Naaju Breaking News, Live Updates, Latest Headlines, Viral News, Top Stories, Trending Topics, Videos
[ad_1]
It was one of the worst massacres against the black community in the United States, but it is virtually unknown.
“I am here to seek justice,” Viola Fletcher told the US Congress last week.
“I am here to ask my country to recognize what happened in Tulsa in 1921.”
Fletcher, 107, is the longest-serving survivor of the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre, one of the most tragic episodes in the city’s history.
This happened in 1921 and left a trail of death and destruction in a thriving black neighborhood known as the “Wall Street Negro”.
How the massacre took place
It all started with a rumor that a young black man had attacked a white girl in a hotel in downtown Tulsa.
It was the morning of May 30, 1921, and Dick Rowland ran into a woman named Sarah Page in an elevator. The details of what happened then vary depending on the source.
Among the city’s white community accounts of the incident began to circulate which were exaggerated because they have been shared with more people.
Tulsa Police arrested Rowland the next day and opened an investigation.
An inflammatory report in the May 31 issue of the newspaper Tulsa Tribune was the spur of a black and white confrontation near the courthouse where the bailiff and his men had blocked the top floor to protect Rowland from a possible lynching.
Shots were fired and African Americans, who were a minority, began to withdraw to the neighborhood of Greenwood, known as “Black Wall Street” by the business abundance and economic prosperity.
Early on the morning of June 1, Greenwood was looted and burned by white rioters.
Then-Oklahoma Governor James Robertson declared martial law and deployed the national guard.
A day after the racial epidemic, the violence stopped.
During the riots, 35 blocks were left in ruins, resulting in the destruction of more than 1,200 houses.
More than 800 people had to be treated for injuries and at first it was said that there were 39 deaths, but historians estimate that at least 300 people have died.
More than 6,000 people – most of them African Americans – were detained at the convention center and some remained there for up to eight days.
Black wall street
By the early 1900s, the Greenwood District was a thriving community with movie theaters, restaurants, shops, and a photography studio.
It was an autonomous and dynamic district, separated from the rest of the city by railways.
The name of Black Wall Street (“Black Wall Street”) highlights its economic boom, which has made the neighborhood considered one of the best in the country for the black community.
This boom was wasted in two days of arson and violence.
Previous constraints
The racial massacre in Tulsa did not come as an isolated and unexpected event.
To understand what happened, you have to understand that two years earlier, when the US military returned from World War I, many black soldiers were lynched with their uniforms.
In fact, the boreal summer of 1919 is known in the United States as “Red summer“for the amount of lynchings and other crimes that have been committed in various cities across the country against the African American population.
“The Tulsa massacre stems from this context,” says Ben Keppel, professor in the Department of History at the University of Oklahoma at BBC Mundo.
“There is ample evidence that the area was a thriving economic center, which element of envy.
“The presence of this Wall Street in a period of rigorous racial segregation upset white supremacists, who could not allow this example of equality and for this reason they felt they had to burn it“, Keppel putty.
“In addition, immediately after the war, the US economy fell into a deep recession which affected the oil industry. There is a pre-existing racism that is buried and resurfaces when there are economic problems.
“You have to understand what was happening to fight against this, against the belief in the supremacy of white people”, explains the historian.
A hidden tragedy
However, for a long time it was not possible to understand what was going on because it was simply not known.
Keppel himself didn’t hear about the Tulsa racial massacre until he came to the University of Oklahoma as a professor and was mentioned by a student in class. It was in 1994. He had not studied it in school or in high school or during his university training.
This situation has changed. Tragic incidents are already part of the school curriculum, although most Americans still don’t know the details.
From her position as Program Coordinator at the Greenwood Cultural Center, Michelle Brown tries to keep the memory alive and collects testimonies from the few surviving survivors.
“After the massacre, blacks and whites they hid what happened under the carpetThey had to move forward, ”Brown told BBC reporter Jane O’Brien.
“Talking about it was reliving and it was too painful. There were mothers who had never heard of their children, wives who had lost their husbands, children who had remained fatherless. they never heard of them“.
The approximately 300 dead were buried in mass graves and the bodies were never found.
Is nobody paid for what happened.
“In the 1990s, legal proceedings were instituted to try to obtain justice for the survivors, but technically the crimes had been prescribed and nothing was done,” says Professor Keppel.
Authorities in Tulsa launched a project in 2019 to locate graves using underground penetrating radar and then identify the victims.
“We have to talk about it as a community because the city is suffering, the city is divided because we have not dealt with this part of the storyWe have to do this if we are to move forward as a united Tulsa, there has to be a discussion that leads to reparation and reconciliation, ”said Brown.
Reparacin Difcil
The question of reparation is a delicate one. Rail lines still separate Greenwood from the rest of the city.
Beyond a few historical points, there is hardly any evidence of this “black Wall Street” in Tulsa.
“My family lived here in 1921, now it’s a dead end,” says Thérèse Aduni.
His grandfather made watches, his father was born a few months after the massacre.
“They just accepted the word massacre, for years they called it riots, so insurance companies didn’t have to pay damages to owners or contractors who have lost everything, ”Aduni told the BBC.
“People want to put an end to this, we hear about reparations to the Japanese, to the Holocaust survivors, why not us?”
For Aduni, reparation must take the form of economic development, which – he denounces – has been systematically denied to the community.
“We don’t have a supermarket! We need a supermarket, a shoemaker, a laundress, we want all the businesses we had before, we want them restored, that would be repairs for me.”
City officials say they are working to tackle racial inequalities and that there has been progress.
A deeper debate
Keppel notes with satisfaction the growing number of documentaries, books and reports on what happened in Tulsa almost 100 years ago.
“I hope that as we approach the centenary, not only the institutional amnesia but change the way Americans see themselves as a society, ”he argues.
“We are immersed in a debate in which once you recognize that this has happened and that it is serious, the question is what are we doing, what are the implications for our public institutions.
“In all regions of the country there are stories that have been kept hidden and this needs to be exposed and discussed. We have to consider what is happening now in Tulsa and in other cities, what we have to learn, ”he said.
Keppel reflects on the current debate on racism in the United States.
“What happens now takes time to develop. Over the past 10 years, five or one, this bad police behavior has happened over and over again across the country and people are fed up with it.
“There are few times in history where circumstances meet emotions and catalyze a larger conversation. I hope this is one of those times,” he concludes.
* This article was originally published in June 2020 and has been updated for the 100th anniversary of the massacre.
.
[ad_2]
Source link
