An open letter to Tulsa visitors on the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

1915 Sanborn map showing the commercial section of Tulsa's Greenwood district a few years before its first destruction

To journalists, photographers, and visitors, pilgrims this week of the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: Welcome to Tulsa. Some context may help you interpret what you see and hear this week.

The cultural foundation for violent mob action on May 31 and June 1, 1921 was laid over the previous four years by Tulsa's respectable government, media, and business leaders, who openly encouraged mob violence against labor union organizers and other undesirables during the World War and afterwards. In the Tulsa Outrage, November 7, 1917, masked vigilantes whipped, tarred, and feathered 17 men connected with the International Workers of the World, an event that the front page of the Tulsa World cheered with the headline "Modern Ku Klux Klan Comes into Being." The Center for Public Secrets is featuring a series of articles by historian Randy Hopkins, "The Trail of Atrocity." There's an exhibit at the Center's space at 573 S. Peoria, Architects of the Massacre, open daily from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. through Thursday, May 27, 2021. The exhibit illustrates the powerful Tulsans who set the tone for the 1921 pogrom and its roots in the extra-legal Councils of Defense established by Oklahoma governor Robert Lee Williams to suppress dissent after the U. S. entered World War I. Randy Hopkins spoke on this topic last night; tonight, Tuesday, May 25, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., Hopkins will speak again along with Chief Egunwale Asuman on "The Mask of Atonement: Tulsa's False Promise of Reparations."

Within a year of the 1921 massacre, Tulsa's African-American community rebuilt Greenwood, having first defeated in court an attempt by city officials to use zoning to block survivors from rebuilding on their own land, forcing the community further north. Survivors of the massacre called the rebuilt Greenwood greater than what had gone before. But Greenwood was destroyed a second time by city government, using federal highway and urban renewal money, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, driving an expressway through the district's very heart, and following up with the Model Cities urban renewal program that left only a single block of retail buildings and a handful of churches. City officials finally succeeded in driving Tulsa's African-Americans further away from downtown; displaced families were encouraged to relocate to cheaply built post-war subdivisions in far north Tulsa, neighborhoods that had been utterly white at the 1960 census.

1939 Sanborn map showing the commercial section of Tulsa's Greenwood district, an area known as Deep Greenwood, after its rebuilding

BatesLine has presented over a dozen stories on the history of Tulsa's Greenwood district, focusing on the overlooked history of the African-American city-within-a-city from its rebuilding following the 1921 massacre, the peak years of the '40s and '50s, and its second destruction by government through "urban renewal" and expressway construction. The linked article provides an overview, my 2009 Ignite Tulsa talk, and links to more detailed articles, photos, films, and resources, including the Solomon Sir Jones films, home movies that documented Greenwood and other black Oklahoma communities in the mid to late 1920s.

1951 aerial photo showing the commercial section of Greenwood ("Deep Greenwood") and the present-day path of I-244.

Carlos Moreno has written a series of feature stories, The Victory of Greenwood, on the men and women who built and rebuilt the community: John and Loula Williams, O. W. Gurley, A. J. Smitherman, Mabel Little, Ellis Walker Woods, to name a few. A book of the same title will be released on June 2.

You might notice that, up the hill and west of Martin Luther King, Junior, Boulevard (formerly Cincinnati Avenue), along John Hope Franklin Blvd (formerly Haskell Street) and nearby streets, there are empty blocks of land, with old brick foundations and concrete steps where homes used to be. These are not race massacre ruins. The homes you see, in a neighborhood that was untouched by the 1921 disaster, were acquired and cleared in the 1990s and 2000s by the city's urban renewal authority as part of the city's promise to provide 200 acres for a state university campus. About 80 acres of that land, now filled mainly with surface parking lots and a few academic buildings, came from the Greenwood urban renewal area; the rest came from west of MLKJr Blvd. I wrote a feature story, "Steps to Nowhere," for This Land Press, in 2014, about the history of this neighborhood, which was never part of Greenwood; that link will also lead you to photos and other articles about the neighborhood's history.

Photo copyright 2014, Michael D. Bates. 116 E. Fairview St., Tulsa. These are urban renewal ruins from the 1990s, not race massacre ruins from 1921.

The centennial commemorations have exposed divisions within Tulsa as a whole and even within the African-American community, with separate organizations sponsoring separate events.

The Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission is not an official body of state or local government, but it has become as unofficially official as possible, with elected officials appointed to its board, and the support of the City of Tulsa, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and other foundations, and the Tulsa Regional Chamber. This is the group sponsoring the new $20 million Greenwood Rising tourist attraction on the southeast corner of Greenwood and Archer; the group sponsoring the sold-out Remember and Rise event at the baseball stadium, headlined by Georgia politician Stacey Abrams and singer John Legend.

Many black Tulsans feel excluded and alienated by the Centennial Commission's plans. Former City Councilor Joe Williams seemed to speak for many people when he wrote:

This Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission and so-called remembrance of the destruction of Greenwood and slaughter of the several hundred innocent victims and celebration of Black Wall-Street is one entirely big joke. Most of US can't even get tickets to the main event including the Survivors and their Descendants because they were already saved up and reserved for the elite and other people from the outside. The power brokers and system are just trying to make it appear to the nation and world like we are all cumbaya and all good together here in T-town. They don't care at all about US or OUR community and the disrespect is intolerable. The day after May 31st our treatment will be back to the usual same-o-same-o status quo. They are pushing FAKE NEWS!

From a recent Human Rights Watch article on Tulsa:

Rather than working on such a plan [for reparations to survivors and descendants], city and state authorities have focused most of their efforts on creating the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission and its flagship project, the "Greenwood Rising" history center, which is meant to honor the victims and foster cultural tourism. The Centennial Commission has raised at least $30 million, $20 million of which went to build Greenwood Rising, but it has alienated massacre survivors and many descendants of victims by failing to adequately involve them in its planning....

At least one survivor, 106-year-old Lennie Benningfield Randle, has issued a cease-and-desist letter ordering the commission to stop using her name or likeness to promote the project. All three living massacre survivors have sued the city of Tulsa, accusing it of continuing to enrich itself at the expense of the Black community by "appropriating" the massacre for tourism and economic opportunities that primarily benefit white-owned or controlled businesses and organizations....

The three living survivors of the massacre have said they do not plan to participate in any of the Centennial Commission's commemoration events. They will instead headline a community-sponsored event called the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival, which is the only centennial commemoration that includes and centers the survivors. They will be joined by US Senator Cory Booker, US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, and the creators of the HBO hit series "Watchmen," which was situated in Tulsa and depicted the race massacre in its opening scene. Unlike the Centennial Commission's events, the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival will emphasize the Black Tulsa community's demand for reparations.

The three survivors, Lessie E. Benningfield Randle, Viola Fletcher, and Hughes Van Ellis, Sr., along with Vernon A. M. E. Church, and descendants of survivors who have passed on, have sued the City of Tulsa, Tulsa Regional Chamber, Tulsa Development Authority, Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, Tulsa County Commission, the Sheriff of Tulsa County, and the Oklahoma Military Department in district court under public nuisance and unjust enrichment law. From the complaint:

The problem is not that the Defendants want to increase the attraction to Tulsa, it is that they are doing so on the backs of those they destroyed, without ensuring that the community and descendants of those subjected to the nuisance they created are significantly represented in the decision-making group and are direct beneficiaries of these efforts.

I note that page 47 of the complaint uses a graphic I created for my initial column on the "Greenwood Gap Theory" in the June 13, 2007, edition of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The graphic (shown earlier in this article) is a section of a 1951 aerial photo, overlaid with names of streets, landmarks, and railroads, along with the present-day path of I-244, a path that was cleared in 1967.

(Unfortunately, the complaint also misuses, on page 52, a graphic from my 2014 This Land Press story about the lost Near Northside, a photo of steps on the south side of Fairview Street between Boston and Cincinnati Avenues (now MLKJr Blvd), from which the BOK Tower in the background had been digitally erased. As detailed in the article, based on land records, street directories, fire maps, and aerial photographs, this neighborhood was a white neighborhood in 1921, was not damaged in the massacre, and survived until the City of Tulsa's urban renewal authority acquired the land in the 1990s.)

In addition to the Centennial Commission and the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation is hosting its annual symposium May 26-29, with a keynote speech by Prof. Cornel West, and many other talks and panel discussions.

The Greenwood Cultural Center, located just north of I-244, is offering tours of the Mabel Little House (a house that was relocated from further north on Greenwood and rescued from urban removal), a special exhibit of the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection, a Sunday, May 30, "Brunch with the Stars," featuring Alfre Woodard, Tim Blake Nelson, Garth Brooks, Wes Studi, and Stanley Nelson, a June 2 panel discussion on the "Bitter Root" Comic Series, the Greenwood Film Festival, June 12 - 14, and a virtual reality film, The Greenwood Avenue Experience, June 15-17.

There is also conflict within the African-American community over the significance of the last remaining block of 1922 Greenwood that survived urban renewal. Small business owners there, mostly African-American, regard it as primarily a place of business, as it was before and after 1921. Other members of the community seem to see it primarily as a sacred space of remembrance. The Greenwood Chamber of Commerce, representing the building owners and businesses, publicly opposed the application by the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival to close Greenwood Avenue and were condemned by many for evicting a small business early this year for non-payment of rent. Business owners had mixed feelings about the Black Lives Matter mural that was painted on the street in front of their shops during the protests of last summer, with some feeling that it distracted from the story of 1921.

The Greenwood Chamber of Commerce is hosting its own event, the Greenwood Centennial Marketplace Showcase, May 28-30, which will include live music, food trucks, an art gallery, and a welcome center at 101 N. Greenwood, on the northeast corner of Greenwood and Archer.

The Black Wall Street Alliance is hosting the Faces of Greenwood Timeline Experience at the Black Wall Street Alliance Art Hall, 100 N. Greenwood (northwest corner of Greenwood and Archer), Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. - 4 p.m., through July 17th.

The Black Panther Movement is sponsoring a National Black Power Convention, May 28-30, featuring a Second Amendment Armed Mass March for Self-Defense on Saturday, May 29, at 4 p.m.

Enjoy your visit. Mourn and celebrate. Learn the history in all of its complexity, a history that didn't stop in 1921.

Sincerely,

Michael Bates

P. S. Members of the community have expressed a desire to add their own messages to this open letter to visitors to Tulsa -- watch this space for those in the coming days.