Tulsa Burning Quotes

Lot's of things in life aren't right, but most things get better with time.

If I right now decided that I wanted to play Monopoly with you, and for 400 rounds of playing Monopoly, I didn’t allow you to have any money, I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board, I didn’t allow for you to have anything, and then we played another 50 rounds of Monopoly and everything that you gained and you earned while you were playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you, that was Tulsa. That was Rosewood. Those are places where we built black economic wealth, where we were self-sufficient, where we owned our stores, where we owned our property, and they burned them to the ground.

It's an emotion that eats away at those who allow it in their heart. Hatred does more harm to those who feel it than it does to those who are hated.

Well, sit down next to me on this porch swing,” Seymour Williams said. “And we’ll tell you about something that never happened.

If the dedication of Mount Zion had been a hint of heaven, that morning was surely a taste of hell.

these rampages had in common: the mobs tended to go after the most prosperous in the lowest caste, those who might have managed to surpass even some people in the dominant caste. In the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mob leveled the section of town that was called black Wall Street, owing to the black banking, insurance, and other businesses clustered together and surrounded by well-kept brick homes that signaled prosperity. These were burned to the ground and never recovered. Decades before, in the early 1890s, a black grocery and a white grocery sat across the street from each other at an intersection just outside Memphis, Tennessee. The black store, known as People’s Grocery, was a cooperative that was thriving even as the walls of Jim Crow closed in. Its owner, Thomas H. Moss, was an upright figure in a three-piece suit and bow tie with a side part in his close-cropped hair, who did double duty delivering mail and running the

historian John Hope Franklin (a native of Tulsa, as it turned out) or his book From Slavery to Freedom (McGraw Hill, 1994). At Ross’s suggestion, Franklin’s book became the launching point for my crash course into black history, and I’m now of the opinion that it should be taught in every American high school. Until reading Franklin’s book, I was only vaguely aware of the horrors of slavery. I was almost completely ignorant of the terror and hardship that came with emancipation—the murderous rides of the original Ku Klux Klan; the reign of Jim Crow; thousands of lynchings; racial hatreds that were not only tolerated, but widely condoned and endorsed at

One thing these rampages had in common: the mobs tended to go after the most prosperous in the lowest caste, those who might have managed to surpass even some people in the dominant caste. In the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mob leveled the section of town that was called black Wall Street, owing to the black banking, insurance, and other businesses clustered together and surrounded by well-kept brick homes that signaled prosperity. These were burned to the ground and never recovered.

white men never hesitated to find their pleasure with Negro women. Before the Civil War, Southern slave owners kept their white women on pedestals, hidden away from the slaves; they made those women icons to white purity and the Southern way of life. But such veneration came with a cost. Women on pedestals tended to be frosty in bed, so the white man had his way with the Negro women and girls. Southern white boys crossed the threshold into manhood with a romp with a woman slave, who refused at the risk of a whipping, or worse. Even the white overseer could help himself whenever the urge arose, and it arose often, and all those mulatto babies were the result. But then the Union triumphed and the slaves were freed. Mingled with the Southern white man’s fury at the destruction of his way of life was this fear: what sort of retribution might the “black buck” now exact on white women? Negro men were now free to do to the white men’s beloved wives and daughters what the white men had done to the Negro women. Great vigilance was required to prevent such abominations. After all, how many rapes began with just a smile?

The white man’s guilt further added to his rage.

So black men swung by their necks by the dozens, murdered again and again for sex crimes almost always more imagined than real.

So they would attack a church, too. Mann squeezed off a few final shots at the whites across Greenwood Avenue and followed the boy down the back stairs, then out the door for the half-mile sprint to Black Tulsa’s Alamo.