The Tulsa War of 1921

I didn’t learn about Tulsa until October 2019. Not from a history book or a documentary, but from the HBO series Watchmen. At the time I dismissed it as fiction, part of the DC comic book universe which the series was based on, I was and still am a Marvel guy growing up. There was no way a Black community was attacked from the sky with fire bombs dropped by biplanes. That sounded like something America would condemn in another country, not admit happened on its own soil. It definitely wasn’t mentioned in the U.S. history textbooks used in my public school education.

In 1997 the movie Rosewood told the story of another Black community destroyed by white people in 1923 on the false accusation that a Black man attacked a white woman. Although it was triggering, it didn’t spark a need to know more back then, before I started my journey toward my full Black self. In 2020 during the pandemic, as I began learning about America’s determination to destroy any successful Black community, New York in 1863, East St. Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919, the “Red Summer,” along with Washington D.C. and Knoxville in that same year.

In my guest essay during the height of the pandemic featured on the Michael Smerconish Show website titled, Black America is in an Abusive Relationship, I talked about this relationship where everybody knows about it but our friends, neighbors, and even family refuse to talk about it. A relationship where our partner has told us if we tell anybody or try to leave, they will kill us. A relationship where our partner says, “I’m sorry, I’ll never hit you again” repeatedly. A relationship where rape, physical and mental abuse, withheld financial resources, and murder are used to keep us in place, our place.

Every year since, as I sit with the realities of Tulsa and learn more, seeing it not through the rose-colored glasses of American history but through the Black lens of clarity and truth, the fictionalized version opening a television series became the catalyst for my desire to know. The firebombing was real. The destruction was real. The beauty of a prosperous thriving Black community was real. The hatred and jealousy was real.

The truth is still gradually unfolding because “truth” was being narrated through a white lens, the story of the lion hunt is always told by the hunter.

Then the survivors who were silenced by the threat of death started telling their stories, contradicting the whitewashed version. For decades America treated their memories like rumors instead of testimony. Mother Viola Ford Fletcher, who passed at 111 years old last year. Hughes Van Ellis lived to 102 and passed in 2023. Lessie Benningfield Randle at 111 is still with us.

If you read the limited accounts and records they would tell you that only ten white people were killed and 300 Black people, but today I’m going to give you some different numbers to ponder, 30 vs. 2,000 and 25,000 vs. 10,000.

Dick Rowland, a young nineteen-year-old Black man who worked as a shoeshine “boy,” was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman who operated the elevator in the Drexel Building. He had stepped into that elevator on his way to use the “Colored” restroom upstairs, an ordinary trip that turned into a death sentence the moment a white accusation entered the air. What happened in that tiny box may never be known for sure, but Dick would not be the first Black man falsely accused of assaulting a white woman and then threatened with lynching by a white mob.

Let’s talk about the 30 Black men who decided the white mob of the most dangerous people on earth would not get to claim a Black life this time. Although we don’t have the names of these men, we can speculate that men like O.W. Gurley, J.B. Stradford, and Buck Colbert Franklin were part of this group. Leaders of their Black community. They showed up with guns determined not to let the angry white mob get their hands on this member of the Black community.

On the other side it is reported that nearly 2,000 armed white men showed up that night determined to administer their own brand of justice and defend the honor of the white woman. Nobody knows who fired the first shot, but gunfire allegedly started when a white man tried to take a gun from a Black man. Outnumbered nearly 100 to 1, those brothers not only held their ground and saved Dick Rowland, they didn’t retreat and run back across the tracks. They backed up and fired back as the mob advanced.

The records claim only a total of ten white people died over the two days, but we know better than to trust the history recounted. They couldn’t say those Black men had to have shot and killed possibly hundreds of white men to hold off such a large mob. It ain’t no fun when the rabbit, or the lion, has the gun.

The other numbers, 25,000 vs. 10,000.

It is estimated that the Greenwood community had about 10,000 residents in total, which included women and children. 25,000 newly deputized white men descended onto Greenwood for two days aided by planes dropping explosives. Most records claim about 6,000 Black people were missing in the end and only 300 were killed. Again, this is through the white lens of history. The disparity in the numbers can only be attributed to spin, fake news.

Many of the Black men who settled in Tulsa and lived in the Greenwood community had served in the military fighting for this country in World War I. Some had worn the uniform of the United States overseas and came home only to be treated like enemies in their own country. They knew how to fight. They would not have fled. If they would die for this country, you can bet they would have died for their community, a community they built.

So this was not a massacre, it was a war. The first race war.

The truth as told by the media afterward could not tell the truth. That white people, although they had the numbers, could not contend, so they had to drop bombs to support the inadequacies of the untrained white mob. The reality would have been too much for white sensibilities.

We may never have the full truth but we know not to trust the story we were handed because a massacre somehow sounds more plausible than a war.

A war suggests resistance. A war means Greenwood fought back.