John Hope Franklin Dinner of Reconciliation 10/29/2009

Greenwood Cultural Center

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Thanks, Lee.  And thanks to all of the wonderful volunteers, from all across the city, who worked so long and hard to put together this most remarkable evening.

It is good to be back home in Tulsa.

And it is good to be not only a part of an evening honoring John Hope Franklin, and to help inaugurate this most important Center, but it is also wonderful to be an event that, quite frankly, he would have loved.

We are also here for a most serious purpose—that of reconciliation, of building bridges, and creating a new kind of future for ourselves and for Tulsa.

But, in truth, we are really here tonight because of the 1921 race riot.

For the riot is our city’s great tragedy, its broken heart, its lingering wound, and its great unfinished business.  And until we find a way to honestly and squarely confront the riot, and all of its troubling legacies, we will never be a “we”—and the story of Tulsa will be a tale of two cities, and not one.

By any reasonable measure, the riot was not merely a defining moment in the history of Tulsa, but a major event in its own right.  Not only was it the single largest incident of racial violence in all of American history, but it was a cataclysm of smoke and gunfire, murder and arson, hatred and cruelty.

Yet even the raw statistics of the tragedy, as shocking as they are, give but little hint to the human dimensions of the catastrophe that happened, eight-eight years ago, where we are sitting this very evening.  It wasn’t simply the case that white Tulsans, during the course of some sixteen hours, burned to the ground more than one thousand African American homes and businesses in Greenwood on May 31^st and June 1^st, 1921.  They burned churches and wedding dresses, children’s toys and family Bibles, cribs and high chairs, photo albums and treasured family heirlooms.  Consumed in the fires on that longest of nights and most terrible of days weren’t simply black Tulsa’s half dozen hotels, two movie theaters, and more than twenty grocery stores, but entire lifetimes of sweat and toil and hard work.

Nor is the number of people who died in the riot, black and white both, merely a matter of arithmetic.  For whatever the real number is—be it 69 or 100 or 300—who really died that day were brothers and fathers, sons and grandparents.  They had names like Ed and Joe, Greg and Bob, Sam and Jimmy, Reuben and William.  They were 35 and 24, 16 and 21, 63 and 40, and one, a stillborn child.  They were single and married, rich and poor.  Some were burned to death, others were shot in the head, the chest, and the back.

And these are only the ones that we know of.  For there were others, buried in unmarked graves, whose names appear, in dusty old funeral home ledgers, simply as “unidentified Negro, cause of death, gunshot wound, died June 1^st, 1921.”

And, but for the grace of God, there should have been many more deaths than there were.  For when the first shots were fired on the night of May 31st, Tulsa police officers—rather than trying to disperse the white mob—instead broke into pawn shops and sporting goods stores and began handing out guns to the white rioters, telling them to “get a gun and get a nigger.”   All that long night, carloads of armed whites roared up and down the streets of the North side, making drive-by shootings into black homes.  And in the morning, when the invasion of Greenwood began in earnest, not only did members of the local, all-white Oklahoma National guard units direct their fire against black Tulsans, but one

group of white citizens set up a machine gun at the top of a grain elevator not two blocks from where we sit tonight, and opened fire on any and all African American men and women, senior citizens and children that they could see, whomever was in range.

But the riot was not, by any means, an event that was limited to Greenwood.

For the riot, it needs to be remembered, started at Sixth and Boulder.  And once the violence began, white rioters gathered together along Fifteenth Street, and out on Lewis, sharing ammunition and making plans for the assault on Greenwood.  The next morning, carloads of whites drove through the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, along 21^st Street, rounding up African American servants and maids who lived in the quarters located behind the homes of the city’s wealthiest oil men, while the possessions of black Tulsans that were stolen by whites were dispersed throughout the South side.  Indeed, most of the pre-riot architecture that still exists in Tulsa today, from the Brady Theater to the old Armory, from First Presbyterian to Holy Family, played a role in the drama. And the riot dead were buried across town—from 11^th and Peoria, to 91^st Street between Harvard and Yale.

For there was no such thing as the Greenwood Riot.  There was only the Tulsa race riot.

*    *    *

Tulsa is, and will forevermore, be linked with the story of the race riot—and it should be.  This is where this immense tragedy took place.  It’s ours, and we have to own up to it.  There is no dodging that.

And linked, it is.  If you start googling Tulsa, it does not take long to get to the riot.  In the Wikipedia entry on Tulsa, the riot is mentioned in the fourth sentence.  The riot has been written about in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and The Economist, in the London Daily Telegraph and French, German, and Swiss magazines and newspapers.  Japanese, Swedish, and Australian television news crews have come to Oklahoma and filmed stories about the riot, as has CBS’s 60 Minutes and the History Channel, while Mike Wilkerson’s powerful HBO documentary was nominated for an Emmy Award. Since 1999, there have been nothing less than ten new books published on the race riot, while in the last two years alone, new plays about the riot have been staged in Chicago and Atlanta.  And in more and more U.S. history books these days, the one and only mention of Tulsa is the riot.

But the question we, in Tulsa, are faced with today is if, to use Paul Harvey’s old tag line, this is going to be the rest of the story—or not.  Shall Tulsa be simply the city of the riot, or the city that healed the bitter wounds that it caused?  Shall we be the city that merely and begrudgingly acknowledged this tragedy, or the city that did something about it?

Make no mistake, these are not idle questions.

For we live a different country now than we used to.  It isn’t just that we have an African American president, a Latina justice of the Supreme Court, or that the national chair of the Republican Party is black.  It goes much deeper than that and with deeper implications for Tulsa’s future economic growth.

For the boardrooms and top tier management of corporate America in the 21^st century are no longer composed entirely of white males.  And when companies start to look at places to build new factories, new facilities, and new offices, they are also going to be looking at quality of life issues that reflect not only an increasingly diverse workforce, but also an increasingly diverse management.  And as they look to where they will build their next manufacturing facility, or where to relocate their corporate headquarters, or where to create the next generation of jobs, they will be asking questions.

Is this the kind of city, they will ask, where there is something for everyone?  Is this the kind of city where all different kinds of people get along?  Or is this the kind of city where on one side of town there are thriving businesses and new construction, while on the other side of town one can’t even find a grocery store?  Is this the kind of city where public funds and private investment only goes one way, and in another part of town there is only dismay and anger, empty lots and fears of losing one’s property?  Is this a city where to be a person of color means you that you have one quality of life, and to be white you have another?  These are questions that, whether we like it or not, others will ask and others will answer.  And what those answers are is of vital importance to Tulsa’s future growth and economic development.

*    *    *

There is, of course, much to be done.  But there are two things, I believe, that we need to do forthwith.

We need, first of all, to do something for the survivors, something meaningful, something substantial, and something real.  And we need to do it now.

We need to remember that during the riot, it wasn’t just white private citizens who shot at African Americans, but white police officers and white National Guardsmen as well.

We need to remember that after Greenwood was destroyed, the city’s African American community asked both the White House and the Department of Justice simply to investigate the riot, but they were ignored.

We need to remember that despite all of the looting and theft and burning that occurred, that no officer of the law would arrest those who were responsible, no prosecutor would file charges, and that no court of law would ever hold even one single murder trial for the scores of deaths that occurred on May 31st and June 1st, 1921.

At every level of government, at every stage along the way, the survivors have been turned away.

And this will not do.

For we live in an America where, only nine months ago, a former concentration camp guard was deported for murderous acts that were committed in 1943.  And we live in an America where, at the highest levels of government, actions have been taken, this year, to extradite a well-known film director for alleged sex crimes that took place in 1977.  And in such an America, the African American survivors of the Tulsa race riot need something more than to be told that the injustice that they endured simply happened too long ago.

We need to do better than that.

Secondly, there is something else that we need to do—and that is to try and find better ways to communicate with each other.

For despite the fact that we no longer live in the age of Jim Crow, and that the old segregation laws have now been gone for decades, Tulsa is one of the most segregated cities in all of America.  With few exceptions, most Tulsans live in segregated neighborhoods, and send their children to largely segregated schools.  And, come this weekend, our Creator will be worshipped from self-segregated pews in self-segregated houses of worship.

Though we drink the same water and see the same sunsets, vote in the same elections and will be buried in the same Oklahoma soil, we are, more than we would care to admit, strangers to each other. And our dealings with one another are far too often tinged with suspicion and mistrust.

Make no mistake, there will be differences of opinion between us.

And make no mistake, the conversations will, at times, be exceedingly difficult.

But we are a city that is in desperate need of clarity and honesty.  And we are a city where we need to be less concerned with someone’s skin color that we are with what she or he is actually saying and doing.

These conversations will not be easy.  But unless we start having them, we will simply not move forward.

*    *    *

But as we talk, we can, if we want, discover something else as well.  And that is that as difficult as our past has been, it can also be the source of inspiration.  And that applies to the riot as well.

For a horrific as the riot was, its story was not solely one of hatred and cruelty, murder and arson.  For also on May 31^st and June 1^st, 1921, there were acts of incredible bravery and courage, love and honor, compassion and sacrifice.

Consider the black World War I veterans who went down to the courthouse to stop the lynching of Dick Rowland.  Some of them were wearing their old Army uniforms, uniforms in which they had only recently faced the bullets of the nation’s enemy in France.  Most of them didn’t even know Dick Rowland.  But they did know that a brother was about to be denied what most Americans took for granted, the right to a trial by jury.

And for that, some of them lost their lives.

But make no mistake, by doing what they did, Tulsa’s black vets placed themselves firmly in the ranks of the nation’s greatest heroes, those who fought and died for freedom’s sake whether it was at Lexington and Concord, Gettysburg or Normandy, Birmingham or Selma.  No Tulsans have ever stood taller.  And no Tulsans were ever more deserving of their own monument

But they were not the only heroes during those terrible days.

Consider Carrie Kinlaw, an African American woman who lived out along the section line at the far edge of black Tulsa.  But when the white invasion of  Greenwood began, rather than run toward an uncertain safety in the countryside, Carrie Kinlaw ran toward the gunfire, in order to save the life of her elderly, invalid mother, whom Carrie and her sisters carried six blocks to safety through a rain of bullets.

Consider Mary Jo Erhardt, a young white stenographer who roomed at the old Y.W.C.A. Building at Fifth and Cheyenne.  After a nearly sleepless night, punctuated by the sound rifle fire, Mary Jo arose early on the morning of June 1^st, to the calls for help from an African American porter who was being chased by a gang of whites.  Quickly hiding the man inside the building’s walk-in refrigerator, Mary Jo then faced down the drawn pistols of the white thugs, risking her own life to protect another’s.

Consider Maria Morales Guiterrez, a recent immigrant from Mexico, who lived with her husband in a small house off Peoria.  Hearing a terrible commotion out on the street on the morning of the 1^st, Maria ran outside, where she found two terrified young African American children, who had been separated from their parents, walking alone in the street.  But then as she looked up, Maria saw an airplane bearing down on the two youngsters.  Sweeping them into her arms, she carried them into her house, and into safety.  But that was not all.  For when a crowd of whites later demanded that she turn the children over to them, Maria refused.  “No,” she told them, “no, and no and no.”

And then consider the tale of a young, unknown, African American mother—her story told to me by an aged riot survivor shortly before he died.  When the wave of terror hit Greenwood, when there was nowhere to run and death to stay, this young woman strapped her infant child onto her back, and climbed down into the sewers, crawling to safety beneath the angry streets of Tulsa.

Carrie and Mary Jo, Maria and this forgotten young black mother, their story is not of hatred and cruelty, but of love and compassion, selflessness and courage.  Appealing to the better angels of our nature, they are, in fact, the true angels of the riot.

Tulsa’s four angels.  What a statue they would make.

*    *    *

In closing, we have, it is clear, much, much work to be done—to heal our old wounds, to make our city whole, and to build a brighter future together.

But as difficult, and tragic, as our past can be–we can find inspiration in it as well.

For the founders of Tulsa—red and white, black and brown—reached for the stars.  From the Creek elders who sat down beside the great oak, sprinkling the ground with soil that they had carried five hundred miles from Alabama, to the brash young wildcatters who struck it rich in the Glenn Pool, to the determined African American entrepreneurs who crossed the Ozarks on horseback and by wagon train to come to the Promised Land of Oklahoma, and to the young immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador of today, our city has been blessed, from the beginning, with a sense of possibility, that here, on the edge of the prairie, that magic could happen, and that the future didn’t belong to someone else, but that we hold it in our very own hands.

We need to regain that vision, to make the impossible happen, and to show the world what Tulsa–and Tulsans–are really made of.  And we can begin, this very night, at the very tables where each of you is now sitting.

Thank you very much.  Good luck, God bless all of you, and God bless Tulsa.

Copyright 2009 by Scott Ellsworth