While we remember events 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 Great 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 50s and early 60s 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 Great 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 blacks, 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.
Much like the Tea Party movement, the Klan engaged in lateral infiltration 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 that context, what happened in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, 100 years ago this week needs to be remembered and understood. Tulsa was a racially segregated city and black 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 a black 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 Great War, and Jim Crow laws were still the norm in huge swathes of the United States.
The KKK used its muscle to suppress trade unionism among America’s poor whites. Lynchings were common in Oklahoma, particularly among black suspects. The blacks in Tulsa lived in a district called Greenwood and had created a relatively prosperous, if segregated, society there.
A 19 year old black 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 he 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 blacks who wanted to prevent the lynching – outside the local sheriff’s jail. After a firefight erupted between the crowds, 12 people lay dead, and 24 hours of horrific communal violence ensued. The black enclave of Greenwood was largely razed to the ground, 300 or more blacks were killed and hundreds more injured and thousands made homeless. Greenwood was surrounded and even bombed from the air. Businesses, schools, churches and the hospital were burned down and eventually more than 10,000 people were 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 but highly imperfect peace in the United States 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 notional Chinese or Russian invasion and to be more directed at subduing some internal enemy.
The Inauguration Day riot and the Proud Boys demonstrations all happened this year. Trump hasn’t gone away. Republicans are still busy suppressing black voters and claiming that Biden’s victory was a fraud.
They may well recapture the White House in three and a half years’ time and the Senate next year. We have no reason to be complacent. Greenwood must be remembered. As must George Floyd.
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