100 Years Later: The Dust Has Not Settled in Tulsa
by dana e. fitchett
“One hundred years later, and the dust has not settled in Tulsa, and it has not settled in America. We’re here today to have a sacred conversation about what it means to repair the damage done to Black businesses and Black communities.”
Black Entrepreneurs of Black Wall Street via The Tulsa Historical Society and Museum
Part I: What Really Happened on June 1, 1921
Among the surge of nationwide—and 100 years overdue—awareness about the Tulsa Race Massacre, Jessica Norwood and Alicia Delia were invited to represent RUNWAY at White Men for Racial Justice (WMRJ)’s Business of Race seminar. WMRJ, a community of white male business leaders, aspires to hold themselves accountable to continuous learning and action among their own affinity group as a precursor and complement to interracial coalition work. Jessica was the central force in a conversation about what it looks like to repair the damage done to Black businesses The session also included remarks from the Reverend Dr. Robert Turner, pastor of Tulsa’s Historic Vernon Chapel A.M.E. Church, which is the single edifice that survived the massacre.
Jessica opened by plainly stating the headlines of what happened on June 1, 1921: “White people in Tulsa ravaged the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, a hub of Black-owned businesses and entrepreneurship known as Black Wall Street. There were over 500 Black-owned businesses, including hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, and a bank.” Greenwood had a population of just 10,000, and was the most prosperous Black community in the country. As a way to make the prosperity more tangible, Rev. Turner elevated that there were, “six Black families in Greenwood alone—which had a population of just 10,000 at the time—who owned their own airplanes.”
This attack on Black American progress is a painful and ugly moment in American history, though unfortunately not out of step with other clear actions to snuff out the promise of self-sufficiency among Black Americans. As one of the WMRJ participants insightfully offered to his peers, “There’s some risk in thinking about Tulsa as an outlier as opposed to symptomatic of something that happened all around the country in one form or another.”Jessica called the group into seeing the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre for what it is: “We see the intention of targeting a Black community because of their prosperity. We see the theft of their land; we see the way that the police, the courts, the banks, the insurance companies—the way that they work together to alter generations after generations with the same racial terror and violence that happened on June 1, 1921.” Rev. Turner grounded his remarks in some of the relentless statistics of the massacre: “In less than 18 hours, 1,256 homes were burned to the ground. Over 10,000 people were made homeless. Over 300 people were killed and bodies dumped in mass graves.”
Tulsa circa 1921 via The History Channel
While these in-the-moment wreckages of the Tulsa Massacre happened over a few days’ time, the ongoing implications for Black businesses continue to have devastating effects into the present. Some of these include weaker financial cushions than their White counterparts, weaker bank relationships, and longstanding funding gaps. This systemic racism has shown up clearly in pandemic resource distribution over the past sixteen months. “It looked like Black firms were not getting access to the federal relief program PPP because they lacked bank relationships,” Jessica pointed out as one example. "We’ve become too comfortable with the idea that the lack of access to capital is just something that happens to Black businesses,” she added, “instead of calling it what it is: a clear and persistent metric of racism."
The contrast between the projected image of America as a benevolent nation and the reality of its failures in protecting and subsequently fighting for its own citizens is deafening. While American forces play hero, intervening in overseas conflicts, our own soil has continued to be infested with unaddressed systemic oppressions that disproportionately disadvantage Black Americans. Rev. Turner drew attention to this dynamic, acknowledging, “The first bombs dropped on America was not by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor. The first time America was attacked by aerial assault was not by Al Qaeda in 9/11. Those first incidents happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and not one of those individuals—to this day—has been charged with a crime.” Despite the promulgation of the image of America as a country of laws with, in the Reverend’s words, “this moral high ground to go throughout the world and enforce international laws and treatises which we have violated ourselves,” it was White American business owners whose airplanes were used to terrorize their fellow Americans in the worst race massacre in the nation’s history. And these perpetrators have yet to go on record or even be investigated about their roles in this irreversible theft of life, property, and progress.
“How do we restore those that have been wronged? How do we make it right?”
Tulsa Massacre via The Black Wall Street Times website
Part II: How Do We Make It Right?
Rev. Turner shared a long list of instances in which America has demonstrated leadership in standing up against injustices—leadership that’s been absent in the face of relentless historical anti-Blackness in our own country, against our own citizens. “I need to see that same bravery,” he said passionately, “that same courage, when it comes to giving justice to Black people. America seems to become a coward in terms of giving justice to Black people.”
“What would it look like if the financial system loved Black people?,” Jessica posed to the group, as a way to focus attention on how to right the wrongs of the Tulsa Race Massacre and other historic events that continue to tear at the fabric of Black communities. The invitation, she said, is to show up in right relationship with one another. To invest in transformational work that creates a more just ecosystem —rather than superficial or transactional work—in our efforts to remedy systemic racism. “Your support cannot be episodic,” Jessica implored. “I want your smart White man advocacy. I want the thing you give yourself.”
Jessica and Rev. Turner’s invitations to the group emphasized the common message that, if you see the inequities, and if you hear the call to do something about it, then it is yours to do. “You are in the right place. This is the right time. And you are the right people,” Jessica shared assuredly. “If it was wrong in 1921,” Rev. Turner added to the reasoning, “we ought to by God try to make it right in 2021.” He went on to say, “There is no expiration date on morality. We have inherited the blessings of America.” He pointed to examples of having streets to traverse that we didn’t pave; wells to drink from that we didn’t dig; air to breathe from trees we didn’t plant. And, he says, “If we can take advantage of all the bounty of blessings of being an American, surely we must not think that we are not to pay for the liabilities of this country.”
Anything short of reparations for the hard-earned prosperity that was violently stolen from Black American citizens by White American citizens is inadequate. Wealth is generational, and there are many ways that the Tulsa Massacre multiplied its destruction over time—with the families of the White aggressors able to continue building on their intact capital, as the families of the Black targets of the violence lost all that they had struggled and succeeded to build in the face of rampant anti-Blackness. The absence of justice for the people who lost their lives and those who lost capital is one of the countless manners in which the so-called “racial wealth gap” is not simply a gap. In Jessica’s words, “It is way bigger than a gap, and it is much more intentional.” The grave discrepancies that persist result instead from the reality that, “Institutions work together against Black people. These are not gaps, but intentional measures of violence against Black people.” She draws attention to how we often treat anti-Black racism as an isolated event, and declares, “That’s the lie. And the only way that lie stops is the moment you stop believing in it. The only way it changes is if we change ourselves.”
Jessica emphasized to the group that, in order to do our sacred work of getting into right relationship with one another and our varied roles in our shared histories, “We must move beyond the shame and the blame, and into a relationship with the truth.”
dana e. fitchett, founder of Movement for Liberation, is a multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary artist whose practices are grounded in listening and utilizing creative process to cultivate new languages in service of alignment, integrity, and freedom. In addition to dancing, teaching movement classes, choreographing, and making visual art, dana writes and edits for individuals and community organizations working for transformation and justice by way of truth and reconciliation.
