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Joe Biden will be in Tulsa, Oklahoma to speak at a remembrance for the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. Amid calls from Black leaders and activists for reparations and repatriation, if Joe can make race relations worse, he will do it.
If you have never heard of the Tulsa Massacre, I will give you a brief primer. I got most of the information from History.com, Tulsa World and The Washington Post:
Dick Rowland shined shoes in Tulsa, the “oil capital of the world” and made a lot of money doing it.
On May 30, 1921, Rowland took a break from his shoe stand inside a pool hall and walked to the Drexel Building to use the only public restroom for Black people in segregated Tulsa.
Rowland passed Renberg’s, a department store that occupied the first two floors of the Drexel Building, and stepped into an open wire-caged elevator operated by a 17-year-old White girl named Sarah Page.
What happened next is cloudy. The elevator may not have stopped level with the floor. Mr. Rowland tripped or fell into Miss Page and she screamed. Police were called and Rowland ran.
The yellow journalists of the time fanned the flames of racism with their descriptions of the incident. The Tulsa Tribune detailed the arrest of Rowland, under the headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.”, and used the word “assault”, which insinuated that he had committed sexual assault.
With rumors still flying of a possible lynching, a group of around 75 armed Black men returned to the courthouse shortly after 10 pm, where they were met by some 1,500 white men, some of whom also carried weapons.
Over the next several hours, groups of white Tulsans—some of whom were deputized and given weapons by city officials—committed numerous acts of violence against Black people, including shooting an unarmed man in a movie theater.
The false belief that a large-scale insurrection among Black Tulsans was underway, including reinforcements from nearby towns and cities with large African American populations, fueled the growing hysteria.
As dawn broke on June 1, thousands of white citizens poured into the Greenwood District, looting and burning homes and businesses over an area of 35 city blocks. Firefighters who arrived to help put out fires later testified that rioters had threatened them with guns and forced them to leave.
It is believed that up to 300 people were killed, but true numbers will never be known because victims were buried in mass graves. Racism in Tulsa increased in the aftermath and lives and property were destroyed. This was a shameful episode in American history. Just like with the earlier New York Draft Riot, yellow journalism and politicians stoked the racial and class divisions.
The Tulsa Massacre got memory holed for decades. Beginning with the 50th anniversary, the citizens in Tulsa began adding to the history and digging for more information.
This week marked the 100th anniversary. An event that was to feature singer John Legend and political gadfly Stacey Abrams was cancelled over “reparations”.
Organizers who called off a headline commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre said Friday the event was canceled after an agreement couldn’t be reached over monetary payments to three survivors of the deadly attack by a white mob, highlighting broader debates over reparations for racial injustice.
Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons told The Associated Press that he submitted a list of requests to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission in order to have the survivors attend the “Remember & Rise” event Monday at ONEOK Field in Tulsa.
And:
State Sen. Kevin Matthews, the chairman of the commission, said after meeting with Solomon-Simmons and other representatives of the survivors, the commission agreed to provide $100,000 to each of the three survivors, along with $2 million in seed money for a reparations fund.
“We raised the money and we were excited the survivors were going to accept these gifts,” Matthews said Friday. “Unfortunately, on Sunday they reached out and increased the amount of the $100,000-per-survivor gifts to $1 million, and instead of $2 million, they asked for $50 million — $50 million — in seed money. We could not respond to those demands.”
Greed is colorblind.
Here is part of the statement by Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) at the scaled back event:
“The intentional white washing of our harmful past is yet another example of why we must seize the moment, fight for reparations and establish a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission. Without understanding and learning from our history, we are bound to repeat it. This a time for public education so we achieve our goal of dismantling systemic racism.”
We should tell the brutal honest truth about our American history. Warts and all. Truth Commissions like the one Barbara Lee wants, always end in more deaths and hatred.
Before Lee spoke at the event, there was a march and rally organized by the New Black Panther Party. A speaker encouraged listeners to “kill everything white in sight.” Here is the video evidence:
That is not helpful to race relations, nor is Bree Newsome, another activist, helpful with her talk of descendants’ sin:
“Amazing how white people commit atrocities in one generation & then they just disappear from existence,” she wrote. “No descendants, no names, no current wealth or land holdings that can be identified as a result of the atrocity.
“Only Black survivors exist with living memory apparently,” she wrote. The idea is that those who still have the land that belonged to their forefathers should relinquish it to the descendants of those who had been harmed by racist past practices. Newsome basically believes that children are responsible for the sins of their parents.
We must learn to live together or we will destroy ourselves and our future.
So, unreconstructed racist Pedo Joe is going to swoop into Tulsa today to lecture the locals about the Tulsa Massacre. Expect Joe to bring racial kindling, rhetorical gasoline and political matches to inflame the crowd. Joe’s puppet masters need us divided and hating each other.
Featured Image: Reverend Jacob Hooker/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
Scott says: Never heard about this on school, that’s for sure. In reading info on the web, it seems that there are many conflicting accounts / information.
Often left out is that the sheriff barricaded the jail to keep the white mob out, and said they’d shoot anyone attempting a lynching.
The armed black mob that showed up was told to leave, but somewhere in that process, there was a scuffle, and a shot was fired, this led to more, with the end result being 10 white and 2 black people killed. Prior to that, most of the white crowd was unarmed.
After this incident, they got armed, and went to the Greenwood neighborhood for revenge. Reports were that many of the blacks initially involved were WWI veterans, and they set up ambushes with automatic weapons , so there was plenty of gunfire from both sides. The reports of private aircraft dropping bombs, etc are conflicting at best.
the official numbers are 26 black and 13 white people dead. Yes, there are reports of far more black people killed, and of mass graves, but to date, the use of ground penetrating radar at the reported sites of mass graves has failed to turn up any evidence at all of such graves.
No matter the death toll, as you point out, this was an ugly event, and the racial tensions were stoked by the media and corrupt politicians.
The different accounts are likely the result of differing perspectives, and unfortunately those wishing to advance an agenda. It would be reasonable to assume that the actual numbers are somewhere between the official numbers, and those claimed by the black activists. The fact that it was 100 years ago doesn’t help, as accuracy of information / availability of witnesses always decreases with time. That does NOT mean that we should just blindly accept the accounts of one side, because they claim to be the sole victims, oppressed, etc. The truth should be based on facts and nothing else, with the real possibility that we will never know the truth.
I was at a Memorial Day remembrance yesterday at Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs, and while I got there too late for most of it, the reenactors telling the stories of the fallen was moving. But then, the last one they talked about was a black man who had fought in the Spanish American War. His story was impressive, as were his accomplishments. But what I found strange was that he was not killed in battle, but rather died in the city in the late 1920’s. I struggled to see how this story was relevant to Memorial Day, as it is supposed to be reserved for those who fell defending our country,.. At the end, the reason for it became more clear at least to me, as the speaker, dressed as a Buffalo Soldier then spent a few minutes talking about Tulsa and the one-sided account of it that he obviously supports. Again, an appropriate conversation to have (though a more balanced assessment would be nice), and being the 100th anniversary of the event , the appropriate day for the conversation. That being said, DURING a Memorial Day Service, and at the graveside of fallen soldiers was NOT the time, or the place for it, and as a veteran, this speaker should have known better. Sadly, he allowed race and personal bias to tarnish an otherwise beautiful remembrance.
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