On Tulsa and Memory

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Tulsa race massacre. If you haven’t read about it yet, this Smithsonian piece is excellent, and where I recommend that you start.

By “recommend that you start” I mean that you owe it to yourself and your family to learn what happened in Tulsa 100 years ago.

If you search online for “deadliest act of domestic terrorism in us history” like I just did, you’ll find a different event from Oklahoma, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Right now, if you go to the Wikipedia page “Domestic terrorism in the United States”, the Oklahoma City blurb reads like this:

Somebody, at some point, had to insert the clause beginning with “since”. See, before 1995, coordinated attacks against Black populations weren’t considered acts of domestic terrorism. Did you hear about Tulsa in 1995? I sure didn’t. (Somebody else also had to add the “citation needed”, apparently.)

I have no recollection of learning about Tulsa at any time until relatively recently. I don’t remember it coming up as an undergraduate, even though I took a class in African-American history. I don’t remember it coming up in grad school, even though I have an M.A. with a specialty of 20th Century American history. I’m not saying it didn’t come up. But if it did, I’m quite sure it came up as an aside, a mention, as a shard of information not befitting how 300 people were murdered when white citizens of Tulsa literally invaded the Black neighborhood of Greenwood - aka the Black Wall Street.

The Smithsonian piece details what happened. A lot of other sources out there can fill in information. I’m not going to repeat all of that here.

There are two things I want to do here. I want to get you, readers, all of you, to invest the time to read about your history, because it is your history.

And the other thing I want to do is speak just a bit more to memory.

I’m not an expert on the subject of collective memory and I’m not going to pretend to be. But, flawed as it clearly was in some respects, I do have an M.A. in history, and I do understand the nature of historiography, of how the winners really do tend to write the history… the winners including the post Civil War white supremacists of the South.

Even if you are an extreme objectivist about history, you certainly must concede that the way people remember the past is constantly evolving.

This reality is very scary for a lot of people, and not just because of the perception that the old history might better suit them. If even history is constantly subject to change, then the very idea that anything at all can be fixed has been turned on its head.

If you take this further, and dive into things like white privilege, and how the way the country’s collective memory as worked has consistently tended to privilege certain vantage points, well, it gets that much scarier. Of course people are going to fight it. Of course people who don’t even understand what the fight is about are going to fight it.

Today is also Memorial Day.

I took D for ice cream. When he was done I walked him down the street to Veterans Memorial Park in Brookfield. I tried to explain Memorial Day to him.

I would up phrasing it something like this:

There are two different days, Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Veterans Day is for recognizing people like his grandpa George who served the country in uniform. Memorial Day is a little different. It’s for remembering people who served the country in uniform and died in the process.

What did they die for? They died for their country, for America.

What does that mean? That means that they died to protect freedom, by which we mean the freedom to go out and get ice cream, the freedom to walk down the street, the freedom to say do things even if we don’t agree with those things, even the freedom to say and do things which are definitely wrong.

D asked me why there’s war.

I said, you know how sometimes people get angry with one another and fight? Well, sometimes countries do that too. And I told him how hopefully he won’t need to ever see war like that, because we’re constantly learning about how not to get into wars.

The reality, of course, is much more complicated… and also not. Some of America’s wars were outright wars of conquest. I’ll name three: the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War.

Wait, you might say… what Philippine-American War? Well, hey, you should read about that one too.

The way I see it, you can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can hold tight to what Memorial Day is about, while at the same time acknowledging that a lot of what America has stood for over time has been conquest, murder, and bullshit. If you veer off too far in one direction, like the nincompoops we saw today standing atop an interstate overpass with “Don’t Tread On Me” flags, well, you’re probably miserable, and you’re just going to spead misery. If you veer off too far in the other direction, and buy into the idea that America is some kind of absolute evil, well, you’re probably miserable, and you’re just going to spread misery.

We’re all humans here. We’re going to experience misery. Pretending otherwise isn’t healthy. But wallowing in it is far more unhealthy.

Acknowledging what happened in Tulsa 100 years ago is not an act of wallowing, though. It is an act of rememberance, much in the same way that Memorial Day itself is. Those people who died in Tulsa were Americans, even prosperous Americans, trying to make their way in America. That they dared to make their way in America is what incensed so many of the white supremacists in Tulsa.

Greenwood’s vision of America is the America that I believe most people who we remember today died for.

Remembering Tulsa today, then, is not about wallowing in some distant past. It’s about affirming the optimistic view of America that Greenwood once represented, and that we must all strive to make possible again.

Now, I don’t expect everybody to agree with me. This is America, after all. This isn’t a place where we’re all expected to agree. In so many ways, we are better off for that.

But I do hope if you’re reading this that you do substantially agree with me, that you believe in a present and future of opportunity for all regardless of where they came from or what they look like.

I hope you believe in the America that I still believe in.