My Conversation with a Descendant of the 1921 Massacre
We have to believe in hope so we can treat the bone-deep hurt that Tulsa has carried for one-hundred years.
A few weeks ago, I was browsing HBO’s streaming service when I came upon a show titled, The Watchmen. I clicked on it and discovered the show was about an alternate reality of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.
The scenes brought back memories of a conversation I had in the 1990s with a descendant of the Massacre, the term we use in Tulsa.
I remember sitting with my mother-in-law at her kitchen table in Tulsa, Oklahoma as she quietly spoke of her mother’s account of the 1921 Race Massacre. Cleo Walker spoke with disdain in her voice as she painted a picture of a little girl who ran from a burning building.
But first, let me give you a little history before we view the painting.
Black Wall Street
In the first decade of the 1900s, African-Americans of North Tulsa reinvested funds derived from the economic boom of oil into their segregated community creating what Booker T. Washington described as the Black Wall Street.
This area comprised thirty-five blocks of successful businesses, affluent residential neighborhoods, a…
