If They Won’t Speak the Stones Will Cry Out: Tulsa Survivors Overcome History’s Erasure
The Beginning
In the Bible, Abraham waited 100 years before he received God’s promise of having his son Issac.
As a child I felt that was unbelievable. Who would be able to live that long to do or say anything?
It wasn’t until I watched the testimony of a Tulsa Race Massacre survivor named Viola Fletcher, did I realize what it means to both suffer and still believe. The result being a pathway to a promise.
In the wake of the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, we are left with a handful of survivors to serve as a mirror to what our society has been, and the worse it can be.
And if no one will tell this truth, the remains of its lost history would cry out.
Fortunately, there were those that did tell this truth, and those that labored hard to preserve it. Both then and now.
On May 19, 2021, a small peach-colored elderly woman, in a lime green jacket, sat in what appeared to be a wheelchair saddled up to a long table. A Black man, appearing to be in his mid-forties, sat beside her gently arranging the papers placed on the table in front of her.
The woman steadied herself before she spoke. She looked to the man next to her for a nod, mouthing to him about the volume on her microphone, as she began her testimony before the House Judiciary.
“My name is Viola Ford Fletcher. I am the daughter of Lucinda Ellis and John Wesley Ford of Oklahoma,” she took a few moments to conclude her introductions with something astounding. “I’m a survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Two weeks ago, I celebrated my 107th birthday.”
The room let out a loud applause. Some appeared to have tears in their eyes. I applauded with them, fighting back my own tears.
“When my family was forced to leave Tulsa, I lost my chance at an education. I never finished school past the fourth grade. I never made much money. To this day, I can barely afford my everyday needs. All the while the City of Tulsa have unjustly used the names and stories of victims like me to enrich itself and its White allies through the $30 million raised by the Tulsa Centennial Commission while I continue to live in poverty.”
Unfortunately, the latter, is a truth echoed by many of descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Sydnee Monday is one of them. Monday often thinks about ways to honor her ancestor’s past. Especially now during such an important moment in history.
However, she finds herself struggling with what is the right way to go forward for the survivors.
“Greenwood is rapidly being gentrified and the city still shies away from conversations about reparations,” Monday says. “White people built wealth off the 1921 Race Massacre — I’d love for that to be redistributed to the people and organizations that have been doing important work for our community in recent decades, like the Greenwood Cultural Center and Vernon AME Church.”
To understand what justice is for the survivors is to understand what they lost.
Ms. Fletcher, whom they affectionately called “mother,” was still here. She was a witness and a piece of living history. And when the chair, Mr. Cohen, asked if she could be his mother, it made me smile. It is an interesting thing in America. When Black women get old, they get a lot of respect. That’s some justice too.
This is for me.
This is for all of those that came before her and for those that will come after, to bear witness of one of the many ways that Black Americans have been disarmed, disenfranchised, murdered in plain sight and left with their voices silenced, and to pick up the pieces.
These days, the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre is on the lips of everyone. This hidden history, in the wake of its centennial, reveals how little anyone knows about it.
On the Steven Colbert Show, Gayle King spoke on it. King, who is also hosting a CBS special about the massacre, shook her head vehemently as she recalled the events and on justice for George Floyd.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I just felt like if America can’t see even through the callousness. If this doesn’t work…I don’t know what will.”
This is the Gayle King. Even she was visibly concerned. This is what it means to be Black in America. It means to live in a paradox of establishment and uncertainty surrounding one’s place.
So how did we get here? What was Greenwood? What really happened?
In 1921, Tulsa was the oil capital of the world it also had over 3,000 Klu Klux Klan members. It was WW1, oil, and Jim Crow that set the backdrop for racial tensions in the Tulsa community at large. When African Americans returned from WW1 it was their attitudes, and the way they carried themselves about town, that some whites felt was a threat to Jim Crow.
The oil boom, which had made some Tulsans, both white and Black wealthy, was beginning to wane. Poor whites were not faring well in the rapidly changing economy, and often pointed their fingers outward for someone to blame.
Brigadier General Ret. Ed Wheeler recounts the mob mentality of some its white citizens in the documentary “The Profile of a Race Riot.” Many had come back from WW1 highly skilled, loaded with weapons from the battlefield, and unemployed. Disgruntled, they often stood in downtown Tulsa looking over at the mansions and the auspicious displays of wealth by Blacks in Greenwood, and it angered them.
White entitlement, coupled with anger at what was a lack of opportunity, made the men fertile ground for recruitment to the Klu Klux Klan. The Klan, in order to reinforce white superiority, blamed their problems on Blacks, Jews and Catholics. Instead of acknowledging segregation and a failing economy it was easier to look to someone else.
“It was a simple answer to a complex problem,” Wheeler says.
Mary E. Jones Parrish courtesy of Trinity University Press
In 1919, a 29-year-old African American writer named Mary E. Parrish, came to Tulsa, OK to experience first-hand the prosperity, collegial nature, and harmony of the Black community in Tulsa. Ms. Fletcher was only 5 years of age when Parrish arrived in Tulsa armed with her notebook, her young daughter, and big dreams of financial prosperity.
I identified with Ms. Fletcher as young writer and teacher myself. For a writer, Washington DC has become the place I would establish my creative writing dreams.
Similarly, to Parrish, it was a watershed event in history that would change the course of my focus as a writer as well. For me it was George Floyd. For Parrish, it would be the greatest race massacre to occur on American soil.
When young Parrish headed north on Archer Street from the Frisco station upon her arrival, she saw nothing but “negro businesses.” The residential area was lined with two-story homes, more than two dozen churches, and well attended schools.
Two blocks east her eyes would feast upon Greenwood Avenue, a Black mecca known as the “Black Wall Street,” to Black people but malevolently referred to as “Little Africa” in the local white newspapers.
In her book, “Events of the Tulsa Disaster,” Parrish references the covetousness of “evil minded real estate men who saw the advantage of making this[Greenwood] a commercial district.”
To Nab A Negro
On Monday May 30, 1921, it had been reported that a 19-year-old African American shoe shiner named “Diamond” Dick Rowland had tripped in an elevator at the Drexel Building and assaulted a white 17-year-old orphan named Sarah Page. Reports vary as to the true nature of their relationship. It is believed that the most likely story is that when he stepped on her foot, she screamed, causing him to flee the scene.
He was later caught and put into jail.
Later that day, the “Tulsa Tribune” ran a now infamous story “To Lynch A Negro.” This story is said to have appeared in the afternoon addition of the newspaper. There was talk of lynching and whispers of rape among the white population of Tulsa, prompting a group of white men to gather at the jail demanding that Rowland be released to them.
According to Paul Gardullo, a head curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the formulaic stereotype about young black men raping young white women was used with great success from the end of slavery forward to the middle of the 20th century.
“It was a formula that resulted in untold numbers of lynching’s across the nation,” Gardullo says. “The truth of the matter has to do with the threat that black power, black economic power, black cultural power, black success, posed to individuals and . . . the whole system of white supremacy. That’s embedded within our nation’s history.”
One this fateful day of May 31, 1921, Parrish would change the course of her writing trajectory after witnessing the most terrifying, militarized, and bloodiest vendetta between whites and blacks sparked by a rumor.
May 31, 1921, 8:30 p.m.
Parrish stayed behind after work ended at around 9 pm to catch up on some reading. Two hours later her young daughter, who had been looking out the window, noticed men in cars with guns. Parrish recalled the men were rabid and blood thirsty “like mad bulls after a red flag or blood thirsty wolves after a carcass.”
Parrish ran down to the street to see what was going and was warned to leave the building or her and her daughter would be killed. Parrish said a prayer and ran for cover. The Black men that had come to defend Dick Rowland were outnumbered by the increasing white mob.
Wheeler says the mob was militarized and strategic. They used their training from WW1 and descended up Greenwood with force. it was less of a mob and more of an ambush.
Parrish, along with her daughter and many others, made a terrifying exodus to safety. She noticed a machine gun on the hillside, on old couple hobbling quickly, and blood curdling screams and cries.
Ruth Sigler Avery a white Tulsan, who interviewed whites surrounding the massacre, frequently references the smell. The sulphureous, coppery smell of bodies burned whole. The screams and sounds of planes and guns firing repeatedly.
It wasn’t until June 1, 1921, at 1:46 am, upon the entrance of the National Guard to the city, did the murderous rampage and destruction cease.
Greenwood was decimated. Black Wall Street and the pride it had inspired in its people burned to the ground and littered with dead bodies. From that point on, Blacks were taken into custody, displaced, many charged and ultimately blamed for the riot.
This left them homeless, penniless, and stripped of their independence. Just as their ancestors were 50 years earlier in slavery. When they tried to recover what they had loss through the courts and through insurance they were unsuccessful. All 1,400 of the insurance claims filed by Black businesses were denied.
A resilient People
In 1925, Greenwood built itself up again. It flourished with more stores than it originally started with. Ultimately, it was never the same. Due to the government seizure of the property through Eminent Domain, the city’s residents were at a loss again. The cyclical and systemic stripping of a Black community’s self-reliance and independence is endemic.
Frederick Douglass once wrote that “No republic is safe that tolerates a privileged class, or denies to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them.”
“We lost everything that day,” Fletcher says. “Our homes. Our churches. Our newspapers. Our theaters. Our lives. Greenwood represented the best of what was possible for Black people in America — and for all people. No one cared about us for almost 100 years. We, and our history, have been forgotten, washed away. This Congress must recognize us, and our history. For Black Americans. For white Americans. For all Americans. That’s some justice.”
My ability to witness all that Black people can be when left alone. When we are not marginalized, monitored, and disenfranchised we are able to access the skills of our ancestors on the continent. But what warms my heart is faith, resilience of people like Ms. Fletcher and the many other survivors. Their compassion is serves as my blueprint.
This is for me.
