gray_ghost (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gray_ghost) wrote2007-03-23 03:32 am
gray_ghost) wrote2007-03-23 03:32 am
The Tulsa Massacre
In the middle of reading Howard Zinn's latest book - A Power Governments Cannot Suppress and he has a section on massacres in US history. He was invited to give a talk somewhere about the Boston Massacre - and he used it as an opportunity to focus on lesser-known massacres in US history. Anyway - he gives passing mention to a massacre which happened in Tulsa in 1921 where mobs of white people bombed the black section of Tulsa Oklahoma from airplanes with nitroglycerin. That was one of the things they did. They were also shooting blacks on the ground the old fashioned way.
And lynching them, and beating them to death whenever convenient. Very forward-thinking of the Klan at the time. Fire bombing a city from the air twenty some years before Dresden and Tokyo. The nitroglycerin from the air is really what gets me. Because the other stuff - lynchings and shootings, can be attributed to the violence of the mob. Fire bombing from the air requires pilots. And planes. And coordination with the civilian government...and....well that's what genocide is, isn't it?
It appears to be all true About 3000 black people were murdered and buried in mass graves, and 503 buildings in the black section of Tulsa were burned to the ground.
It took until 1997 for a commission to be formed to look into the matter of what really happened.
Here's a link to the final report of the commission. Having lived through the Watts race riot (the 2nd version - which happened while I was in school in California) I have to wonder why the media never mentioned the Tulsa Riot. I know it took place in 1921, but you would think the most horrific race riot in history would at least be mentioned once - if for nothing else than to juxtapose it against the current one which was raging over the Rodney King verdict. I mean - put it into some context and place the fucked up state of race relations in the US into historical perspective?
I find it funny that Zinn (in spite of knowing all this dark history of the US that was cut from the official version) is still so optimistic about average people doing the right thing in the end. Doubly so since he didn't come to his knowledge of things late in life - but knew it from an early age (he got his head kicked in by a cop when he was a teenager while marching in a Communist party rally in New York).
Anyway - doesn't that creep you out? My first reaction was that part of the movie in "The Sixth Sense" where the kid freaks out at his hs teacher who is giving him the official line on what their school used to be during and before the Revolutionary war. The kid is bugging out because he can see the corpses of all the people who were hung back in the court house hundreds of years ago as witches - and he knows that everything the teacher is feeding him is a lie because he can see the truth all around him. And the dead people are PISSED about being forgotten.
I'm pissed that they're forgotten. I hiked up to Mount Moriah in Deadwood with Wally last summer and we looked at all of the graves of the notable people who left their marks on Deadwood. And then they had a section called Potter's Field which is where they put all the John/Jane Does. Now given the history of Deadwood - the real history lies buried in Potter's Field. The cheating card sharks, the whores, the drunks, the gunfighters, the drifters, the drug addicts, the Chinese laborers. I want to know what happened to those people.
And lynching them, and beating them to death whenever convenient. Very forward-thinking of the Klan at the time. Fire bombing a city from the air twenty some years before Dresden and Tokyo. The nitroglycerin from the air is really what gets me. Because the other stuff - lynchings and shootings, can be attributed to the violence of the mob. Fire bombing from the air requires pilots. And planes. And coordination with the civilian government...and....well that's what genocide is, isn't it?
It appears to be all true About 3000 black people were murdered and buried in mass graves, and 503 buildings in the black section of Tulsa were burned to the ground.
It took until 1997 for a commission to be formed to look into the matter of what really happened.
Here's a link to the final report of the commission. Having lived through the Watts race riot (the 2nd version - which happened while I was in school in California) I have to wonder why the media never mentioned the Tulsa Riot. I know it took place in 1921, but you would think the most horrific race riot in history would at least be mentioned once - if for nothing else than to juxtapose it against the current one which was raging over the Rodney King verdict. I mean - put it into some context and place the fucked up state of race relations in the US into historical perspective?
I find it funny that Zinn (in spite of knowing all this dark history of the US that was cut from the official version) is still so optimistic about average people doing the right thing in the end. Doubly so since he didn't come to his knowledge of things late in life - but knew it from an early age (he got his head kicked in by a cop when he was a teenager while marching in a Communist party rally in New York).
Anyway - doesn't that creep you out? My first reaction was that part of the movie in "The Sixth Sense" where the kid freaks out at his hs teacher who is giving him the official line on what their school used to be during and before the Revolutionary war. The kid is bugging out because he can see the corpses of all the people who were hung back in the court house hundreds of years ago as witches - and he knows that everything the teacher is feeding him is a lie because he can see the truth all around him. And the dead people are PISSED about being forgotten.
I'm pissed that they're forgotten. I hiked up to Mount Moriah in Deadwood with Wally last summer and we looked at all of the graves of the notable people who left their marks on Deadwood. And then they had a section called Potter's Field which is where they put all the John/Jane Does. Now given the history of Deadwood - the real history lies buried in Potter's Field. The cheating card sharks, the whores, the drunks, the gunfighters, the drifters, the drug addicts, the Chinese laborers. I want to know what happened to those people.