Black Birds in the Sky

by Brandy Colbert

  Unfortunately, the Tribune wasn’t the only publication or entity that tried to bury the truth. The Oklahoma volume of the American Guide Series mentioned it in 1941 but devoted only one paragraph to the subject. History textbooks completely ignored the event—in fact, it was not included as part of the state’s public school curricula until 2000, nearly eighty years after the massacre. This resulted in near total erasure of what had happened in Greenwood, to the point that many people who moved to Tulsa after the massacre and even some born and raised there in the ensuing years, both Black and white, often knew nothing about it.

  Educator Nancy Feldman, who was white, hadn’t heard anything about the Tulsa Race Riot, as it was known then, when she moved to Oklahoma in 1946 to teach sociology at the University of Tulsa. Survivor Robert Fairchild informed her of the event that had occurred twenty-five years prior, and, deeply disturbed by what she’d learned, she brought up the incident with her college students. According to Feldman, several of them “stoutly denied it and questioned my facts.” Even after Fairchild himself visited the all-white class, they were not convinced; even worse, their parents told them Fairchild and Feldman were lying. Feldman was ordered by the school’s dean to “drop the whole subject.” She said her own friends were reluctant to acknowledge what had happened, as well: “When I would mention the riot to my white friends, few would talk about it. And they certainly didn’t want to.”

  Nancy Dodson, an instructor at Tulsa Junior College, was also advised not to talk about the massacre “almost upon our arrival,” she said. “Because of shame, I thought. But the explanation was, ‘You don’t want to start another.’”

  Of course, some white people were ashamed of what had happened, while Black survivors were silent from fear, and likely not eager to speak of such a sad moment in their history. Perhaps some of them—close descendants of enslaved people, and some maybe even formerly enslaved themselves—didn’t want to burden their children with such a harrowing tale about what had happened in their own town, and not that long ago.

  It’s not that the massacre wasn’t discussed at all; it was, privately. But it had been made clear that public discussion was taboo, and most of the city’s white residents, in particular, adhered to this collective oath of silence. Educational institutions in particular didn’t seem to want their faculty to speak out about the massacre, even as trying to hide what had occurred was denying their students the Tulsa history and education they were paying for, and deserved.

  Still, while University of Tulsa leaders may not have wanted instructors like Nancy Feldman to speak about the massacre, that didn’t stop one of their students from writing his graduate thesis on the topic in 1946. Loren L. Gill, a white veteran of World War II, was fascinated by the massacre and began conducting extensive research and interviews with locals, city officials, and survivors. Although his paper is considered by historians to be somewhat reductive and inaccurate in its conclusions, Gill’s efforts to record the truth of what happened in 1921 have been commended.

  Despite the primarily white teachers and institutions who sought to hide what had happened, there are Black educators who tried their best to pass down the story of Black Wall Street and its demise. Some teachers at Booker T. Washington High School ensured their students knew the history of Greenwood in the years following.

  But other than these few instances, the massacre largely remained lost to history.

  Eventually, however, things started to change.

  A few months before the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre, the head of the Tulsa chamber of commerce magazine decided to cover the event. Ed Wheeler, a white man who hosted a history show on a local radio station, was hired to write the article and began interviewing survivors and digging through local records. Not long after he started his research, other white people began trying to intimidate him; he received menacing phone calls, and groups of men twice approached him in person, plainly saying, “Don’t write that story.” Wheeler didn’t give in to their threats, however, and finished the article—only for upper management at the chamber of commerce to block its publication, a decision that was backed up by the chamber’s board of directors.

  Like graduate student Gill, Wheeler was determined to report the truth about what had happened in 1921, and after the story was also rejected by Tulsa’s two major newspapers, he ended up finding a home for it in a new Black publication called Impact Magazine.

  There were also photographs taken of the massacre, many of which were preserved and housed in a collection at the Tulsa Historical Society. For this, we must thank Mozella Franklin Jones, daughter of B. C. Franklin, the well-known Black attorney in Tulsa who had survived the massacre and represented other survivors and whose work also helped overturn the building codes that were implemented to prevent residents from rebuilding Greenwood.

  Buck Colbert “B.C.” Franklin

  Also in 1971, Black survivors came together to remember the event with a special program at Mount Zion Baptist Church, whose original building had been torched during the massacre only a few weeks after it was dedicated. The fiftieth anniversary program was headed by W. D. Williams, known as Bill when he was a teenager—the son of John and Loula, who had owned several businesses in Greenwood, including the iconic Dreamland Theatre. The Williams family had survived, but their businesses, including the auto shop and confectionery, were destroyed in the massacre. Williams was one of the teachers at Booker T. Washington High School, his alma mater, who had worked to keep the massacre’s memory alive. Some white people also attended the program at Mount Zion. It was the first time Tulsans had publicly recognized the massacre in decades.

  The 1970s were a time of change. It was the first decade after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which promised Black people all over the country equal treatment by law. Black culture began to gain popularity around the United States, in the form of literature, television, and, significantly, in education, as the first programs and departments focused on Black studies had recently been established at select institutions (though many of these programs were often underfunded). And as education transformed, people began to talk and teach more about what had happened in Tulsa fifty years ago. Books about Oklahoma began to include accounts of it, too. In 1975, historian Rudia M. Halliburton Jr. published The Tulsa Race War of 1921, the first book about the massacre since Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish’s 1922 account.

  As remarkable—and long overdue—as these efforts were, they did not overcome the forces of white supremacy that kept the stories of Greenwood hidden, nor did they bring them to light on a national scale. But they gave Tulsans and future historians a way to piece things together, little by little, even decades later.

  While everyone was trying to decide how and when to talk about the massacre, what happened to Greenwood itself?

  Only a few buildings in the thirty-plus blocks that were destroyed survived the massacre, including Booker T. Washington High School and Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church. The high school desegregated in 1973 and began busing in white students to learn alongside local Black students. Now known as a magnet school, Booker T. Washington has changed locations twice since 1921, but the facade of the original building was transported and used in construction of the current building on East Zion Street “for its historical significance.” Vernon A.M.E. Church, whose basement remained intact after the massacre, was later added to the National Register for Historic Places in 2018.

  * * *

  The Oklahoma Eagle Opens Up Shop

  In June 1920, Black journalist Theodore Baughman, the managing editor of A. J. Smitherman’s Tulsa Star, left his job and founded a competing newspaper, the Oklahoma Sun. However, just a year later, the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed businesses in the Greenwood District, including the offices of both the Sun and the Star. Smitherman sold what could be salvaged of his equipment to Baughman and left town, making Baughman’s publication the only Black newspaper in the cit
y. Baughman reportedly put out a trimmed-down daily paper after the massacre, printing the names of people looking for family and friends.

  Baughman changed the name of his paper to the Oklahoma Eagle and would eventually open an office in the rebuilt Greenwood District. In 1936, Edward L. Goodwin Sr. invested in the Eagle, and became sole owner the next year, after Baughman’s death. Goodwin, who said he was going to dedicate the rest of his life to “fighting for the things that I knew that black people needed and never had in order to elevate them to a higher social level, a higher economic level, [than] they’d been accustomed to,” created a new motto for the Eagle: “We Make America Better When We Aid Our People.”

  The Oklahoma Eagle is the tenth-oldest Black-owned newspaper currently publishing in the United States, and is the last original Black-owned business from Black Wall Street still operating in the Greenwood District footprint.

  * * *

  All that’s currently left of the original Negro Wall Street is fourteen brick buildings at Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street, which were reconstructed after the massacre. But those buildings aren’t the only reminders to mark the area where the neighborhood once stood. Dozens of street plaques commemorating the people and businesses of the Greenwood District, the first of which was installed in the early 1990s, line Greenwood Avenue, due to the efforts of Black Tulsa native Michael Reed.

  “We developed our own community and that’s something I’m really proud of and I want the world to know it,” he told Tulsa’s News on 6 in 2020. “It was a shame to lose the recognition of the pioneers, the historic value and contribution of the citizens that were here in the early 1900s.”

  After working with local leaders in the 1990s to lay the first plaques, installation continued in the mid-2000s, with the assistance of Reuben Gant, who was then serving as president of the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce. “It was a way to pay homage to the story of Greenwood,” Gant said. “It created a sense of identity and I notice people walking through the district with their heads down and what they [are] doing is reading the plaques.”

  Today, more than 170 plaques detail the businesses that stood there before the massacre—their names, their street addresses, and whether they reopened. In 2019, people began reporting they were damaged, missing, or in such poor shape that the text could no longer be read. Construction crews working in the area maintained they would reinstall any plaques that were dug up while working, and Reed said there are plans to install more in the future.

  By the 2010s, Greenwood had become a racially mixed neighborhood with a growing business district. It contains a minor league baseball stadium for hometown team the Tulsa Drillers, an arts district, a luxury apartment complex, a shopping center, and more. But not everyone is happy about these changes: In 2018, the Washington Post reported that some of the African American residents of Greenwood, who make up two-thirds of the neighborhood, had mixed feelings about increasing development for white-owned businesses in a neighborhood where non-Black people may not even know the history.

  However, some of the new construction has been regarded as a positive addition to the community. In 1995, the city spent $3 million on the Greenwood Cultural Center, a nonprofit organization at 322 North Greenwood Avenue that houses an event venue, a photo gallery, and space to host youth and community programs and classes. The complex also runs the Mabel B. Little Heritage House, which serves as a museum that honors Little, a survivor, as well as victims of the massacre. In 2019, it was announced the Greenwood Cultural Center will undergo a $9 million expansion, funded by private donors, which will reconfigure the current structure and add administrative offices, a museum, and a gift shop.

  The John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation was founded in 2007 and helped oversee construction of the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park, which opened in October 2010 on North Elgin Avenue. John Hope Franklin, the son of prominent Black lawyer and massacre survivor B. C. Franklin, was a highly respected educator, historian, and civil rights advocate; he died in 2009 but witnessed the groundbreaking of his eponymous park. It now includes an area called Hope Plaza, which displays three bronze sculptures based on people in photographs of the massacre, as well as the twenty-five-foot-tall Tower of Reconciliation, which depicts the history of Black Americans in Oklahoma, with a focus on the massacre. The park also hosts tours that include information on the massacre, the Trail of Tears, the migration of Black Americans, the Greenwood District, and Black Wall Street.

  Despite the efforts made by these citizens and institutions to bring attention to Tulsa’s history, as well as unity to a community so brutally fractured, many Black Tulsans don’t feel the massacre has been given proper resolution. In 1997, an eleven-member state commission was formed to investigate the causes and consequences of the massacre and to give suggestions on how the city should address it moving forward. The Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 released a 178-page report in February 2001 that strongly recommended a series of reparations initiatives, including direct payment of reparations to survivors and descendants of the massacre, the creation of a scholarship fund for students affected by the massacre, the establishment of an economic development enterprise zone in the historic Greenwood District, and more.

  Though Reconciliation Park was a result of the commission’s study, the city has not implemented most of the commission’s other recommendations. In 2003, a group of survivors and descendants attempted to sue the city, as well as the state of Oklahoma, for damages suffered from the massacre. The federal district court dismissed the case, claiming the victims had waited too long to file the lawsuit—in spite of the fact that public officials worked to cover up the case for decades, and information definitively stating police officers and other officials were directly involved in the massacre wasn’t available until the commission delivered its report in 2001.

  Nevertheless, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed: “In fact, plaintiffs neither allege nor even imply that they were prohibited from accessing the courts in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.” The court believed the survivors and descendants should have done so after the civil rights laws passed in the 1960s, or after Scott Ellsworth’s extensively researched book Death in a Promised Land was published in 1982. The group attempted to appeal the case once again two years later, in 2005, but the US Supreme Court declined to hear it, without comment. Black Tulsans have also unsuccessfully worked to get the district listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Designating Black Wall Street as a national historic site would protect the commercial district from unwanted construction and allow Black Tulsans to make decisions on its legacy. Though two churches from the original district have been designated—Mount Zion Baptist and Vernon A.M.E.—the Oklahoma Historical Society and preservation officials believe it would be a challenge to get it listed, as almost all the buildings “of historic significance” that remained, including many that were rebuilt in the years following the massacre, were demolished by urban renewal efforts in the 1950s.

  The Black Wall Street Massacre Memorial, located in Tulsa’s Greenwood District, which honors the hundreds of Black Tulsans killed in 1921

  While assessing how to best distribute reparations, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission brought to light a significant matter that has plagued survivors for decades: it recommended the creation of a memorial “for the reburial of any human remains found in the search for unmarked graves of riot victims.”

  In 1998, spurred by renewed attention to eyewitness survivor accounts that the bodies of Black victims had been dumped into mass graves around the city, investigators began probing for the remains in a number of likely areas. The digs found conditions “that merited further investigation.” Then, in 1999, a white man named Clyde Eddy came forward with additional information. Ten years old at the time of the massacre, Eddy stated he saw white men digging a trench in a section of Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery in 1921. He also claimed to have seen wooden crates there, holding Black bodies. A follow-up of Ed
dy’s claims led by world-renowned forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow revealed an “anomaly” that showed “all the characteristics of a dug pit or trench with vertical walls and an undefined object within the approximate center of the feature,” per the commission report. The commission went on to say, “It can be argued that the geophysical study, combined with the account of Mr. Eddy, are compelling arguments for this feature being considered a mass grave.” However, despite overwhelming evidence to support further investigation, the city declined to excavate this area of Oaklawn Cemetery. Susan Savage, Tulsa’s mayor at the time, claimed she didn’t want to disturb the marked graves at the site.

  However, in 2018, Tulsa mayor G. T. Bynum committed to launching another investigation. He told the Washington Post: “We owe it to the community to know if there are mass graves in our city. We owe it to the victims and their family members. We will do everything we can to find out what happened in 1921.” And in July 2020, Tulsa finally began to dig for mass graves from the Tulsa Race Massacre at Oaklawn. Under observance from descendants of massacre survivors, archaeologists and forensic anthropologists began carefully digging, using machinery and techniques that would minimize damage to any remains they might find. The land was also excavated by hand. Unfortunately, the test excavations, though initially promising, did not yield anticipated results.

  In October 2020, however, a forensics team “unearthed eleven coffins” while searching in another area of the cemetery, according to the New York Times. As the paper reported, “The mass grave was discovered in an area of the city’s Oaklawn Cemetery where records and research suggested that as many as 18 victims would be found. Painstaking work will be required to identify whether the remains are from victims of the massacre.”