Tulsa Massacre was Erased from History
By Alan Singer
My partner Felicia Hirata, friends Judy and Ruben Stern, and I were discussing the movie Killers of the Flower Moon and conversation shifted to the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. Felicia, Ruben, and I are all retired New York City high school social studies teachers and we realized we had never taught about the massacre in class, and we were unsure of whether we even knew about it when we were teachers. It had effectively been erased from history.
As a high school teacher, I did introduce my students, almost all African American and Latinx, to post-World War 1 racist attacks on African Americans with the poem “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay that was first published in the July 1919 of The Liberator coupled with photographs and newspaper headlines of the 1919 Chicago race riot showing white mobs and police attacking Blacks in the street. The McKay poem is especially powerful and resonated with students because it is a call for resistance.
https://alansingerphd.medium.com/the-100th-anniversary-of-the-tulsa-race-massacre-5cee3a689f6f[1]
I now teach social studies methods at Hofstra University in suburban Long Island, New York. After our discussion of Killers of the Flower Moon and the Tulsa Massacre, I decided to review how the post-World War 1 race riots and the Tulsa massacre were covered in the textbooks I used as a high school teacher and in more recent editions used by teachers today, books my students will likely use when they become teachers, books that continue to minimize the role that race and racism played in American history.
Ruben and I both taught United States history at Franklin K. Lane High School in the 1980s using Lewis Todd and Merle Curti’s Triumph of the American Nation as our primary textbook. Chapter 27 “New Directions in American Life Changing Ways (1900-1920)” ignores race, in fact the book’s index does not include race or racism as a category (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986). After discussing World War 1, the authors skipped directly to the “Golden Twenties” where the post-war race riots were ignored. In a later chapter, “Decades in Contrast Changing ways (1920-1939),” “Black migration to the North,” “Disappointed hopes,” and “The riots of 1919” are briefly mentioned, but not what happened in Tulsa. Students learned from the book that “Frightened whites, convinced that black Americans were trying to threaten them and gain control, responded with more violence. Police forces, ill-equipped to deal with riots, usually sided with whites” (751). Perhaps even more disturbing than the omissions, is this justification offered for the white rioters.
I also used Thomas Bailey and David Kennedy, The American Pageant, 7th Edition (1983, D.C. Heath) with a college-level dual enrollment class. A section in Chapter 39, “The Politics of Boom and Bust, 1920-1932” titled “The Aftermath of War” includes a paragraph explaining that “Vicious race riots also rocked the Republic in years following the Great War . . . [I]n the immediate post-war period, blacks were brutally taught that the North was not a Promised land. A racial reign of terror descended on Chicago in the summer of 1919, leaving twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites dead. Clashes also inflamed Knoxville, Omaha, Washington, and other cities.” There was also no mention of 1921 and Tulsa massacre in this textbook. Unlike Todd and Curti, Bailey and Kennedy didn’t justify the behavior of the white rioters but by suggesting that these were somehow clashes between Blacks and whites, it takes the onus off white mobs killing African Americans and driving them out of housing and jobs.
Even Howard Zinn’s widely used A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980 by Harper Collins and reissued most recently in 2015 by Harper Perennial, the most progressive history of the United States that I used as a reference, falls short. Zinn included the post-war strike wave but not the race riots in 1919 or the destruction of the Black community of Tulsa in 1921.
I read From Slavery to Freedom, A History of Negro Americans, 3rd edition by John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. (1969, Vintage) as an undergraduate at CCNY in a class on American Nego History during the 1968-1969 school year. Unfortunately, it did not have much influence on the American history curriculum.
In the 7th edition (published in 1994 by Knopf), Franklin and Moss have a chapter “Democracy Escapes” about conditions faced by African Americans in the United States in the post-World War 1 era after approximately 380,000 African Americans served in the army and about 200,000 were stationed in the European theater (346-360; Goldenberg, 2022). Despite welcoming parades in major American cities, The Crisis reported “This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land. It lynches . . . It disenfranchises its own citizens . . . It encourages ignorance . . .It steals from us . . . It insults us . . . We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the U.S.A., or know the reason why” (347).
Between June and December 1919, Red Summer, Franklin and Moss estimate there were twenty-five anti-Black race riots in American cities (349). The most serious riot was in Chicago where there were thirty-eight fatalities, over 500 reported injuries, and 1,000 families left homeless (350-351). The book also briefly describes a “race war” in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June 1921 where nine whites and 21 blacks were killed.
On Long Island, New York, the most widely used United States history textbook is Holt McDougal’s The Americans by Gerald Danzer, Jorge Kor de Alva, Larry Krieger, Louis Wilson, and Nancy Woloch. The 2012 edition has two references to the post-World War I racial climate. A “Historical Spotlight” box in a chapter on “The First World War” explains that “Racial prejudice against African Americans in the North sometimes took violent forms. However, the 1917 East St. Louis riot seems to be excused because “White workers were furious over the hiring of African Americans as strikebreakers at a munitions plant.” The 1919 Chicago riot is also blamed on African Americans who “retaliated” when a Black teenager was stoned to death by “white bathers” after he swam into “water off a ‘white beach’” (600). A later chapter on the Harlem Renaissance mentions that “Northern cities in general had not welcomed the massive influx of African Americans. Tensions had escalated in the years prior to 1920, culminating in the summer of 1919, in approximately 25 urban race riots” (659). This section does not explain who was rioting and who was being attacked.
The 12th edition of The American Pageant (2002), widely used in Advanced Placement classes, added Lisabeth Cohen as a co-author. A section on “Workers in Wartime” included the “sudden appearance” of African Americans in “previously all-white areas sometimes sparked interracial violence,” equally blamed on Blacks and whites (711). A photograph of a victim of the 1919 Chicago race riot lying on the ground face down includes the caption “The policeman arrived too late to spare this victim from being pelted by stones from an angry mob” (711). From the picture, it is difficult to tell that the victim was African American and he is not identified as such in the caption, although the police standing above him are clearly white. Members of the mob and its victims are not identified, and the caption inaccurately suggests that white police were trying to protect the Black community. The 16th edition, published in 2015, notes in Chapter 32 “American Life in the Roaring Twenties, 1919-1929” that a “ new racial pride also blossomed in the northern black communities that burgeoned during and after the war,” but contained no mention of the race riots in 1919 or 1921 (749) and the chapter on “The Politics of Boom and Bust, 1920-1932” dropped the reference to “vicious race riots” in the 1983 edition.
The fourth edition of Making America (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) by Carol Berkin, Christopher Miller, Robert Cherny, and James Gormly references the East St. Louis and Tulsa riots in the index and race riots are paired with lynchings as examples of the conditions faced by returning Black veteran after World War 1. Unlike other texts, this book clearly identifies that “white mobs” were attacking African Americans in East St. Louis, Washington DC, Chicago, Omaha, Tulsa, and Detroit (694, 706, 732). It is also one of the few textbooks to list racism in the index.
America’s History 9th edition for the AP Course by James Henretta, Rebecca Edward, Eric Hunderaker and Robert Self, published by Bedford, Freeman & Worth in 2018, includes Chapter 21, “Unsettled Prosperity: From War to Depression, 1919-1932.” This chapter has a section titled “Racial Backlash.” White attacks on Black workers and communities are presented as a response to the Great Migration during World War I and competition for jobs and housing. The section references 1917 riots in East St. Louis, Illinois where white mobs “burned more than 300 black homes and murdered between 50 and 150 black men, women and children”; the Chicago race riot of 1919; the Rosewood, Florida Massacre; and the “horrific incident” in Tulsa. The Tulsa “incident” did receive significant coverage, about half of a paragraph. “Sensational, false reports of an alleged rape helped incite white mobs who resented growing black prosperity. Anger focused on the 8,000 residents of Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood district, locally known as ‘the black Wall Street.’ The mobs – helped by National Guardsmen, who arrested African Americans who resisted – burned thirty-five blocks of Greenwood and killed several dozen people. The city’s leading paper acknowledged that ‘semi-organized bands of white men systematically applied the torch, while others shot on site men of color.’ It took a decade for black residents to rebuild Greenwood” (653-654).
The best coverage of the 1917-1921 anti-Black race riots is probably Eric Foner’s AP text Give Me Liberty (6th edition, Norton). Chapter 19 “Safe for Democracy: The United States and World War I,” has a section on “Racial Violence, North and South.” It reports on the East St. Louis and Chicago attacks by white mobs on Black workers and communities, lynchings in the South targeting returning Black war veterans, a bloody attack on striking Black sharecroppers in Arkansas, and Tulsa. Foner describes Tulsa as “The worst race riot in American history . . . when more than 300 blacks were killed and over 10,000 left homeless after a white mob, including police and National Guardsmen, burned an all-black section of the city to the ground. The Tulsa riot erupted after s group of black veterans tried to prevent the lynching of a youth who had accidently tripped and fallen on a white female elevator operator, causing rumors of rape to sweep the city” (766).
Over one hundred years after the Tulsa Massacre, the United States needs to stop pretending that racism ended with the American Civil War and take steps to address the lingering impact of slavery and systemic racism on American society. An important step would be to ensure that high school students learn about events from the past that continue to shape the present.
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