THE TULSA RACE RIOT err Massacre

This Blogger has met very few smart people in his life, very few, a handful. This Blogger does not consider experts as inherently smart, just knowledgeable. A smart person is one who can enter any situation, and help one in need to solve the problem by asking the right questions.

It is a declining art, like reading the runes. Soon it will be a lost art as thinking is consumed by sophomoric Millennial Group Think.

One of the few really smart people  this Blogger knows sent him a flattering email last week; this Blogger would like to share it; “Gerry!  I love your logic, historical perspective and code breaking ability to connect the dots.  You are non-linear within a linear world within non-linear universe.’

This Blogger was basking in that praise when his inbox was flooded by  emails from  people who had read the NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY REVIEW article about the Tulsa massacre.

The article quotes an eyewitness, Undersheriff Maxey. The emails  to this Blogger noted that he had spent a summer on a ranch in Guymon, Oklahoma, and was the Undersheriff a relative? Who knew people remembered Blogs?

There are Maxeys in Oklahoma; there are violent Maxeys in Oklahoma…so who knows if this Blogger and the Undersheriff are related.

In the article, the 2020 writer notes that the 1971 interviewer of Undersheriff Maxey asked to name the man or men who committed one of the most heinous actions during the massacre.

Undersheriff Maxey declines to name names; that is not surprising to this Blogger. The Maxeys will never tell what they have seen, knew or done….this Blogger’s mother, who was not a Maxey, called it the Silent Assassin Syndrome.

“The massacre began over Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white elevator operator of the nearby Drexel Building. He was taken into custody. After the arrest, rumors spread through the city that Dick Rowland was to be lynched. Upon hearing reports that a mob of hundreds of white men had gathered around the jail where Dick Rowland was being kept, a group of 75 black men, some of whom were armed, arrived at the jail with the intention of helping to ensure Dick Rowland would not be lynched. The sheriff persuaded the group of black men to leave the jail, assuring them that he had the situation under control. As the group of black men was leaving the premises, complying with the sheriff's request, a member of the mob of white men attempted to disarm one of the black men. A shot was fired, and then according to the reports of the sheriff, "all hell broke loose". At the end of the firefight, 12 people were killed: 10 white and 2 black.As news of these deaths spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded. White rioters rampaged through the black neighborhood that night and morning killing men and burning and looting stores and homes, and only around noon the next day did Oklahoma National Guard troops manage to get control of the situation by declaring martial law.”

The massacre lasted between  May 31 – June 1, 1921.

The following is excerpted from the NEW YORK TIMES’ article.

“…. on June 1, 1921, …. The  helpless old black man who was shredded alive behind a fast-moving car would have been well known in Tulsa’s white downtown, where he supported himself by selling pencils and singing for coins. He was blind, had suffered amputations of both legs and wore baseball catcher’s mitts to protect his hands from the pavement as he scooted along on a wheeled wooden platform.

Among the white bystanders who witnessed the pencil seller’s grisly end was a teenager named E.W. Maxey, who was undersheriff of Tulsa County by the time he recounted the carnage to the local historian Ruth Sigler Avery 50 years later. Undersheriff Maxey admitted to knowing the thugs who tied the “good old colored man” to a convertible and sped off along Main Street. Describing the scene to Ms. Avery in 1971, he recalled that the victim “was hollering. His head was being bashed in, bouncing on the steel rails and bricks” that lined the street.

Not far away, in the prosperous black district of Greenwood, white vigilantes systematically torched nearly 40 square blocks. Gone in the blink of an eye were more than 1,000 homes, a dozen churches, five hotels, 31 restaurants, four drugstores and eight doctors’ offices, as well as a public library and a hospital. As many as 9,000 black Tulsans were left homeless. Photographs from the period depict shellshocked survivors being marched at gunpoint to temporary concentration camps.

From Day 1, many Tulsans believed that the authorities had sought to suppress the true horror of the episode by setting the death toll at a few dozen. Others have estimated that as many as 300 may have died. The number of fatalities seems destined to remain a mystery.

Stories emerged featuring bodies stacked up on street corners, ferried out of town on city-owned trucks, burned in an incinerator or dumped into a river.….When Tulsa resumes the search for its dead, archaeologists should bear in mind Undersheriff Maxey’s portrait of the unnamed dragging victim: an old man with two amputated legs — one stump longer than the other — and a skull bashed in by streetcar tracks. 

Greenwood, whose business district was known as the Negro Wall Street, was the seat of African-American affluence in the Southwest, with two newspapers, two movie theaters and a commercial strip featuring some of the finest black-owned businesses in the country. White Tulsa’s business elite resented the competition all the more because the face of that competition was black. Beyond that, the white city saw the bustling black community as an obstacle to Tulsa’s expansion. The white press set the stage for Greenwood’s destruction by deriding the community as “N……town” and portraying its jazz clubs as founts of vice, immorality and, by implication, race mixing. As was often the case in the early 20th century, a false accusation of attempted rape opened the door for white Tulsans to act out their antipathies.

A black man accused of accosting a white woman in a downtown elevator in broad daylight was predictably arrested, and, just as predictably, a mob convened at the courthouse spoiling for an evening’s lynching entertainment. Black Tulsans who appeared on the scene to prevent the lynching exchanged gunfire with the mob. Outmanned and outgunned, they retreated to Greenwood to defend against the coming onslaught.

The city guaranteed mayhem by deputizing members of the lynch mob — a catastrophic decision, given that Oklahoma was a center of Ku Klux Klan activity — and instructing them to “get a gun, and get busy and try to get a n…..” The white men who surged into Greenwood may well have been told to burn the district. Greenwood’s defenders fought valiantly but were quickly overwhelmed.

…. the historian Danney Goble likened the attack to the murderous pogroms that the Russian Empire unleashed on Jewish communities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In both cases, the authorities hoped to drive out despised minorities by allowing marauders to kill and loot at will. Mr. Goble argued that the Tulsa massacre was best seen against the backdrop of at least 10 lesser-known pogroms in other Oklahoma towns that had drenched the decade leading up to 1921 in African-American blood.

….“Practically overnight, entire neighborhoods where families had raised their children, visited with their neighbors, and hung their wash out on the line to dry, had been suddenly reduced to ashes. And as the homes burned, so did their contents, including furniture and family Bibles, rag dolls and hand-me-down quilts, cribs and photograph albums.”

….Some of the white men who ravaged Greenwood may have convinced themselves that the armed black men who confronted the mob at the courthouse were part of a conspiracy to take over the white city. No such pretense was even remotely available to the killers who roped the helpless pencil seller to a car and dragged the life out of him along Main Street. The event was a carnival of death, staged for their amusement.

This atrocity was given a single sentence in a larger news article about the carnage: “One Negro was dragged behind an automobile, with a rope around his neck, through the business district.” In recent years, however, the incident has become a bloody shorthand for the hatred of blackness that underlay this massacre as a whole.

Consider the critically acclaimed HBO series “Watchmen.” While making a new generation of viewers familiar with this bloody episode, the writers used their version of the dragging as a metaphor for white supremacist violence not just in Tulsa but in the country as a whole.

In 1921, the white civic elite did its best to shield the city from negative publicity by limiting news coverage. Not long after the conflagration, for example, Tulsa’s police chief barred the taking of photographs in the devastated area without police permission — as “a precaution against the influx here of Negroes and other critics seeking propaganda for their organizations.”

The description of the dragging that Undersheriff Maxey shared with Ms. Avery 50 years after the fact offers a window into how this public silencing was achieved. He despised the leader of the killers — who was dead by the time of the 1971 interview — and seemed to have had genuine affection for the pencil seller. Nonetheless, he declined to name the main perpetrator because he “had people” in Tulsa.

…..Like many other Tulsans, Undersheriff Maxey doubted the city’s suspiciously low body count. During the Avery interview, he spoke of seeing five or six truckloads of black bodies moving up Main Street to an unknown destination. “I seen them haul truckload after truckload of colored people in those things, stacked up like cordwood,” he said. Asked where the dead might have gone, he replied, “I don’t even know that, but they was hauling them out somewhere, I guess, and put them in ditches or something.”….NEW YORK TIMES.”

History would have been better served if Undersheriff Maxey had been asked the correct question: WHO ORGANIZED THE MASSACRE?

Over three hundred blacks were killed in one day, supposedly in a spontaneous race riot; that is a lot of killing for spontaneity. That is so much killing that one has to sit down and rest from all that killing; which requires refreshments, water supplies, or whiskey or sandwiches, and relief teams, bringing up more ammunition. Armed mobs are not firing squads; it takes a lot of ammunition to kill 300 scurrying people in a day.

The initial fire fight, which supposedly caused this riot, blacks killed ten white men, and only lost two….even though they were outnumbered by three to one. Unlikely.

The white rioters used private planes to drop incendiary bombs on the black neighborhood. Where in the hell would one spontaneously get private planes to drop bombs?  Does one drive out to the local dust cropper and ask him to trade in his insecticides for bombs? Spontaneously? Every dust cropper this Blogger met in Oklahoma got pre-paid for a job.

To come to grips with the Faulknerian sin of the Tulsa Race riot, one should consider that it was not a riot, not a spontaneous riot, but a carefully planned and choreographed pogrom.

As well planned as the Hutus Massacre of the Tutsis, or the  massacre of the MacDonalds at Glencoe.

This brings us to the deeper Faulknerian sin; so deep it is Biblical.

“The LORD said, "If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake."

Then Abraham spoke up again: "Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes,what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city because of five people?" "If I find forty-five there," he said, "I will not destroy it."

...Abraham said, "Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?" He said, "For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it."

Then he said, "May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?" He answered, "For the sake of ten, I will not destroy

it."…GENESIS.”

This massacre is on par with what the Hutus did to the Tutsis in Rwanda; it was a community based pre-planned massacre. Every Hutu in Rwanda and every white person in Tulsa had an inkling the slaughter was coming.

Yet no white person thought enough of one black friend,  one black mistress, one black baby,  one black concubine, or one black house painter to warn them.

The true sin is how could all the white people desire ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE THEY KNEW KILLED?

Wasn’t there one black person in all of Greenwood, the white citizens of Tulsa did not want killed?

The great flaw in this current Liberal crusade against American Racism is that they are using Stalinist Methodology, the moving nomenclature.

First Liberals move the term illegal aliens to undocumented workers, to undocumented immigrants to immigrants. That movement is Stalinist.

Now Liberals have moved the nomenclature of Racism; first you were a racist if you joined a lynch mob and participated in a massacre. Now you are a racist if you like GONE WITH THE WIND, think Billy Porter is a joke,  and think Lupita has no talent.

This Blogger,the son of a Trotskyite, once asked a Trotskyite, why do Stalinists always enlarge the nomenclature of offense? He answered this Blogger succinctly:” It gives them a reason to punish you for ANY REASON.”

Disliking Afrocentric art is not as racist as killing innocent black people.

So, as Americans burdened by Faulknerian sins, let us come together on these fundamental concepts: Killing innocent blacks, killing blacks without reason, killing blacks for the fun of it, is racist. Not liking August Wilson’s writings in not racist.

Participating in the Tulsa massacre is racist; not attending WNBA games is not racist.

Finally, this Republic is in a great debate over whom to honor with statues?

Robert E. Lee? This Blogger wants to keep the Lee statues up, for there have been few men in History able to inspire his troops to cross an open field, in the face of massed artillery  and breach; as Lee’s soldiers did at Gettysburg. Such courage, such AMERICAN courage, needs to be honored, and hopefully bottled for when destiny again tests our dear people.

But other statues should be built.

Five Hundred Vietnamese villagers were massacred by AMERICAN SOLDIERS during the Vietnam War at My Lai. It was a planned massacre.

Three guys, three American soldiers did the following:

"Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr., a helicopter pilot from Company B (Aero-Scouts), 123rd Aviation Battalion, Americal Division, saw dead and wounded civilians as he was flying over the village of Sơn Mỹ, providing close-air support for ground forces…The crew( Thompson, Andreotta and Colburn)landed their helicopter by a ditch, which they noted was full of bodies and in which there was movement. ... Thompson, shocked and confused, then spoke with 2LT Calley, who claimed to be just following orders. Thompson and his crew witnessed an unarmed woman being kicked and shot at point-blank range by Medina, who later claimed that he thought she had a hand grenade.Thompson then saw a group of civilians (again consisting of children, women, and old men) at a bunker being approached by ground personnel. Thompson landed, and told his crew that if the soldiers shot at the villagers while he was trying to get them out of the bunker, then they were to open fire on them

The helicopter had looped around then set down quickly near the edge of the ditch. Glenn Andreotta had maintained visual contact with the spot where he saw the movement, and he darted out of the aircraft as soon as it touched the ground. Thompson got out and guarded one side of the chopper and Colburn guarded the other. Andreotta had to walk on several badly mangled bodies to get where he was going. He lifted a corpse with several bullet holes in the torso and there, lying under it, was a child, age five or six, covered in blood and obviously in a state of shock.

The child, Do Ba, was pulled from the irrigation ditch and after failing to find any more survivors, Thompson's crew transported the child to a hospital in Quảng Ngã”

Thompson and Colburn turned their guns on American soldiers, fellow American soldiers, and served noticed that they intended to kill those soldiers if they did not stop killing innocent people.

Perhaps the seminal question is not what statues America should tear down, but what statues should America build; this Blogger humbly suggests statues to Thompson, Andreotta and Colburn. And one in Tulsa, to the old blind black man murdered in the Devil’s own way.
Greenwood, after spontaneous riot