7
The Legacy of Greenwood
While many Tulsans at the time would have preferred that the whole incident be immediately forgotten, it wasn't—at least not at first. Dozens of newspapers around the country reported on the massacre: The New York Times ran a front-page story, and the appalling event even made international news, with a headline in the Times of London. In the United States, citizens from as far as Philadelphia and as near as Kansas were condemning Tulsa for what had taken place, calling the massacre a "horror" and a "disgrace."
Oklahomans were split on the national reaction to the event. Some white Tulsans seemed proud of what had happened. They bragged about their involvement and passed around postcards that displayed graphic photos of massacre victims, similar to the postcards and photographs that were distributed around the United States after lynchings of Black Americans. More than seventeen hundred members of the revamped Ku Klux Klan continued to terrorize Black Tulsans over the course of the following year. In April 1922, they paraded through downtown Tulsa—under an airplane that was flying an electrically lit cross. While it was never determined if the KKK was officially involved in the massacre, a number of Klan members were elected to Tulsa city and county office in 1922.
Some Black Tulsans did not want the event to be forgotten, for very different reasons. Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish, a Black educator and journalist who survived the massacre with her daughter, Florence Mary, wrote about the massacre for the Oklahoma Interracial Commission, a group focused on preventing lynchings. Parrish recorded the event from her own memories, and transcribed interviews with witnesses, as well as testimonies of other survivors. Along with photographs detailing the damage that had been done, Parrish published her account in her 1922 book, Events of the Tulsa Disaster—the first to be published about the massacre.
Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish
However, it would be a long time before anything else recounting the event would be printed. Many people, including most public officials, didn't appreciate the widespread national criticism of their state. Oklahoma had been a state for only fourteen years at that time. It was still trying to establish itself in the United States, and a shameful event like the Greenwood massacre would only make people think that Tulsa was an unruly, violent, racist place to live. Political leaders and business owners didn't want the story of the massacre hanging over them.
Thus began a concerted effort to erase it from Oklahoma's history.
A prime example can be found in the archives of the Tulsa Tribune. While the paper had been so eager to report on Dick Rowland's alleged "assault," the subject of the ensuing massacre was conspicuously absent from future issues commemorating past events. In the 1930s, the paper published an editorial series called "Fifteen Years Ago" that shone a spotlight on events in Tulsa's past from the same day. The June 1936 issue, however, mentioned nothing about the massacre; instead, it highlighted parties from June 1921, news about people who had graduated from Tulsa high schools that year, and the goings-on of Tulsa residents, such as who was entertaining out-of-town visitors and who had gone on trips themselves. While one could assume that the Tribune believed it was too soon to rehash the massacre, ten years later, in June 1946, the newspaper once again ignored the subject in its "Twenty-Five Years Ago" feature.
Unfortunately, the Tribune wasn't the only publication or entity that tried to bury the truth. The Oklahoma volume of the American Guide Series mentioned it in 1941 but devoted only one paragraph to the subject. History textbooks completely ignored the event—in fact, it was not included as part of the state's public school curricula until 2000, nearly eighty years after the massacre. This resulted in near total erasure of what had happened in Greenwood, to the point that many people who moved to Tulsa after the massacre and even some born and raised there in the ensuing years, both Black and white, often knew nothing about it.
Educator Nancy Feldman, who was white, hadn't heard anything about the Tulsa Race Riot, as it was known then, when she moved to Oklahoma in 1946 to teach sociology at the University of Tulsa. Survivor Robert Fairchild informed her of the event that had occurred twenty-five years prior, and, deeply disturbed by what she'd learned, she brought up the incident with her college students. According to Feldman, several of them "stoutly denied it and questioned my facts." Even after Fairchild himself visited the all-white class, they were not convinced; even worse, their parents told them Fairchild and Feldman were lying. Feldman was ordered by the school's dean to "drop the whole subject." She said her own friends were reluctant to acknowledge what had happened, as well: "When I would mention the riot to my white friends, few would talk about it. And they certainly didn't want to."
Nancy Dodson, an instructor at Tulsa Junior College, was also advised not to talk about the massacre "almost upon our arrival," she said. "Because of shame, I thought. But the explanation was, 'You don't want to start another.'"
Of course, some white people were ashamed of what had happened, while Black survivors were silent from fear, and likely not eager to speak of such a sad moment in their history. Perhaps some of them—close descendants of enslaved people, and some maybe even formerly enslaved themselves—didn't want to burden their children with such a harrowing tale about what had happened in their own town, and not that long ago.
It's not that the massacre wasn't discussed at all; it was, privately. But it had been made clear that public discussion was taboo, and most of the city's white residents, in particular, adhered to this collective oath of silence. Educational institutions in particular didn't seem to want their faculty to speak out about the massacre, even as trying to hide what had occurred was denying their students the Tulsa history and education they were paying for, and deserved.
Still, while University of Tulsa leaders may not have wanted instructors like Nancy Feldman to speak about the massacre, that didn't stop one of their students from writing his graduate thesis on the topic in 1946. Loren L. Gill, a white veteran of World War II, was fascinated by the massacre and began conducting extensive research and interviews with locals, city officials, and survivors. Although his paper is considered by historians to be somewhat reductive and inaccurate in its conclusions, Gill's efforts to record the truth of what happened in 1921 have been commended.
Despite the primarily white teachers and institutions who sought to hide what had happened, there are Black educators who tried their best to pass down the story of Black Wall Street and its demise. Some teachers at Booker T. Washington High School ensured their students knew the history of Greenwood in the years following.
But other than these few instances, the massacre largely remained lost to history.
Eventually, however, things started to change.
A few months before the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre, the head of the Tulsa chamber of commerce magazine decided to cover the event. Ed Wheeler, a white man who hosted a history show on a local radio station, was hired to write the article and began interviewing survivors and digging through local records. Not long after he started his research, other white people began trying to intimidate him; he received menacing phone calls, and groups of men twice approached him in person, plainly saying, "Don't write that story." Wheeler didn't give in to their threats, however, and finished the article—only for upper management at the chamber of commerce to block its publication, a decision that was backed up by the chamber's board of directors.
Like graduate student Gill, Wheeler was determined to report the truth about what had happened in 1921, and after the story was also rejected by Tulsa's two major newspapers, he ended up finding a home for it in a new Black publication called Impact Magazine.
There were also photographs taken of the massacre, many of which were preserved and housed in a collection at the Tulsa Historical Society. For this, we must thank Mozella Franklin Jones, daughter of B. C. Franklin, the well-known Black attorney in Tulsa who had survived the massacre and represented other survivors and whose work also helped overturn the building codes that were implemented to prevent residents from rebuilding Greenwood.
Buck Colbert "B.C." Franklin
Also in 1971, Black survivors came together to remember the event with a special program at Mount Zion Baptist Church, whose original building had been torched during the massacre only a few weeks after it was dedicated. The fiftieth anniversary program was headed by W. D. Williams, known as Bill when he was a teenager—the son of John and Loula, who had owned several businesses in Greenwood, including the iconic Dreamland Theatre. The Williams family had survived, but their businesses, including the auto shop and confectionery, were destroyed in the massacre. Williams was one of the teachers at Booker T. Washington High School, his alma mater, who had worked to keep the massacre's memory alive. Some white people also attended the program at Mount Zion. It was the first time Tulsans had publicly recognized the massacre in decades.
The 1970s were a time of change. It was the first decade after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which promised Black people all over the country equal treatment by law. Black culture began to gain popularity around the United States, in the form of literature, television, and, significantly, in education, as the first programs and departments focused on Black studies had recently been established at select institutions (though many of these programs were often underfunded). And as education transformed, people began to talk and teach more about what had happened in Tulsa fifty years ago. Books about Oklahoma began to include accounts of it, too. In 1975, historian Rudia M. Halliburton Jr. published The Tulsa Race War of 1921, the first book about the massacre since Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish's 1922 account.
As remarkable—and long overdue—as these efforts were, they did not overcome the forces of white supremacy that kept the stories of Greenwood hidden, nor did they bring them to light on a national scale. But they gave Tulsans and future historians a way to piece things together, little by little, even decades later.
While everyone was trying to decide how and when to talk about the massacre, what happened to Greenwood itself?
Only a few buildings in the thirty-plus blocks that were destroyed survived the massacre, including Booker T. Washington High School and Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church. The high school desegregated in 1973 and began busing in white students to learn alongside local Black students. Now known as a magnet school, Booker T. Washington has changed locations twice since 1921, but the facade of the original building was transported and used in construction of the current building on East Zion Street "for its historical significance." Vernon A.M.E. Church, whose basement remained intact after the massacre, was later added to the National Register for Historic Places in 2018.
The Oklahoma Eagle Opens Up Shop
In June 1920, Black journalist Theodore Baughman, the managing editor of A. J. Smitherman's Tulsa Star, left his job and founded a competing newspaper, the Oklahoma Sun. However, just a year later, the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed businesses in the Greenwood District, including the offices of both the Sun and the Star. Smitherman sold what could be salvaged of his equipment to Baughman and left town, making Baughman's publication the only Black newspaper in the city. Baughman reportedly put out a trimmed-down daily paper after the massacre, printing the names of people looking for family and friends.