city of Tulsa sought to make further amends in 2007 when Tulsa County district attorney Tim Harris dismissed all the indictments that were issued to Greenwood residents in 1921—including the indictment of Tulsa Star newspaper publisher A. J. Smitherman.
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The Tulsa Race Massacre in Pop Culture (Spoilers Ahead!)
Many people had never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre until the premiere of HBO’s limited series Watchmen in October 2019. Graphically depicting the massacre in the beginning of the first episode, the series uses the event as part of the origin story of the world’s first superhero. Viewers later learn that the main character’s grandfather was one of the survivors fighting for his life in the distressing flashback.
Though the series constructs an alternate history—in the 2019 Tulsa of Watchmen, survivors and their descendants have already been granted reparations under the leadership of Robert Redford, who’d been the US president for decades—the show displays a deep respect for Greenwood’s history, incorporating homages to the Dreamland Theatre and the Greenwood Cultural Center, as well as iconic photographs of the massacre. Watchmen was nominated for twenty-six Emmys and won eleven, both of which were the most of any show at the 2020 ceremony. When series creator Damon Lindelof accepted the Emmy for outstanding limited series, he dedicated the statue to massacre victims and survivors.
Another HBO series, Lovecraft Country, delves into the Tulsa Race Massacre; the main character, Atticus, is the descendant of massacre survivors, and a poignant flashback episode depicts scenes with younger versions of his father and uncle on the evening of May 31, 1921.
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For decades, the Tulsa Race Massacre was considered a taboo subject, but in recent years, people have been talking about it more than ever. Many books, both nonfiction and historical novels, have been written on the subject, documentaries have been produced, and television and podcast series have dedicated extensive air time to the massacre. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, houses a manuscript from survivor B. C. Franklin; he wrote a detailed firsthand account of the massacre, which was found in 2015 and donated to the museum “with the support of the Franklin family.” The museum also created a section called “Riot and Resilience in Tulsa, Oklahoma” in its Power of Place exhibition.
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission was formed by Oklahoma State senator Kevin Matthews in 2017 to “leverage the history surrounding the events of nearly 100 years ago by developing programs, projects, events and activities to commemorate and inform.” The organization is building a history center in Greenwood, helped the Oklahoma State Department of Education develop curriculum to teach the massacre to public school students around the state, is offering a three-day workshop to Oklahoma social studies teachers to aid in teaching about the massacre, and has received a $1 million grant to fund the Greenwood Art Project.
In 2018, the Black Wall Street Chamber of Commerce was created “to enhance the quality of life for African Americans and the north Tulsa community through economic development, education, workforce development, community development, and legislative advocacy.” The chamber is hoping to rebuild the Greenwood commercial district, as well as the surrounding area in North Tulsa.
And in September 2020, ninety-nine years after the massacre, another group of survivors and descendants filed a new lawsuit against the city of Tulsa, as well as six other defendants that includes the Oklahoma National Guard, the Tulsa County sheriff, and the Tulsa Regional Chamber, the city’s chamber of commerce. The lawsuit seeks to gain unspecified punitive damages, but also focuses on reparations in the form of scholarships, as well as awarding city contracts to Black-owned businesses. The attorneys representing the survivors and victims are hoping the court will rule that the massacre was a “public nuisance,” which is “unlawfully doing an act” that “endangers the comfort, repose, health, or safety of others”—an overdue designation that the erasure of history has long prevented.
Tulsan Eddie Faye Gates donated a large collection of “eyewitness accounts, photographs, recorded survivor stories and other narratives of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre” to Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum in late 2020. The Gilcrease has used the nearly $300,000 in grant money it received from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to digitize the collection, which includes newspaper clippings, audio and video interviews with survivors, and Gates’s handwritten research notes, among other items.
“It became her mission to ensure the atrocities that occurred during the 1921 Race Massacre are not forgotten and that the survivors’ stories serve to make needed change,” Dianne Gates-Anderson, Gates’s daughter, told the Tulsa World. “It is also important to her and our family that the collection be physically located in North Tulsa and accessible for viewing and research by descendants and the community at large.” The museum works with the provided materials to “create resources for teaching such trauma-based history topics for K–12 educators.” At long last, educators and students will have a wealth of significant and personal information about a story that has long been whispered about or simply hidden.
Perhaps nobody could say it better than Tulsa Race Massacre survivor descendant John Hope Franklin, when he spoke at the dedication to the park named in his honor in 2008: “Someday we’ll have the joy and pleasure of complete reconciliation. We’re moving in that direction. I hope we get there very soon.”
One has to wonder why such a remarkable feat as Black Wall Street and the tragic story of the Tulsa Race Massacre went untold for so long—and why this is just one event in a long line of American triumphs and tragedies that have been erased from history books for decades or even centuries. In essence, white supremacy and the myth of American exceptionalism are often the culprits, as is so with many injustices in the past and present narrative of this country. And that erasure starts in our formative years.
Julian Hayter, a historian and associate professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, told NBC News that school curriculum “was never designed to be anything other than white supremacist, and it has been very difficult to convince people that other versions of history are not only worth telling. They’re absolutely essential for us as a country to move closer to something that might reflect reconciliation but even more importantly, the truth.” LaGarrett King, who is an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri, as well as founding director of the institution’s Carter Center for K–12 Black History Education, agreed: “Really, the overarching theme is, ‘Yes, we made mistakes, but we overcame because we are the United States of America.’ What that has done is it has erased tons of history that would combat that progressive narrative. So, of course you’re not going to have crucial information such as what happened in Tulsa.”
While the massacre claimed so many lives, their legacy and the stories of the survivors will not be forgotten—the stories of Americans who lived through beautiful times and horrific times, which is the story of America itself. And now it is up to each one of us to ensure their stories continue to be told. As the courageous journalist, anti-lynching activist, and civil rights pione
er Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
Afterword
Much like it was truly eye-opening to write about an event that happened one hundred years ago, and everything that led up to it, I can’t imagine what historians will think when they write about 2020 decades from now. I was researching and writing Black Birds in the Sky during a tumultuous year, as life changed right before our collective eyes. Yet one aspect I was struck by is how very little things seem to have actually changed between previous centuries and the time I was living through. Or, rather, how many harmful elements of US politics and culture have endured despite the progress we have achieved.
In 1918, the world was hit with a new and deadly strain of influenza. Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “with no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.” Sound familiar?
As of this writing in February 2021, the United States had exceeded 27 million infections of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and had reported more than 460,000 deaths. Living under some form of safer-at-home or stay-at-home orders since March 2020—the same month the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic—many Americans have been endlessly vocal about how these deaths could have been prevented, if only more people would adhere to wearing masks in public, practice social distancing and give up large group gatherings, and wash their hands. Many more place the blame on President Donald J. Trump, who early on ignored hard science while spreading lies about the disease’s deadliness and infection rate, and publicly shunned the most basic advice of health professionals.
Still, an equally loud group felt their freedom was being threatened by being asked to take measures that help keep others safe, including those at greater risk of contracting and dying from disease: those with health conditions, the poor, the elderly, and communities of color.
And none of this was new.
During the 1918 pandemic, President Woodrow Wilson—the same guy who screened The Birth of a Nation in the White House and was reported to have wholeheartedly agreed with the portrayal of the KKK as heroes—severely mishandled the governmental response to the new strain of flu, which ended up killing an estimated 675,000 Americans in fifteen months and at least 50 million people worldwide. According to historian John M. Barry, “Wilson never made a public statement about the pandemic. Never.” And, just as President Trump reportedly contracted COVID-19, Wilson came down with the very virus he had refused to acknowledge to the people he was supposed to be leading. Many people around him were infected with the virus as well, same as the Trump administration, their families, and the people who worked for them.
Without effective national leadership, cities and states were primarily left to the whims of their mayors and governors, and the numbers showed exactly how that played out. Philadelphia’s leaders refused to cancel a World War I parade in September 1918, despite widespread evidence of the flu’s deadliness, and more than twelve thousand people died in just a few weeks, first overcrowding hospitals and then overwhelming the city’s morgues.
St. Louis, on the other hand, which was the sixth-largest US city at the time, “was very quick to implement city closures,” J. Alexander Navarro, assistant director for the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, told USA Today. He said Dr. Max Starkloff, the city’s “energetic and visionary” health commissioner, helped usher in lifesaving health protocols, by closing public gathering spaces, such as schools, theaters, and churches, and banning group activities altogether—including St. Louis’s own war parade. Records show that between September and December 1918, Philadelphia saw nearly fourteen thousand deaths from the virus, while St. Louis recorded just under three thousand.
The viral natures of the 1918 influenza strain and COVID-19 aren’t identical, but the safeguards suggested by scientists are similar enough to see that many deaths in both cases were easily preventable. Yet some politicians and citizens alike continue to disregard science and professional advice in favor of exercising their “freedom.”
One question I keep coming back to as I think about these two deadly pandemics: Is history bound to repeat itself no matter what, or does it repeat itself because so many people don’t want to look to the past to see how we got to the future?
As the pandemic swept news cycles across the world in March 2020, little national attention was given to the murder of Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old Black medical worker in Kentucky, who was shot and killed in her bed by a white Louisville Metro Police officer on March 13 during what several sources have described as a “botched” raid. Nor were people talking about Ahmaud Arbery, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who, a few weeks earlier, had been stalked and murdered by two armed white men in south Georgia for the apparent crime of jogging while Black.
Arbery’s death began making national headlines in April 2020, after video was released and activists began to speak up; his killers were finally charged on May 7—more than two months after Arbery’s murder. Meanwhile, Taylor’s story didn’t receive the attention it deserved until May 2020—the same month her family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Louisville Metro officers. The national coverage lit a fire under the city’s law enforcement: Louisville’s FBI office finally opened an investigation on May 21; the same day, the Louisville Metro Police Department announced its officers would be required to wear body cameras moving forward.
These deaths of innocent Black people would be unjust at any time, but they felt particularly egregious as the country struggled with the pandemic, which was endangering health, jobs, and food security. Add to this the fact that Black people and other communities of color were more likely to contract and die from COVID-19 due to housing conditions, working in essential jobs, and inadequate access to health care, and tensions grew incredibly high.
Then came Memorial Day.
In New York City, Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper began his morning in the Ramble, a “woodland retreat” in Central Park where he was looking for songbirds. When he asked a white woman in the area named Amy Cooper (no relation) to follow the park rules and leash her dog, she called the police on him, telling him she was going to report that “an African American man is threatening my life.” Video evidence showed Christian posed no threat and kept his distance from Amy. But her whole demeanor changed as she spoke to the 911 dispatcher, shrieking that she was in danger. It was later revealed that in a second conversation with a 911 operator, she’d claimed Christian had assaulted her. Amy Cooper was confident that her word would be believed over his because she was aware of the history in this country—that in cases like this one, white women are always the victims, and Black men are always the aggressors. She threatened his life by calling law enforcement because she knew the police would likely believe her word over his. In this instance, however, she was wrong. After admitting that he had not threatened her life or assaulted her, Amy Cooper was charged with a misdemeanor for filing a false police report; she was also fired from her job.
Although Amy Cooper was held accountable for actions that she very well knew were endangering Christian Cooper’s life, the echoes of Black men being lynched over false accusations from white women were all too clear.
Just a few hours later, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, forty-six-year-old George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was arrested after allegedly trying to pay for cigarettes with a fake twenty-dollar bill. Responding to a call, a white Minneapolis police officer pinned Floyd to the pavement and kneeled on his neck for more than nine minutes, rendering Floyd, who begged for his life, unconscious. Multiple witnesses watched him die under the officer’s knee. Because it was caught on video, the world watched as well.
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bsp; Everyone has their breaking point, and this holds true with communities, too. Watching yet another Black person die at the hands of the police, and a white woman recklessly calling law enforcement because she didn’t like being asked by a Black man to follow the rules—all in a year that was already fraught with so much unnecessary death and financial hardship—was too much to bear. And, once again, the people took to the streets.
But this time felt different. The murders of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Michael Brown in 2014, John Crawford in 2014, Tamir Rice in 2014, Eric Garner in 2014, Samuel DuBose in 2015, Freddie Gray in 2015, Sandra Bland in 2015, Walter Scott in 2015, Terence Crutcher in 2016, Alton Sterling in 2016, Philando Castile in 2016, Jordan Edwards in 2017, Stephon Clark in 2018, Elijah McClain in 2019, and Atatiana Jefferson in 2019 were well documented and protested. And yet the protests that emerged after Floyd’s death felt monumental.
The New York Times reported that “within 24 hours of Mr. Floyd’s death, demonstrations were organized in a half-dozen US cities, with protesters chanting the names of Black people subjected to police brutality.” The protesters were not just Black or people of color this time. Scores of white people joined in, too—many of them who, despite the list of police brutality victims in the previous paragraph, had just woken up to the very real problem of the unequal treatment of Black people in the United States. The protests grew, stretching to “more than 2,000 cities and towns,” and eventually going global as crowds of masked people insisted Black Lives Matter.
I had always heard that modern-day police departments were rooted in slave patrols, yet I was still surprised by the clear connection in my research. Many, many police officers set out each day to do their job of protecting the people they serve and would never think of shooting, let alone killing, an unarmed person simply because the sight of Black or brown skin made them “fear for their lives.” But it’s hard to divorce the way in which slave patrols in the South targeted Black people before slavery was abolished from the way in which police departments, their reorganized reincarnations, did afterward. To these forces, Black people were always the enemy—a community to be “tamed,” whose mere existence presents a threat to the maintenance of the status quo—and those ideals have clearly persisted through generations of law enforcement who failed to see Black people as free, equal, and worthy of living their lives unbothered.