The Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street area after 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
Tulsa Historical Society from Tulsa World screen shot
The anniversaries fall, one atop the other, in a sad symmetry of racism, violence, and pain. That a hundred years separates them only adds to the shared legacy—The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis a year ago under the knee of a man whose job was to protect and serve the public, including Floyd.
Floyd’s murder, recorded on a smartphone, is more than nine minutes of horror that has played over and over again until we know it by heart, fresh, all too real and raw. As unspeakable and undeniable as it was—former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin awaits sentencing on multiple murder charges of which he was found guilty—it is but a fraction of what occurred in the prosperous Black Greenwood district of Tulsa. Hundreds may have been murdered, including by air with contrived bombs.
Fires of hatred already were burning before the conflagration of Greenwood turned Tulsa into less than the “Magic City” it believed itself to be. Randy Krehbiel, Tulsa World writer and author of a book on the massacre, has reported that in May 1921 “when a young black man known as Dick Rowland was arrested for allegedly trying to press himself on a white elevator operator, and a company of armed black men went to the Tulsa County Courthouse to protect the city’s carefully cultivated reputation went up in flames, consumed by the same fires that destroyed Greenwood.”
Old photos and a new 3D presentation created by The New York Times detail the destruction of what had been known as Black Wall Street. No one knows, however, where those killed during the massacre are buried. For years this fact has been as buried as the massacre of Blacks had been. For a long time the slaughter was not referred to as a massacre but as the Tulsa Race Riot. Now, there is no denying the giant holes in the earth at the city-owned Oaklawn Cemetery and the unknown remains that have been extracted from them. Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum admitted to the Tulsa World and other media that even in 2013 when he was a city councilor and first learned there might be a mass grave from the massacre, he could not believe it.
“As I had when I first heard about the race massacre, I thought, ‘There is no way that is actually true,” he acknowledged. “There is no way that in a city-owned cemetery we potentially have a mass grave from the race massacre and we have never bothered to dig and see if it is actually there or not.”
But it was. As the World’s Kevin Canfield explained, it was just one of three potential mass graves identified in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission. Conflicts (political) and concerns (personal) deterred excavation. Now, with Bynum as mayor, the city has been digging in and exposing itself and its past. Questions and doubts about specifics remain: Is the city looking in the right place? Does it cost too much? “We are doing this for the victims and their families,” Bynum said. “We are not doing this to make everybody happy.”
They are doing it because it is and always has been the right thing to do.
I learned what it meant to do the right thing just up the road from this sacred place, and it was two strong, right-thinking women who taught me—Mama and Ida Mae. A fuller version, with flesh on the bones found here, can be read in Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart. Pieces of my worlds, past and present—Oklahoma and Akron—continue to collide and coalesce, opposites and equals, even if it might not seem as if they would or should. They just do.
Recently I wrote about these places in a comparison of PGA-caliber golf courses: Tulsa’s Southern Hills and Akron’s Firestone South. And already, I return to Tulsa for a more a momentous moment, the 100thanniversary of The Tulsa Race Massacre. The most famous man from Akron, Black or otherwise, LeBron James, has been here, too.
James, his childhood friend and now off-the-basketball-court business partner Maverick Carter, and their film company have produced Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street. It premieres Monday, May 31, at 9 p.m. ET on CNN. It is the right thing to do to learn as much as possible about the massacre. There also are a number of books on the subject that a person could consider, including Randy Krehbiel’s Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre, which I intend to read. There are many valuable sources but I prefer those close to home: Krehbiel writes for the Tulsa World and so does Ginnie Graham, editorial writer and columnist whose career path resembles my own. Her story “Interstate 244: ‘It took the heart out of Greenwood’” examines a more recent wrong.
If Ida Mae were alive to read it, I have a good idea what her no-nonsense response might be: “ ’Bout time, Stevie,” she’d say. Ida Mae worked for my family when I was a child and became more than an employee to Mama and to me to whom she seemed like a second mother, albeit one who was Black and taught me that Black was beautiful before the phrase became a cultural marker. She was always beautiful to me.
As for Mama, without words she showed me the right way to treat someone. She and Ida Mae were friends, not simply employer and employee. I always had the feeling that they loved each other, because . . . it was just so right and good. That’s how it felt to me when I first met Clarence Smith after he and others from Lincoln School in Nowata, Oklahoma, joined our class in the seventh grade. We were the first integrated class.
Like me, Smitty loved sports. Unlike me, Smitty was really, really good, whether the game was football or basketball. He was quick to stand up for what was right and to protect his Black classmates who could not protect themselves when the abuses came from some, either because kids can be cruel or because of integration. Smitty’s character as much as his talent drew me to him. It and he were magnetic.
Once after basketball practice ran long and he had no way to get home, I offered him a ride. I don’t know if he was sure that he should accept, given the times and the unchartered territory we were in. But he did. We hopped on the back of my Cushman Eagle and I took the shortest, most direct route to his home in the north part of town. It meant we rode right through our small downtown. It must have been a sight: The white boy, the Black young man, and the bright-as-the-brightest-sunrise pink motor scooter.
Even before I had dropped off Smitty and headed home, Mama had received a call. It proved an unexpected and unpleasant education for the caller and a good one for me regarding what was right and permissible in these new untested times of integration. If there had been more people like Mama, at least 37 and as many as 300 might not have been massacred down the road in Tulsa, 1,200 homes might not have burned leaving 10,000 people homeless and with businesses, schools, churches and a hospital destroyed. A hundred years later 107-year-old Viola Ford Fletcher told a congressional committee the wrongs that a 7-year-old had seen that day in Greenwood: “I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I still hear the screams.” Soon, President Joe Biden will visit Tulsa and what’s left of Greenwood.
Will he make it right? Can he? I wish Mama were still here. If anyone could make this right, she could—or would die trying. She knew right from wrong and never confused the two.
