Tulsa’s Massacre of 1921 and the Quest for Black Freedom in America

May 31, 1921 was the first day of the Tulsa Race Riot, an event which nearly crushed the African American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma and has long held a position of lore in African American history. It remains an event that, like so many other horrific events in American history, should be better known by the average citizen. The last survivor of the “Race riot,” Olivia Hooker, has recently spoken about her memories of that tragic day. I wish to think about the events in Tulsa as part of a larger narrative, however, about how we should think about the ways in which black economic self-empowerment in all its forms has been an important part of African American intellectual history.

The events in Tulsa are often seen as an example of African Americans attempting to strive for economic equality and being squashed by the very system that implored them to work hard. The Greenwood district of Tulsa, the African American section of that city, prospered up until the events of May 31, 1921. As with so many anti-black pogroms in the United States in the late 1910s and early 1920s, the Tulsa riot was sparked by accusations of a black man assaulting a white woman. But we should not be surprised that such a pretense was used to destroy an economically vibrant–and unmistakably black–section of Tulsa. Ida B. Wells-Barnett showed in her research and reporting the ways in which the lynching of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was linked to concerns among white southerners about the economic independence of their black counterparts.

Even today, concerns about black uplift through capitalism animate much of the discussion about race, racism, and citizenship among African Americans. Part of what made Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “A Case for Reparations” such a compelling read, after all, was his usage of economic and historical data to chronicle the fiscal damage done to the African American community throughout the 20th century. More recently a report titled “What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap” highlights how even debates among African Americans about closing the racial wealth gap get facts wrong. Notably, arguments that if African Americans simply “bought black” and stuck to black-owned banks are shown to be ineffective solutions.

This is a reminder of debates during the Great Depression, involving figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, which looked to answer the question of how to help an African American community that was already in precarious economic waters before the Depression survive such a difficult time. For that matter, the economic question concerned African American activists in the 1960s and 1970s–and their various solutions helped spark the American Left to think harder about de-industrialization and neoliberalism’s impact on the average citizen.

Tulsa is a stand in for how these problems often affected African American intellectual history. Tulsa is also a reminder of how much American history remains darkened by shame, tragedy, and a useful forgetfulness that ignores the pain so many ancestors suffered in America.