If all you know about the Tulsa Race Massacre is the re-creations of the attack featured in HBO series like Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, prepare yourself for a serious education over the next few weeks.
Monday marks the 100th anniversary for one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history, the Tulsa Race Massacre. Back in 1921, a mob of white people tore down and burned the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Okla. — a segregated part of the city so prosperous and bustling, it was known as Black Wall Street.
Jump to reviews of Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre (The History Channel, May 30), Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street (CNN and HBO Max, May 31), and Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten (PBS, May 31).
According to some historians, over 1,200 homes and buildings were destroyed by the violence, killing between 100 and 300 people. But thanks to white-dominated power structures in the city of Tulsa and state of Oklahoma, news about the massacre was wiped from many official sources for decades (several fans of Watchmen and Lovecraft Country have told me they had never heard of the massacre before these fictional TV shows dramatized the attack during their episodes last year and in 2019).
All that will likely change over the next week and beyond, as a flood of programs centered on the Tulsa Race Massacre come to television. From enterprise reporting efforts at ABC, CBS and NBC to projects on National Geographic, CNN, The History Channel and PBS, there are a wide array of documentary films and TV programs aimed at reminding Americans just how deadly unchecked racism can be.
Code Switch’s Recommended Reads About The Tulsa Massacre
After watching the films offered by The History Channel, CNN and PBS, I saw common themes emerge. First was the power of white society to control what history is recognized, to erase uncomfortable truths and resist efforts to dig up the truth (sometimes literally, as when officials ended early attempts to find mass graves of massacre victims in 1999). Several films featured comments from longtime white residents of Tulsa, including its current mayor, G.T. Bynum, who said they didn’t even learn the Tulsa Race Massacre had happened until they were adults.
Such insistence on erasing Black pain from a community’s official history creates, by necessity, a shadow history kept among people of color and passed along, often by word of mouth. White America may have tried to forget Tulsa, but the massacre’s details lived in the stories of Black survivors and their descendants, handed down like bitter family heirlooms.
(Even worse, for a journalist like me, was to realize the role the media played back then — both in whipping up white fears about Black people through horrifically racist films and newspaper stories, while disappearing news of attacks and lynchings once white people took action.)
