Tulsa Massacre Quotes

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.

This was an unprecedented moment in American history as well. For the dead of the Tulsa massacre were hardly alone. Over the course of four centuries, thousands of African Americans had been the victims of murderous racism. Slaves had been shot, stabbed, and tortured to death, their bodies tossed in unmarked graves. Lynchings had claimed hundreds more, as Black men and women had their life force stolen from them beneath railroad trestles, telephone poles, and ancient oak and elm trees, their limbs creaking and swaying beneath the extra weight. And then there were the one who simply disappeared, into labor camps and county jail cells, or patches of wood and swamp, lit only by the pine knobs and kerosene lamps of their executioners. The victims of racism weren't few. They were legion. But here, in this aging cemetery in the heart of the country, was the first time than an American government -- federal, state, or local -- had ever actively set out to locate the remains of victims of American racism.

tensions have escalated throughout the nation. Lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan are continuing, as are race wars and massacres of colored people in cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Rosewood, Florida; and even my beloved Washington, DC, as Mama predicted long ago. The most terrifying part of all of this is that the federal and state governments have endorsed these mounting racist sentiments by rejecting anti-lynching bills like the Dyer Act, despite President Harding’s support, and by adopting despicable legislation like Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which prohibits interracial marriage and defines “white” as one with no trace of blood other than Caucasian. No, in this environment, I can take no unnecessary risks.

The history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and its aftermath tells a story of both tragedy and resilience in the long struggle for racial justice in America. The facts of Tulsa are not unique in America’s past or present on matters of race. The false accusation, the lack of real due process, the racially motivated brutality, the institutional suppression, and the absence of meaningful government acknowledgment and action are tragically all too common. But so too are the resilience and the strength of the people: to struggle, to survive, and to thrive in the face of overwhelming odds.

Though Oklahoma is known in African American history circles for its all-Black spaces, like the famed ‘Black Wall Street’ of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, the first Black inhabitants of Indian Territory were those who came as enslaved people with their Native owners. In arguing for their claim to Indian Territory land, these Indian freedpeople utilized the strategies of the first wave of Indian Territory settlers, the members of the Indian nations in which they’d lived.

Since the founding of the United States, racists have felt threatened by laws meant to expand justice and equality—they see the legislation as a roadblock to their own success, rather than something that provides people with the human rights they’ve always deserved.

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.

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

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.