For white, middle-and upper-class Americans such as myself, the acute threat of terrorism right here at home is something new. Indeed, the media we run and predominantly staff routinely described the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building as the first significant case of terrorism in the nation's history. Of course, the horrifying events of a year ago—all the more shocking because they were played out on live national television—even more decisively made terrorism in the homeland a clear, present, and ongoing danger. Suddenly, we all believe it can happen here.

Black Americans are no less threatened by and no more enamored with the likes of Osama Bin Laden than other Americans are. But there is a difference. For blacks, homeland insecurity and the all too palpable danger of terrorism are nothing new.

As opposed to acts of war, meant to directly subdue and conquer an enemy, acts of terrorism are more immediately symbolic and even theatrical. Terrorists may dream of someday seeing an enemy under their boot. But their more proximate aim is intimidation of the spirit and toxic pollution of the imagination. They will settle for emotional and spiritual subjugation, short of a more comprehensive and physical subjugation by outright war. So the diabolically spectacular events of September 11 struck at the heart of American faith in this nation's global economic and technological superiority. It was a superiority we tended to think of as invulnerable. But now the skyscrapers and airplanes that so vividly embodied this superiority are also signs of our vulnerability; they indicate not so much the armor of the national self-image as its exposed underbelly.

Similarly, African Americans know the period after Reconstruction and into the early 20th century as one marked by virulent terrorism. Whites who would officially and wholly subjugate blacks were militarily defeated in 1865. But in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee. It was originally nothing more than a diversionary social club. Not for long, though. From its intuitively haunting name to its ghostly robes and hoods, with burning crosses and menacing midnight raids, the Klan soon developed into a homegrown terrorist organization. Its threatening theatricality turned especially deadly with public lynchings, often preceded by highly symbolic torture involving blinding or castration. Between 1890 and 1930, nearly 3,000 Americans (mostly blacks) were lynched—if not always by the Klan, usually in the tradition of its cruel theater of intimidation. Bodies were frequently left hanging for days. Hanging ropes were cut into pieces and sold. Even more gruesome "souvenirs" included victims' fingers or knuckles. A market developed for postcards of satisfied executioners (and their wives and children) posed with hanging or burned black corpses. All this was meant to spiritually subjugate "uppity Negroes" and keep them "in their place."

Such instances of terrorism are readily found in American history books. But there are others more effectively buried and hidden from public consciousness. Like every Oklahoma schoolchild, I had my share of lessons in state history and civics. And as an undergraduate at Oklahoma State University in the late 1970s, one of my most memorable courses was in black American history. But I never heard of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot before stumbling across it in some readings of "radical" history in the early 1990s. More recently, the worldwide trend toward consideration of reparations for past wrongs against ethnic groups, and the tenacity of Oklahoma's blacks, have decisively disinterred Tulsa's shame.

Within the last year, three books on the Tulsa Riot have been issued by major publishers; an earlier, pioneering but brief chronicle was published in 1982. Whatever their differences in detail, and some are important, these four accounts establish one thing beyond dispute: In the annals of significant events of terrorism in America, to the April 12, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11, 2001, fall of the World Trade Center must be added the June 1, 1921, destruction of Tulsa's African American community.

To appreciate why a vast tract of Tulsa caught fire and burned in the spring of 1921, it is necessary to take account of racial passions and fears that began smoldering in the 19th century. Oklahoma did not attain statehood until 1907. Before then it was a territory not clearly claimed or regulated by any state or nation. In the 1830s, it was, frankly, a dumping ground. When the Five Civilized Tribes were driven from the southeast United States, they were herded along what came to be called the Trail of Tears and into the Oklahoma Territory.

The Five Civilized Tribes held black slaves. Treatment of slaves varied from tribe to tribe, but the Creeks and Seminoles allowed intermarriage and, after Emancipation, adopted African Americans into their tribes. Creek and Seminole freedmen voted, owned land, attended tribal schools, and received equal tribal justice. Predictably, these conditions drew other freed slaves to the Oklahoma Territory. And by the closing decades of the 19th century, blacks in the Territory enjoyed far more rights and privileges than blacks in the official U.S., North or South. As James Hirsch notes, the Territory became a "bastion for black nationalism" and, beginning in the 1880s, there were indeed hopes that Oklahoma would become the nation's first black state. Blacks across the continent thought of the Oklahoma Territory as "the Promised Land."

One people's promise, however, can be perceived as another people's threat. "If the black population could be distributed evenly over the United States," The New York Times editorialized in 1890, "it would not constitute a social or political danger. But an exclusively or overwhelming negro settlement in any part of the country is, to all intents and purposes, a camp of savages." With the nearing of Oklahoma statehood, "the Negro Question" grew hot in the Territory. Oklahoma Republicans of the day divided on voting and other equal rights for blacks. Democrats vigorously opposed civil rights for blacks and argued that "Republican success means African domination"—this despite the fact that, by 1900, Oklahoma Territory's whites outnumbered blacks 10 to 1.

One man became emblematic of the majority sentiment. Democrat William H. "Alfalfa Bill" Murray was elected president of the Oklahoma state convention in 1906. Alfalfa Bill, who would continue for decades as a major force in Oklahoma politics, was notoriously racist. He thought blacks were inferior to whites because of their putatively lesser "brain weights" and said blacks could thrive as porters, bootblacks, and barbers but never as lawyers and doctors. He praised Hitler for "being right in his science" about the Jews. (Decades later an Oklahoma University professor stumbled across an autographed copy of Murray's book The Negro's Place in Call of Race. Alfalfa Bill had inscribed on its endpages, "I hate Indians too.")

Such bigotry quickly translated into policy, so that the very first legislation passed by Oklahoma's state senate segregated whites and blacks, and later Oklahoma would become the first state to segregate telephone booths. But Oklahoma's blacks had enjoyed a few decades of comparatively decent levels of freedom, education, business establishment, and self-government. They were not easily put entirely back in "their place." An oil boom in the first decade of the 20th century turned Tulsa from a backwater to a rich and bustling center of the petroleum industry (a 1909 city directory listed 126 oil companies headquartered there). Black Tulsa, known as Greenwood because its business district lined its namesake avenue, enjoyed a degree of the entire city's prosperity. By 1921, Tulsa was a city of nearly 100,000 people; Greenwood's population had grown to 11,000. Greenwood boasted two black schools, a hospital, two newspapers, 13 churches, three fraternal lodges, two theaters, and a public library. Its Stradford Hotel, with three stories and 54 rooms, was believed to be the nation's largest hotel owned and operated by an African American—and its opulence matched that of any hotel in white Tulsa. There were also barbers, real estate agents, lawyers, and a surgeon with a national reputation. As far away as Chicago, Greenwood was seen as the peak of American achievement for blacks. It was sometimes referred to as the "Negro Wall Street."

Educated, justifiably proud, articulate, and ambitious, Greenwood's citizens were early leaders in struggles for civil rights. At the same time, the country as a whole was seeing a resurgence of its racism. Bigotry was intensified by World War I and its attendant insecurities. Nativist movements such as the KKK revived. Historian John Hope Franklin has called this "the greatest period of inter-racial strife the nation ever witnessed." So, even as African Americans were meeting with a degree of success and getting more assertive in their call for civil rights, hotels and restaurants in Northern cities that had served blacks began to turn them away. Some Southern newspapers ran ads inviting the public to witness the burning of live Negro men. In East St. Louis, all too typically of the horrible violence across the country, marauding whites shot a black infant and tossed its body from a flaming building.

Such was the racial climate when, in the waning days of May 1921, a 17-year-old, white, female elevator operator in downtown Tulsa claimed that a black man named Dick Rowland had attacked and attempted to molest her. The scenario strained credulity—what sane black man would accost a young white woman at the most public spot of a busy office building, during peak business hours, in white Tulsa?—and later the woman would retract her accusation and Rowland would be acquitted. But at the time, Tulsa did not stop to reason: ugly passions and irrational desperation prevailed. Rowland was jailed. On May 31, newspaper accounts assumed his guilt. That evening, hundreds, and perhaps as many as 1,500, whites gathered outside the courthouse where Rowland was incarcerated.

Greenwood's citizens feared the worst and vowed they would not passively allow one of their own to be lynched.

A delegation visited the jail and was assured by the sheriff that he would not release Rowland from protective custody. But as the evening deepened, the white crowd swelled and grew increasingly restive. A year before, a white man had been snatched from a Tulsa jail and lynched by a mob. By all accounts, jailers had given up their captive to the vigilantes without a struggle; by some accounts, policemen directed traffic as spectators flocked to witness the hanging. If even a white man was not safe from vigilante violence in a Tulsa jail, Greenwood's leaders reasoned, how could they believe Rowland—a black man accused of trying to rape a white woman—was secure?

Late in the evening, around 75 black men, many of them veterans of World War I, took up weapons and marched in formation on the jail. Someone in the crowd tried to snatch a pistol from a would-be Rowland protector, and the gun discharged. The white crowd instantaneously transformed into a mob. Blacks were knocked down, hit, and stomped to death by knots of whites. The blacks availed themselves of military retreat strategy, and broke into ranks alternately firing on the pursuing mob and falling back toward Greenwood.

Facing weaponry wielded with some efficiency, the white mob diverted attention to its own arming, breaking into sporting goods and hardware stores and looting guns and ammunition. Greenwood men hunkered down on the border between white and black Tulsa, defending their community with gunfire, and nightfall stalled the white advance for several hours.

Through the night the white mob regrouped, gathering weaponry and ammunition and strategizing—at least partly under the direction of city officials. Tulsa's police chief deputized many rioters and even armed some. A light-skinned naacp official, masquerading as white, said that he was deputized with only three questions, then told he could "go out and shoot any nigger you see and the law'll be behind you."

Just after 5 a.m. on June 1, a siren sounded and the mob invaded Greenwood. Now armed, and with far superior numbers, the white vigilantes pressed into black Tulsa. They shot many blacks and incinerated the corpses of some. One body was tied to a car and trophy-dragged through the downtown. The mob forced all blacks out of their homes, looting clothing, jewelry, phonographs, curtains, and the like, then torching the houses. The Stradford Hotel and the Dreamland Theatre were only the most illustrious of many businesses. As word of the invasion spread, thousands of blacks fled. Some would relocate with family or friends as far away as Kansas City; many were found in the countryside outside Tulsa over the first few days following the riot.

A last redoubt in Greenwood was Mt. Zion Baptist Church, a brick structure comparable in size and beauty to any church in white Tulsa. Mt. Zion's construction had been completed only 57 days before. An effective defense was mounted with gunfire from its windows and belltower. By mid-morning National Guardsmen from Oklahoma City rather belatedly moved into Greenwood.

The Guard would later say it thought it could most effectively protect blacks by rapidly evacuating them. Black survivors say Guardsmen simply protected and assisted the vigilantes. By all accounts, Mt. Zion was vanquished only when Guardsmen backed a flatbed truck close to the church, then uncovered and began firing a belt-loaded machine gun. Shards of bricks and mortar flew from the belfry. The big gun cut jagged holes in the side of the building. Rioters were afforded cover to rush Mt. Zion with torches and kerosene. The defenders evacuated their breached fortress and the church burned.

Dozens more stories have been passed down from that terrible day. Tim Madigan's account especially, and often devastatingly, draws from interviews with eyewitnesses. James Hirsch also interviewed many survivors, but he leans more cautiously on documented accounts. This juxtaposition in itself could engender profitable consideration of the merits and limits of oral and of documentary history. Black culture is orally gifted and may honor oral accounts more readily than much of white culture. In any event, Greenwood did not have its own police force or other official sources of documentation. Its newspaper offices were destroyed that day, and its journalists were literally running for their lives. So, no matter how fair historical researchers may be, the documentary account comes largely from white sources. And even here crucial police records and (white) newspaper accounts have been expunged or lost. Some significant points of contention will never be settled.

It is argued, for instance, that the Tulsa Tribune on May 31 ran an incendiary front-page editorial headlined "To Lynch a Negro Tonight." But the editorial in question has been (quite suspiciously) clipped from all archived or otherwise found copies of that day's paper. Certainly no less significantly, black witnesses said airplanes flew over the riot, firing on the community and even dropping firebombs. White authorities said the airplanes were unarmed and were merely surveying and assessing the scope of the conflagration. Airplanes bombing American citizens on their own soil would (as September 11 too graphically demonstrated) be especially heinous and terrifying. Hirsch's careful weighing of the matter persuades me, at least, that airplanes probably did not bomb Greenwood. But some Greenwood survivors and their descendants are convinced they did.

Out of this climate of controversy and nondefinitive evidence, it is difficult, even impossible in some respects, to exactly assess the horror of June 1, 1921. What is known beyond debate is that an entire community was destroyed that day; 1,256 houses were burned in a 35-square block area. The burned property, including businesses, was valued at $1.5 to $1.8 million (more than $14 million in 2000 dollars). We also know that about 6,000 Greenwood citizens were forced into detention camps in the days after the riot.

Much less certain is a more significant statistic: the number of people killed. Death estimates range from about 30 to 300 people (with probably at least 75 percent black). The death count is in any case substantially higher when one takes into account those who died from disease and exposure as a direct consequence of the destruction. Immediately after the riot the Red Cross erected nearly 400 army tents for survivors, and from June 18 to June 28 heavy storms flooded the Arkansas River. Rain blew down tents and soaked bedding, clothing, and firewood; two feet of water stood in some streets. Pneumonia, typhoid fever, malnutrition, and smallpox were rampant, and resulted in uncounted additional deaths.

By even the most conservative estimates, however, the Tulsa Riot is clearly one of the most destructive non-wartime attacks on an American community in this country's history. Indeed, the nature, enormity, and evil of the tragedy raise the question of what we should call it, now that we are belatedly remembering it. It is commonly denominated a "riot," but that word fails to capture the intentionality and not altogether spontaneous demeanor of the event. We might recognize it as a "massacre," but that may downplay the active resistance and defense of Greenwood by its very capable citizens. Arguably, what happened that day was a pogrom or even, to use a more up-to-date word, an act of ethnic cleansing. After all, there is evidence—documentary and otherwise—that many vigilantes intended to drive blacks from Tulsa. Surviving photographs of Greenwood under billowing black smoke include some with scrawled legends such as "Runing [sic] the Negro Out of Tulsa."

Whatever we call June 1, 1921, surely it was terrorism. And it was an act of gross injustice, still awaiting anything like appropriate restitution. Only one man served jail time: a black sentenced to 30 days for carrying a concealed weapon on the night of the riot. Though some Tulsa officials, including a prominent judge and the head of the Chamber of Commerce, said the city should rebuild Greenwood, city officials soon adopted the tack that the event was an "unlawful uprising of Negroes" and the city was liable for no damages. (The federal government never entered the debate.) The day after Greenwood burned, Tulsa's mayor ceded all responsibility for relief work to the Red Cross, and the city and county provided only a paltry $200,000 for relief efforts.

In the late 1990s, Oklahoma state legislators appointed a study committee. While the legislators ultimately disavowed the interpretation of June 1 as a "Negro uprising" and admitted in vague terms the harm of racism in Oklahoma's history, they rejected the study committee's recommendations for monetary and scholarship reparations. Instead, each survivor was given a gold-plated medal bearing the state seal. No other attempts at reparation are in view.

Nevertheless, Alfred Brophy, a legal historian, makes a compelling case that if any event justifies reparation, it is that of June 1, 1921. Brophy allows that

reparation debates are often complicated because state or municipal liability cannot be resoundingly demonstrated. But, with such actions as deputizing

vigilantes and the National Guard's machine-gunning of a church, it is indisputable that there was official culpability for much of Greenwood's destruction. Brophy also acknowledges that reparations often present difficulties in terms

of who exactly deserves any monetary restitution. Opponents of reparations argue, for instance, that today's descendants of Native Americans or African Americans were not directly harmed by events centuries prior. But in the Tulsa case, some 100 black victims of the riot are still alive.

Still, Brophy takes seriously the argument against reparations that wonders how fair it is to impose on a bygone era our contemporary, and so anachronistic, standards of right and wrong. But again the Tulsa case cannot be thus dismissed. White Tulsans, in newspapers and official documents, acknowledged the shame of the event mere days or weeks after Greenwood burned. The injustice was recognized as an injustice at the time it occurred.

Given the cogency of Brophy's strictly legal arguments, it seems to me that the moral case for Greenwood reparations is even more impressive. With official liability demonstrable, with some who suffered damages still alive, and with standards applicable to the time indisputably relevant, I can imagine no compelling argument that serious, reasonable, and adequate

restitution has been made. Leaving the events of June 1, 1921, unrestituted really amounts to an argument, in deed if not in word, for a nihilistic morality of might makes right. Greenwood's survivors, as members of a minority, cannot legally or politically compel reparations. But how can other Oklahomans—and other Americans—not impair our credibility to speak on behalf of the rule of law, and against the gross wrongs of all terrorism, if we accept that the Tulsa Riot has been fittingly redressed by half-apologies and a passel of gold medallions?

Perhaps it is time for American churches to step up to the plate, to speak out, and even, if no governmental institution will act, to imagine ecclesial forms of restitution. In 1921, white Tulsa's churches, with the exception of the women of First Presbyterian who nursed in detention camps, merely stood by at best. At worst they inveighed against "vicious" black "agitators" like W.E.B. DuBois, or sermonized that the stage for the riot was set by such immoralities as public dancing and uncensored movies.

Their witness may not be the best model for us. Instead, when it comes to Christian and moral responsibility, we might do better to look to the example of Greenwood's Mt. Zion Baptist Church. As mentioned, the new building had stood for barely two months before it was destroyed. A $50,000 loan, made by a bank in white Tulsa, remained outstanding. After their building was leveled, Mt. Zion's congregants covered the church basement and met and worshiped in their Sunday best on a dirt floor, over plank pews laid across sawhorses. There they also collected tithes to meet their debts. Twenty-one years later, they paid off the loan.

Rodney Clapp is editorial director of Brazos Press. Among his books are A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (IVP) and Border Crossings: Christian Trespasses on Popular Culture and Public Affairs (Brazos).

Books Discussed in this Essay: Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921/Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002). Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1982). James S. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (Houghton Mifflin, 2002). Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (St. Martin's, 2001).

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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