⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I think the first time I heard about the Tulsa riot/massacre
was a news story that was about the effort to find mass graves. If I
recall, the people doing the searching didn't find what they were
looking for, but it did make an impression on me.
Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy was first published in 2002; the edition I read had a preface in 2021, written for the 100th anniversary of the event, when the massacre was very much on people's minds after the summer of 2020. Author James S. Hirsch begins the new preface by noting "Anytime you write a book about a historical event, the question inevitably arises: What relevance does that event have today? No one is asking that anymore about the Tulsa race massacre of 1921" (p. 6).
This is an excellent book. Hirsch goes through the history of Tulsa, describing how the city developed and the attitudes of the residents and how those led to the events of May 31-June 1, 1921 ("Even in its early boom years, the city's lawlessness was virtually impossible to stop" [p. 33]); I was surprised to learn how new a city Tulsa is and how ingrained racism was in Oklahoma and Tulsa itself ("The ascendancy of the Democratic Party at statehood . . . meant the denial of civil liberties to blacks, but Oklahoma was determined to out-Jim Crow the other southern states" [p. 44]). Hirsch goes into racial violence and lynching and the tropes that white people believed about Black people being happy during slavery and how that affected race relations in the 1920s:
Hirsch details what happened after the massacre, what happened to the residents of Greenwood (which was awful and incredibly degrading, which shouldn't have surprised me but still did) in the immediate aftermath and as time went on. He talks about the town rebuilding and what happened to various people involved, and then how it was remembered--or denied.
Essentially, white people believed that Black people invaded their side of town and they had to defend themselves. Black people believed that a Black teenager was going to be lynched for assaulting a white woman--a white woman who pretty quickly denied that she was assaulted and said she wouldn't pretty charges--and so they went to where he was being held to prevent that from happening. In the time to come, both groups came to believe certain things, whether or not those were factual.
Hirsch spends a lot of the book going into the remembrance of the event, how people try to deny it, how it was discussed or not, how it was researched, how the threat of another one loomed over the residents of Tulsa, both Black and white, how it was commemorated. A commission was assembled in the 1990s to study it and make recommendations, including about reparations. He gets into what actually happened as well as he can.
I appreciated how even-handed he was. The horrors of the destruction of Greenwood aren't denied; he delves a lot into issues like whether the area was firebombed and whether there were mass graves of victims. (Having read this, I feel like planes definitely flew over the area but didn't bomb it; there were definitely more victims that the official tally, but I'm unsure about the mass graves.) He tells the stories of victims with respect and my heart absolutely broke for them, but he doesn't accept everything they say at face value. He does tell their story, sharing things, for example, like the idea that the massacre was planned by white city officials; my impression is more that these people took advantage of what was going on to destroy Greenwood, but they didn't plan it. Circumstances were definitely in their favor. He follows Don Ross, a Black journalist-turned-politician (who fought to get the Confederate flag off the capitol grounds) throughout the remembrance section. Ross is a fascinating figure and this from him really struck me:
Recommend.
Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy was first published in 2002; the edition I read had a preface in 2021, written for the 100th anniversary of the event, when the massacre was very much on people's minds after the summer of 2020. Author James S. Hirsch begins the new preface by noting "Anytime you write a book about a historical event, the question inevitably arises: What relevance does that event have today? No one is asking that anymore about the Tulsa race massacre of 1921" (p. 6).
This is an excellent book. Hirsch goes through the history of Tulsa, describing how the city developed and the attitudes of the residents and how those led to the events of May 31-June 1, 1921 ("Even in its early boom years, the city's lawlessness was virtually impossible to stop" [p. 33]); I was surprised to learn how new a city Tulsa is and how ingrained racism was in Oklahoma and Tulsa itself ("The ascendancy of the Democratic Party at statehood . . . meant the denial of civil liberties to blacks, but Oklahoma was determined to out-Jim Crow the other southern states" [p. 44]). Hirsch goes into racial violence and lynching and the tropes that white people believed about Black people being happy during slavery and how that affected race relations in the 1920s:
The "new Negro" was the malevolent counterpart of the "old Negro," or "Sambo," whom whites invented during slavery and later romanticized in merchandise as a simple, carefree "darky" who lived in an antebellum racial utopia. The "new Negro," according to this view, lacked the civilizing restraints of slavery and was therefore regressing to a state of barbarism. Physical force was the only way to restrain him. (p. 62)Hirsch describes the precipitating events and what happened in Tulsa during the massacre, but it took up less of the book than I expected. It's still hard to read. Part of the issue goes hand-in-hand with the second part of the book title: "remembrance." Because in the years after the massacre, a lot of the primary documents disappear. There's debate about whether a newspaper published an editorial "To Lynch a Negro Tonight"; the editorial page and front-page story about the inciting incident were both cut from the newspaper's bound volumes. Even the official documentation has disappeared. So mostly what we're left with is what participants and victims told their descendants.
Hirsch details what happened after the massacre, what happened to the residents of Greenwood (which was awful and incredibly degrading, which shouldn't have surprised me but still did) in the immediate aftermath and as time went on. He talks about the town rebuilding and what happened to various people involved, and then how it was remembered--or denied.
Essentially, white people believed that Black people invaded their side of town and they had to defend themselves. Black people believed that a Black teenager was going to be lynched for assaulting a white woman--a white woman who pretty quickly denied that she was assaulted and said she wouldn't pretty charges--and so they went to where he was being held to prevent that from happening. In the time to come, both groups came to believe certain things, whether or not those were factual.
Hirsch spends a lot of the book going into the remembrance of the event, how people try to deny it, how it was discussed or not, how it was researched, how the threat of another one loomed over the residents of Tulsa, both Black and white, how it was commemorated. A commission was assembled in the 1990s to study it and make recommendations, including about reparations. He gets into what actually happened as well as he can.
I appreciated how even-handed he was. The horrors of the destruction of Greenwood aren't denied; he delves a lot into issues like whether the area was firebombed and whether there were mass graves of victims. (Having read this, I feel like planes definitely flew over the area but didn't bomb it; there were definitely more victims that the official tally, but I'm unsure about the mass graves.) He tells the stories of victims with respect and my heart absolutely broke for them, but he doesn't accept everything they say at face value. He does tell their story, sharing things, for example, like the idea that the massacre was planned by white city officials; my impression is more that these people took advantage of what was going on to destroy Greenwood, but they didn't plan it. Circumstances were definitely in their favor. He follows Don Ross, a Black journalist-turned-politician (who fought to get the Confederate flag off the capitol grounds) throughout the remembrance section. Ross is a fascinating figure and this from him really struck me:
When a white interviewer suggested that race relations had improved since the 1950s, [Ross] leaned forward and glared. "How in the hell can you tell me that?" he demanded. "You know, you talk about privilege and entitlement. The biggest entitlement white folks have is the entitlement of being white. Break that for me . . . I mean, it don't make sense to me, the white folks' attitude, that somehow I ought to be appreciative that you don't hate me as much. That's the progress. Once you would physically kill me, and I have evidence of that, and now you just choke me to death economically and politically and socially, and you want me to say that's progress from dying! 'Because you sonofabitch you, we coulda killed your black a**,' that's what you're telling me. But now we let you live, and I'm proud of that progress. White folks let me live. Until I get the same entitlement irrespective of skin color, f**k you . . . But I love you. (p. 228)I feel like I learned a lot from this book, and as a history major, the discussion of how events are remembered, officially and unofficially, fascinated me. But ultimately, the book just broke my heart over and over again.
Recommend.
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