KC author knows ignoring uncomfortable race history like Tulsa means we’ll repeat it
I have a confession to make: While I pride myself on being a fairly well educated Black woman, I’m ashamed to say I knew nothing about the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, massacre of an entire prominent community of affluent Black Americans until two years ago.
Even more embarrassing, I learned about it from its recreation in the opening scene of the 2019 science fiction HBO television series “Watchmen,” based on the 1986 graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I’ve since pored over countless articles and read several books about this horror.
A century after this country’s worst incident of racial terrorism, I’ve thought a lot about my previous ignorance. How could it be possible that I had not ever heard about this 34-block community, dubbed “Black Wall Street,” being attacked by white supremacists who burned, bombed and riddled it with machine gun fire from low-flying planes, reducing the whole quarter to smoldering rubble?
At first hearing, I admit, I thought it too horrific that Tulsa officials and the National Guard had participated in the murder of — according to historians — probably as many as 200 innocent Black men, women and children, for no reason other than jealousy over their prosperity.
Members of Tulsa’s Black population who survived the systematic destruction of the Greenwood District were left virtually homeless. Many fled to start over in surrounding states, and some came to Kansas City.
Yes, this story is true. Not “hateful lies about this country,” as former President Donald Trump refers to all racist atrocities he and others don’t want taught in schools. Keep the people stupid, right? This subject never has been classroom conversation. Not when I was in school many moons ago, not when my children were in school, and not now either. But it should be.
It is indeed part of America’s ugly white supremacist history that has been intentionally left out of schoolbooks along with so much more truth about how this country enslaved, oppressed, terrorized and then intentionally mischaracterized its treatment of Black and brown Americans for centuries.
That’s patriotic education for you. More of the same old, same old.
And, if Republican legislators have their way in pushing to stop schools from teaching children about American racism and how it has shaped public policy in this country, a century from now, kids still won’t hear the whole story in schools. Which enables the continuation of racist practices that so many of us, people of all races and backgrounds, are just plain fed up with.
GOP senators have called teaching about American racism a form of activist indoctrination. And there it is. God forbid we learn from mistakes of the past. When people know better, they demand better.
East St. Louis had its own race riot
The thought of wiping any study of American racism from classrooms is just plain wrong. “It’s appalling,” said Charles Coulter, a 66-year-old Kansas Citian who grew up in Tulsa. Coulter worked for The Star for nearly 30 years, first as a sports editor and later, before his retirement in 2007, on its editorial board. He is the African American author of “Take up the Black Man’s Burden: Kansas City’s African American Communities, 1865-1939.”
“What’s really disappointing is our generation fought to get our story as Black people told throughout the country” Coulter said. “I thought we fought this battle back in the 1970s and in the ‘80s and had established ‘bonafidity.’ Do we really have to fight this battle every generation?”
It seems so, Charles.
Tulsa was not the only racist rampage we didn’t learn about in school. There were many, including one in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. White workers, who had gone on strike, were angry that Black workers were hired to replace them, and went on a murderous tear, beating Black men and women with guns, rocks and pipes. They set fire to homes and shot residents as they fled their burning properties. Black people were also lynched in other areas of the city.
Again, this is true Midwestern history not shared in schoolbooks. But it was passed on in Black families through stories told generation after generation. Which is something many Black Tulsans failed to do after the 1921 massacre, Coulter said.
The massacre happened 33 years before Coulter was born. His mother was 9 when Greenwood was wiped out. His family did not own property or a business in Greenwood, but lived in a nearby neighborhood at the time. His grandmother was among the hundreds of innocent Black people rounded up and held after the massacre, just because. Each Black person arrested for nothing more than being the same color as those under direct attack had to get a white person to speak for them in order to be released.
Black Tulsans knew what happened in Greenwood, of course, only no one ever talked about it.
“I guess they were afraid,” Coulter said. “My mother never talked about it. My grandmother never talked about it. I didn’t know about it. It wasn’t taught in school.”
It wasn’t until around 1994 that Coulter ran across this devastating chapter in the history of his own hometown. He was preparing to teach a course on the Black experience in the Midwest at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, “when I stumbled on Scott Ellsworth’s book ‘Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921,’” he said. “I thought, why have I never heard of this?”
Coulter said he has since learned that after the Greenwood massacre, “everybody just sort of agreed it didn’t happen. White Tulsa, the city government, felt guilty, ashamed, and they needed to rebuild Tulsa’s image as soon as possible. Black Tulsans didn’t talk about it because they were scared of raising up racial tensions.”
Greenwood was eventually rebuilt, Coulter said, “But then the local government, the urban planners, went and built an interstate through it.” Maybe they figured no one would ever ask what happened in Greenwood if Greenwood was no longer there. Wrong again.
