While we remember events of 100 years ago which led to an independent Irish state, and while we are preparing to commemorate the disastrous civil war which followed, it is worthwhile to remember events which took place 100 years ago this week in Oklahoma in the United States. What is now known as the Tulsa massacre makes very hard reading even today. America in the aftermath of the first World War (a war decided in the ultimate by American intervention) was a nation convulsed by the darkest of struggles for racial supremacy.
People like me who remember the civil-rights movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s recall footage of Klansmen burning crosses in the deep south. The outcome of the struggle for civil rights led by Martin Luther King and ultimately by President Lyndon Johnson, seemed to be a vindication of good over evil. But what is not generally understood these days is the massive rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan which took place in the US in the aftermath of the first World War, documented by historian Thomas Pegram among others.
The Klan grew in numbers from tens of thousands to between two and three million Americans. Its enemies were African Americans, Catholics, Jews, other immigrants and every form of “alien”. It endorsed prohibition and infiltrated the Republicans and Democrats to root out all the Klan’s enemies.
Political takeover
Much like the Tea Party movement, the Klan engaged in a lateral takeover of the political establishment. Presidential candidates in the early 1920s feared the Klan and did their level best to avoid or appease it. The starkly racist agenda of the KKK appeared to become part of mainstream American political culture.
Huge parades in American cities combined with backroom political manoeuvring to make the Klan a very potent force for the best part of a decade. This was no small band of political extremists.
In this context, what happened in the Greenwood district of Tulsa 100 years ago this week needs to be remembered and understood. Tulsa was a racially segregated city and African Americans were, by legislation, effectively disenfranchised. Unable to vote, they were disqualified from jury service and from state employment. Woodrow Wilson, the would-be champion of the League of Nations and the proponent of self-determination for the post-imperial Europeans, was himself a rigid segregationist. Teddy Roosevelt had invited an African American man to dine at the White House during his term as president and caused considerable scandal among large portions of white America.
Racial tensions had flared up in American cities since the end of the first World War and Jim Crow laws were the norm in huge swathes of the US.
The KKK used its muscle to suppress trade unionism among America’s poor whites. Lynchings were common in Oklahoma, particularly among African American suspects. The African Americans in Tulsa lived in Greenwood and had created a relatively prosperous, if segregated, society there.
Pogrom
A 19-year-old African American shoeshine boy encountered a 17-year-old girl who was a lift operator in downtown Tulsa. It was reported that he had touched her arm and that she had screamed and panicked. Incited by a local inflammatory newspaper, the boy, Dick Rowland, was arrested and confrontation took place between armed crowds, whites who were suspected of wanting to lynch him and African Americans who wanted to prevent the lynching – outside the local sheriff’s jail.
After a firefight between the crowds, 12 people lay dead and 24 hours of horrific communal violence ensued. The African American enclave of Greenwood was largely razed to the ground, 300 or more African Americans were killed and hundreds more injured and made homeless. Greenwood was surrounded and even bombed from the air. Businesses, schools, churches and the hospital were burned down and more than 10,000 people were made homeless.
This horrific racial pogrom is hard to credit at this distance in time. But it serves to remind us that lying under the comparative and highly imperfect peace in the US there lurks a caldera of volcanic magma which threatens to erupt all the time.
The constitutional guarantee of citizens’ rights to bear arms meant that both sides had the weapons to kill and threaten each other. Today the right to own assault rifles seems to be less concerned with resisting a Chinese or Russian invasion and to be more directed at subduing the internal enemy.
The inauguration day riot and the Proud Boys demonstrations happened this year. Trump hasn’t gone away. Republicans are still busy suppressing African American voters and claiming that Biden’s victory was a fraud.
They may recapture the White House in 3½ years’ time and the Senate next year. We have no reason to be complacent. Greenwood must be remembered. As must George Floyd.