“What I saw was bad enough, and yet I cannot tell all that I saw.”
- "Events of the Tulsa Disaster," by Mary E. Jones Parrish
As the Civil War neared its end, Union General William Sherman had been convinced that newly emancipated slaves needed their own land to secure their freedom. He issued Special Field Order No. 15, setting aside 400,000 coastal acres of land for Black families and stating that, “…no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside.” A provision was added later for mules.
In three months, the potential of Sherman’s order vanished with a single shot. That April, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and in the fall President Andrew Johnson reversed Sherman’s order, allowing Confederate planters to regain the land. It demonstrated a ruthless appropriation that would be repeated for decades to come.
Still, Black Americans created pockets of wealth during the Reconstruction years and into the early 20th century. Yet where Black Americans created a refuge, White Americans pushed back through political maneuvering and violence. This year marks the centennial of one such event: the heinous attack on the Black enclave of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
A glistening city-within-a-city, Greenwood was home to grocery and retail stores, theaters, restaurants and hotels – all the businesses and services that would cater to Black residents of a segregated state. Greenwood’s streets were lined with the stately mansions of doctors and business tycoons as well as the more modest dwellings of domestic workers. It was so prosperous it became known as “Negro Wall Street.”
The affluence of Greenwood “created this tie-in between Black Tulsans and White Tulsans,” says University of Tulsa anthropologist Alicia Odewale in CNN Films’ “Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street.” “But it’s all about perspective. White Tulsans talked about Greenwood as ‘Little Africa’ or ‘Nigger Land.’”
One hundred years ago, on May 31, 1921, that racial animosity became fuel for a massacre.
A lynch mob formed in downtown Tulsa after a 19-year-old Black man was accused of assaulting a White woman. That night, thousands of White Tulsans launched an all-out assault on Greenwood with rifles, machine guns, torches and aerial bombings from private planes.
The rampage lasted into the next afternoon, leaving 10,000 Black Tulsans homeless and their community burned to nothing but ash and rubble.
It’s still unknown how many people were killed but it’s estimated as many as 300 lost their lives in the massacre.
It was one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history. And it was part of a larger pattern of assault.
“We estimate that there were upwards of 100 massacres that took place between the end of the Civil War and the 1940s,” says William Darity Jr., a Duke University economist who co-authored “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” with writer and folklorist A. Kirsten Mullen. “And they take place North and South, East and West.”
We looked back through research and news clippings, paying particular attention to around 50 racially charged incidents between 1863 and 1923 when people of color lost property or economic opportunity. The events highlighted here reveal how acts of racial violence of different scope played out across the country and targeted various ethnicities. Historians then helped us examine how and why they had occurred and where we still see the impact today.
The achievements of Black Americans made them vulnerable to attack, said Trina Shanks, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute.
“If Blacks were successful and actually were visibly prosperous, that made them a target. Some of the violence might have been triggered by this economic envy,” said Shanks, director of community engagement at the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work. She explains that some White Americans thought, “How can we make sure that we reserve these economic benefits and opportunities for the White population and our children and push Blacks out so there can be more for us.”
The front page of the Detroit Free Press on March 7, 1863.
This dynamic played out in Wilmington, North Carolina, where many Black Americans achieved economic success for several decades in the late 1800s. They worked throughout the major port city as professionals, skilled artisans and industrial workers. They formed a building and loan association, built libraries and created baseball leagues. During the 1870s and 1880s, some Black businessmen and entrepreneurs amassed wealth rivaling that of many Whites, according to a 2006 historical report produced by the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, which was created by the state’s General Assembly
Comments