100 years after the forgotten Tulsa massacre: what happened in 1921?

The memory of the flames and the dead was as terrible as the decades of official silence. Tulsa (Oklahoma) will commemorate Tuesday the greatest racial massacre in recent U.S. history, when in 1921 a white mob burned down and completely looted Greenwood, one of the wealthiest African-American neighborhoods in the United States at the time.

The horror began after a meeting in an elevator in which white teenage girl Sarah Page accused a young black shoe shiner, Dick Rowland, to assault him, but it never matters too much.

Between May 31 and June 1, 1921, a crowd of whites, many supported by local authorities, razed, looted and torched more than 1,200 homes in this neighborhood of Tulsa, a symbol of the progress of the black population in the United States after the end of average slavery there a century ago.

The exact number of deaths is unknown as no one wanted to investigate, although historians now put the deceased at least 300.

Not a single person was detained or faces charges for what happened in this city in the central United States, and no compensation has been paid to the families who lost their homes and belongings.

“What happened in Tulsa is essential to understand the experience of blacks in this country, where they were subjected to violence from whites supremacist from the start, ”historian Brenda Stevenson, professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), pointed out to Efe.

Greenwood

Greenwood was one “dynamic community”, said the historian, made up of people who were “only one or two generations at most from slavery,” and who had succeeded in creating “a very successful neighborhood, a very strong middle class, with its own social life with theaters, churches, schools “.

The Tulsa Massacre underscores “the lingering idea that African Americans they are consumable, that our accomplishments can be erased, that our history can be erased, ”Stevenson said.

What the white attackers wanted in 1921, the expert said, “was to stress that if black people are going to live in our society, they will do it as inferior. They will not be the same economically or culturally. “

For decades, local, state and federal governments they looked the other way, and it was not until 2001 that the commission created by the state of Oklahoma to document the events recognized, for example, that the Tulsa police authorities themselves had supplied weapons to the multitude of white attackers.

Mary Elliott, curator of the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, identified the causes of this prolonged silence as “fear of the threat of further violence“as well as” the people who fled, the thousands who left “since” for those who lived this experience, to tell it, it is almost to relive it “.

“And, of course, those responsible for the violence also wanted to bury him, just as they buried the corpsesknowing it’s a trauma that no one will want to talk about, ”Elliott explained.

Of the heinous massacre there are only three survivors left, all then children and witnesses of terror.

One of them is Viola Fletcher, 107, who appeared before Congress in March, where he criticized the forgotten lived.

“Our country can forget this story, but I can not. I won’t, and the other survivors won’t, our descendants won’t, ”he defiantly told lawmakers about what happened a hundred years ago.

Perhaps a first step in ensuring this tragedy is never forgotten is the visit that US President Joe Biden will do tulsa Tuesday to commemorate what happened.

He will be the first sitting president to come to the city on this special date, and he does so after the wave of racial justice protests the United States experienced last year, sparked by the death of the Afro – American George. Floyd after being suffocated by white police in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

EFE Agency

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