The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 has received much
attention, at a time when America comes to
terms with its legacy of systemic racism and
racial violence against Black people. That
massive human tragedy—when a white mob
entirely lynched hundreds of Black people and
destroyed the thriving community of
Greenwood—is still being felt today. The
bodies buried in mass graves are still being
unearthed today.
However, Black Wall Street is not the end of the story,
but rather is the tip of the iceberg. Before,
during and after Tulsa, lynchings and racial
violence were taking place across the country.
One of the more egregious chapters of the Civil War was
the Fort
Pillow Massacre in Tennessee. On April 12, 1864, Confederate
soldiers opened fire and murdered 300 Black
Union soldiers who had already surrendered.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate
general responsible for the massacre, founded
the Ku Klux Klan after the war. A bust
honoring Forrest stood in the Tennessee
Capitol from 1978 until 2021.
Over a century before the January 6th insurrection at the
U.S. Capitol, a successful coup d’etat was
staged on American soil. In 1898 in Wilmington,
North Carolina, a white supremacist mob assassinated Black elected
officials, and replaced the Reconstruction-era
city government—a Black-white coalition
government--with themselves. Sixty people were
murdered, and the Daily
Record, a Black-owned newspaper, was burned to the ground.
The Red
Summer of 1919 was a season of white violence against Black folks.
It was the middle of a pandemic—the deadly flu
pandemic of 1918—and the Great Migration of
Black people from the South to the urban
centers of the North. The First World War had
ended. Black veterans had returned home ready
to fight against racial injustice, were not
having it, and defended its community from
whites who viewed them as an economic threat.
In 25 riots across the country, more than 250
Black people died in what historian
John Hope Franklin called “the greatest period
of interracial strife the nation has ever
witnessed.” In Washington,
DC, where white mobs brutally beat Black people after
allegations that a white woman had been
assaulted by a Black man, armed Black men
defended against attacks from white soldiers.
It was one of the few race riots where white
casualties exceeded Black casualties. Violence
in Chicago was sparked after a Black man was struck by a stone
and drowned in Lake Michigan. Police took no
action against the white offenders. White
gangs wreaked havoc on the city’s Black
communities.
And in the Rosewood
massacre of 1923--depicted in the film “Rosewood”—a white mob descended
upon the small Black community in central
Florida after a white women claimed a Black
man sexually assaulted her. The town was
burned down and residents lynched. In 1994,
the Florida legislature gave $2.1 million
settlement, and the governor issued an
apology.
These are only a few examples of the massacres of Black
lives at the hands of white supremacist
terrorism. We must remember and deal with our
past if we hope to avoid repeating it.
