There was an old story about how Americans look at the world.
There had been a train wreck in India, and an American newspaper told the story this way:
“Three hundred Indians and a man from Chicago died in a train wreck …”
The punchline is that a woman was reading the article in Illinois, and her response was, “Oh, that poor man.”
Well, this weekend marks the 100th anniversary of one of the worst race massacres in modern American history. White people in Tulsa, Okla., completely destroyed one of the most thriving black communities in the country, wiping out an area known as Black Wall Street.
You saw the headline in the Tulsa World, which called it a race riot and said two white people had been killed.
“Oh, those poor men.”
The real story was that white people invaded the black neighborhood and basically trashed everything, causing the equivalent of $32 million property damage in 2020 dollars. Oh, and somewhere between 75 and 300 black people were killed.
The truly strange part of it all was that events were basically covered up for about 75 years. Many folks left. The ones who stayed — both black and white — didn’t discuss it. If you look at local, state and national histories written during that time, people didn’t include the story.
Americans who don’t want to know our real history love to say that most of what white people did to black people happened centuries in the past. They might have been stunned to see some of the stories about the massacre this week have included comments from a few people who actually lived through it as small children and remember it.
I’m still shocked by the Tulsa World headline.
Two whites dead?”
And that’s the story why? Because they were George Washington and Abraham Lincoln? Or Leopold and Loeb? Or Sonny and Cher?
In all probability, they were just two guys in the wrong place at the wrong time, guys who wouldn’t have died if they were minding their own business.
To be fair to modern-day Oklahomans, a bipartisan group in the state legislature put together a commission in 1996 to study the massacre. Their report — issued in 2001 — said the city and conspired with the white mob against black citizens. They set up a fund to provide scholarships as a form of reparations, and last year Oklahoma schools included the massacre in their curriculum.
Oklahoma may be among the reddest of red states, but that doesn’t mean people there don’t ever do the right thing.
Good for them.