If anyone truly believes that the April attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was the most tragic bombing ever to take place on United States soil - as the media has been widely reporting - they're wrong, plain and simple. That's because an even deadlier bombing occurred in that same state nearly 75 years ago. Many people in high places would like to forget that it ever happened. Searching under the heading of "riots," "Oklahoma," and "Tulsa," in current editions of the World Book Encyclopedia, there is conspicuously no mention whatsoever of the Tulsa race riot of 1921, and this omission is by no means a surprise, or a rare case.
The fact is, one would also be hard-pressed to find documentation of the incident, let alone an accurate accounting of it, in any other "scholarly" reference or American history book. That's precisely the point that noted author, publisher and orator Ron Wallace, a Tulsa native, sought to make nearly five years ago, when he began researching this riot, one of the worse incidents of violence ever visited upon people of African descent. Ultimately joined on the college project by Jay Jay Wilson of Los Angeles, the duo found and compiled indisputable evidence of what they now describe as "A Black Holocaust in America." The date was June 1, 1921, when "Black Wallstreet," the name fittingly given to one of the most affluent all-Black communities in America, was bombed from the air, and burned to the ground by mobs of envious whites. In a period spanning fewer than 12 hours, a once thriving black business district in northern Tulsa lay smoldering.
A model community destroyed, and a major African-American economic movement resoundingly defused. The night's carnage left some 3,000 African-Americans dead, and over 600 successful businesses lost. Among these were 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores and two movie theaters, a bank, a post office, libraries, schools, law offices, a half-dozen private airplanes, a bus system, a hospital and 21 churches. As could have been expected the impetus behind it all was the infamous Ku Klux Klan, working in consort with ranking city officials, and many other sympathizers.
In their self-published book, "Black Wallstreet: A Lost Dream," and its companion video documentary, "Black Wallstreet: A Black Holocaust in America!" the authors have chronicled for the very first time, in the words of area historians and elderly survivors, what really happened there on that fateful summer day in 1921, and why it happened. Wallace similarly explained why this bloody event from the 1920s seems to have a recurring effect that is felt in predominately Black neighborhoods to this day. The best description of Black Wallstreet, or Little Africa, as it was also known, could be likened to a mini-Beverly Hills. It was the golden door of the Black community during the early 1900s, and it proved that African-Americans had successful infrastructure. That's what Black Wallstreet was all about. The dollar circulated 36 to 100 times, sometimes taking a year for currency to leave the community. Now, in 1995, a dollar leaves the Black community in 15 minutes. As far as resources, there were Ph.D.'s residing in Little Africa, Black attorneys and doctors. One doctor was Dr. Berry, who owned the bus system. His average income was $500 a day, hefty pocket change in 1910. During that era, physicians owned medical schools. There were pawn shops everywhere, brothels, jewelry stores, 21 churches, 21 restaurants and two movie theaters. It was a time when the entire State of Oklahoma had only two airports, yet six Blacks owned their own airplanes.
It was a very fascinating community. The area encompassed over 600 businesses and 36 square blocks with a population of 15,000 African-Americans. And when the lower-economic Europeans looked over and saw what the Black community created, many of them were jealous. When the average student went to school on Black Wallstreet, he wore a suit and tie because of the morals and respect they were taught at a young age… The main thoroughfare was Greenwood Avenue, and it was intersected by Archer and Pine Streets; from the first letters in each of those three names, you get G.A.P, and that's where the renowned R & B music group The Gap Band got its name. They're from Tulsa. Black Wallstreet was a prime example of the typical Black community in America, with an independent Black business community, but what made it unusual was its location. At the time, Oklahoma was set aside to be a Black and Indian state. There were over 28 Black townships there. One third of the people who traveled in the terrifying "Trail of Tears," along-side the Indians between 1830 to 1842 were Black people. The citizens of this proposed Indian and Black state chose a Black governor, a treasurer from Kansas named McDade. But the Ku Klux Klan said that if he assumed office, that they would kill him within 48 hours.
A lot of Blacks owned farmland, and many of them had gone into the oil business. The community was so tight and wealthy because they traded dollars hand-to-hand, and because they were dependent upon one another as a result of the Jim Crow laws. It was not unusual for a home accidentally burned down, to be rebuilt within a few weeks by neighbors. This was the type of scenario that was going on day to day on Black Wallstreet. Blacks intermarried into the native Indian culture, and some of them inherited Indian land claims, including whatever oil was later found on the properties. To illustrate how wealthy this Black community was, there was a banker in a neighboring town whose wife, California Taylor, was the daughter of the owner of the largest cotton gin west of the Mississippi River. When California went shopping, it was in Paris, France, where she had her clothes custom made. Black Wallstreet conducted global business, and the Black community of Tulsa flourished from the early 1900s until June 1, 1921, when the largest massacre of civilian Americans in the history of the United States took place, all at the instigation of the KKK. Imagine walking out of your front door and seeing 1,500 homes on fire. It must have been amazing!
Survivors interviewed think that the whole thing was planned, because during the time that all of this was going on, white families stood with their children around the borders of the Black district, watching the massacre, the looting and all, much in the same manner they would watch a lynching. The word "picnic" derives from a form of homicide-as-entertainment pastime native to Oklahoma, being short for "pick a nigger" to lynch. (It was a typical Friday evening form of recreation that was considered perfectly normal, during which a Black male would be lynched, and the viewers would cut off body parts as souvenirs.) This went on every weekend in this country, and it was all across the county. (Interestingly enough, the readiness to take a souvenir from a lynching implied that it was socially acceptable to murder Blacks, and it is eerily reminiscent of the detailed records the Nazi's kept of the people they exterminated in the death camps, as if what they were doing was not illegal. WFI Editor)
The riots were not caused by anything Black or white; it was caused by jealousy. Lots of white people had come back from World War I, and they were poor. When they looked over into the Black communities and realized that Black men who fought in the War, had come home as heroes, it helped to trigger the destruction. The riot cost the Black community everything, and not a single dime of restitution - no insurance claims - has been awarded to the victims to this day. Nonetheless, they rebuilt. Yet, it is estimated that 1,500 to 3,000 people were killed and we know that many of them were buried in mass graves all around the city. Some were thrown into the river. As a matter of fact, at 21st Street and Yale Ave., where there now stands a Sears parking lot, was once a coal mine; many bodies were thrown into the shafts before they were sealed up, and paved over for the convenience of shoppers. Black Americans don't know about this story because the word "holocaust" disturbs the partisans of the Democratic and Republican parties. The white community is haunted by the reality of the republic's past as a slave-state, and is anxiety ridden that some day the Black community will make demands for restitution, for the "Old Money" fortunes that were made on the backs of enslaved black people. The idea that the United States invented "ethnic cleansing" and racism, and that the first concentration camps were devised by the U.S., and that the Black people were subjected to a holocaust because of the fear they caused in the white community, who fully realized the violent implications of the enslavement of another ethnic group, all defies the patriotic jingoistic propaganda taught to school-children, that America is the land of the free.
When other ethnic groups use the word "holocaust" it is socially acceptable; but when Black people discuss the Black Holocaust, they are dismissed as cry-babies, trying to dig up old issues from ancient history, that most white people believe are settled. In 1910, Black people owned 13 million acres of land, at the height of racism in the United States. The reality that the Black people had a thriving community is proof that they have the equal ability of any other ethnic group, justifying the pride of Black people in the accomplishments of their community. It is also important for all people to understand the reality of the Black Holocaust in America, and stop trying to deny the fact that the biggest obstacle to a social peace in the United States today is the role played by the Federal Government in perpetuating racist conflict in the past.
SOURCE: Excerpted from Black Elegance Magazine, date unknown. As told to Ronald E. Childs; Ron Wallace, co-author of "Black Wallstreet." To order Black Wallstreet, contact Dularon Entertainment, Inc., P. O. Box 2702, Tulsa, OK, 74149, or call 1(800)682-7975.
Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.
The social clash between the white and black ethnic groups in the United States is especially marked by the fear that permeates white society regarding black people. To many average white people, black people and the black experience is completely alien. When the things that are common to black people are related to many average white people, such as having to come to grips with constant suspicion from others - like store security - solely on the basis of the color of one's skin, it is virtually impossible for the white person to believe that such conditions exist in America. Likewise, the consistent reports of police harassment of black people that have been documented since the first days of the republic, are hard to believe by middle-class white people, who only have cordial relations with the police. It is also easier for white people to let go of the memory of slavery than it is for the black people, because for the white people it represented an episode of national shame. The number of black people who "disappeared," is too high to estimate, and no one has really tried, because the gruesome reality that murder was used liberally to keep the racist based class-system active even after the official end of slavery is too ugly a lesson for school teachers to disclose to impressionable children. Another black community that perished in the middle of the night, was Rosewood, Florida. It was only recently that it even came to light that Rosewood was destroyed, and that people were murdered, on no more than a rumor. But it is important to all Americans, that the truth about the past be faced honestly, if America is to have a future at all.
Maryalice Anderson posted from her Ipad!
Location:N 48th St,Milwaukee,United States
