Reply #76: Tulsa Race Riot---possibly the worst in American history

[bobbieinok]

never taught in Tulsa schools; not mentioned even in most national histories of African-Americans until recently

I knew about it b/c my grandmother who had a rooming house in Tulsa told me how she told her black woman helper to bring her family to the house until things quieted down

a few years ago I talked with a black woman about my age who also grew up in Tulsa......that was at the time the state was considering some sort of reparations (IMO, shamed into it b/c some national journals had written about the event)......I said no white I knew who grew up in Tulsa knew about this; she said every black in Tulsa knew about it...once again I saw: even in the same town at the same period blacks and whites live in different realities/worlds

http://www.ipoaa.com/tulsa_race_riot_overview.htm

a very good, though discussion by Franklin, an African-American historian whose familiy lived through the riot/massacre, and Ellsworth, who wrote the first scholarly study of the event.....several pictures of the destruction

also a discussion of the cover-up, ie why after less than 10 years afterwards mention of the event disappeared from Tulsa, OK, and the US......

from the article

....

For those hearing about the 1921 Tulsa race riot for the first time, the event seems almost impossible to believe. During the course of eighteen terrible hours, more than one thousand homes were burned to the ground. Practically overnight, entire neighborhoods where families had raised their children, visited with their neighbors, and hung their wash out on the line to dry, had been suddenly reduced to ashes. And as the homes burned, so did their contents, including furniture and family Bibles, rag dolls and hand-me-down quilts, cribs and photograph albums. In less than twenty-four hours, nearly all of Tulsa's African American residential district -- some forty-square- blocks in all -- had been laid to waste, leaving nearly nine-thousand people homeless.

Gone, too, was the city's African American commercial district, a thriving area located along Greenwood Avenue which boasted some of the finest black-owned businesses in the entire Southwest. The Stradford Hotel, a modern fifty-four room brick establishment which housed a drug store, barber shop, restaurant and banquet hall, had been burned to the ground. So had the Gurley Hotel, the Red Wing Hotel, and the Midway Hotel. Literally dozens of family-run businesses--from cafes and mom-and-pop grocery stores, to the Dreamland Theater, the Y.M.C.A. Cleaners, the East End Feed Store, and Osborne Monroe's roller skating rink -- had also gone up in flames, taking with them the livelihoods, and in many cases the life savings, of literally hundreds of people.

The offices of two newspapers -- the Tulsa Star and the Oklahoma Sun -- had also been destroyed, as were the offices of more than a dozen doctors, dentists, lawyers, realtors, and other professionals. A United States Post Office substation was burned, as was the all-black Frissell Memorial Hospital. The brand new Booker T. Washington High School building escaped the torches of the rioters, but Dunbar Elementary School did not. Neither did more than a half-dozen African American churches, including the newly constructed Mount Zion Baptist Church, an impressive brick tabernacle which had been dedicated only seven weeks earlier.

Harsher still was the human loss. While we will probably never know the exact number of people who lost their lives during the Tulsa race riot, even the most conservative estimates are appalling. While we know that the so-called "official" estimate of nine whites and twenty-six blacks is too low, it is also true that some of the higher estimates are equally dubious. All told, considerable evidence exists to suggest that at least seventy-five to one-hundred people, both black and white, were killed during the riot. It should be added, however, that at least one credible source from the period -- Maurice Willows, who directed the relief operations of the American Red Cross in Tulsa following the riot -- indicated in his official report that the total number of riot fatalities may have ran as high as three-hundred.1

more....

also many of the blacks were put in internment camps......many lived in tents the following winter......there is evidence that some whites wanted to take the land where the buildings and homes had been and 'develop' it; this was blocked......shades of 2005 and NOLA/Katrina!!