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A Skillful Narrative of Excavating the Truth About the Tulsa Race Massacre
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The Greenwood district of Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, after white mobs shot
and pillaged their way through the vibrant and prosperous Black enclave.
The Greenwood district of Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, after white mobs shot
and pillaged their way through the vibrant and prosperous Black
enclave.Credit...Library of Congress
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ByJennifer Szalai <https://www.nytimes.com/by/jennifer-szalai>
* NYT, May 26, 2021
Trying to recover a forgotten history is one thing; rescuing a history
that has been actively suppressed is another.
The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice
By Scott Ellsworth
321 pages. Dutton. $28.
On May 31 and June 1, 1921, white mobs descended onthe Greenwood
district
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/24/us/tulsa-race-massacre.html>in
Tulsa, Okla., shooting and pillaging their way through a vibrant and
prosperous Black enclave, reducing it to rubble. Low-flying airplanes
dropped burning turpentine balls, leaving an entire block in what one
eyewitness described as “a mass of flame.” An all-white local contingent
of the National Guard turned a machine gun on the Mount Zion Baptist
Church, systematically raking the walls with heavy fire until the
stalwart building gave way in a cascade of shattered glass and tumbling
bricks.
“At taxpayer expense, a House of God has been demolished,” Scott
Ellsworth writes in “The Ground Breaking,” a new book that begins by
recreating the bloody events of 100 years ago in a propulsive present
tense. Ellsworth then goes on to trace the story of what has happened
since, from silence and cover-up to sustained attempts to learn the full
history. Last year, an excavation foundmass graves
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/us/tulsa-massacre-coffins-grave.html>that
likely belong to some of those who were killed, and just last week,the
massacre’s three known survivors
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/us/tulsa-massacre-survivors.html?referrer=masthead>—
the youngest is 100 years old — testified before a House Judiciary
committee that is considering reparations.
Image
Credit....
Awareness of the massacre has even made its way into pop culture, with a
pointed allusion in Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” (“Take me back to
Tulsa to the scene of the crime”) and a central plot point in the HBO
series “Watchmen.”
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Ellsworth himself is a key figure in this story. His 1982 book, “Death
in a Promised Land,” was one of the first full histories of the
massacre, and in 1997 he served as a consulting historian to the
state-sponsoredOklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
<https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/19/magazine/unearthing-a-riot.html>. A
native Tulsan himself, Ellsworth grew up in the white part of town; the
only Black people in his world were the men who hauled the trash on
Fridays. As a child in the ’60s, he had heard nothing but vague whispers
about “the riot” until he and his friends were tooling around the city’s
new library one summer and decided to see what they could find with the
microfilm reader.
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There, they read old newspaper stories about injuries and deaths and a
“race war.” Ellsworth, who was 12 at the time, remembers his feelings of
bewilderment alongside an awareness that he had uncovered something that
adults were trying to keep hidden. “Something/had/happened,” he writes.
“The riot was real.”
“The Ground Breaking” narrates a lifetime of discovery — from that
summer in the library through Ellsworth’s years as a historian, talking
to survivors and their descendants, trying to piece together a past that
few wanted to remember. The triggering incident was the
allegation,almost certainly false
<https://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf>, that a young
African American man had sexually assaulted a white teenage girl; the
fighting started after a group of Black World War I veterans arrived at
the courthouse to protect the accused from a gathering lynch mob.
Image
The historian Scott Ellsworth, whose new book, “The Ground
Breaking,” is about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.
The historian Scott Ellsworth, whose new book, “The Ground Breaking,” is
about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.Credit...Kelly Kurt Brown
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Among white Tulsans, Ellsworth encountered a mix of shame and defiance.
Photographs and official records had disappeared. Someone had even cut
out relevant parts of The Tulsa Tribune before the newspaper was
committed to microfilm. Black Tulsans, too, had their own reasons not to
revisit what happened. What they had lived through was horrific —
Ellsworth himself has likened it to an American Kristallnacht. Many of
those who had survived didn’t want to burden their children with such
trauma.
He did find some Black survivors who wanted to talk — but not to him, at
least not at first. In the mid-1970s, Ellsworth introduced himself to
W.D. Williams, who was a 16-year-old high school student in 1921.
Williams had been waiting for decades to tell his life story, but
Ellsworth knew that he “sure as hell” hadn’t been waiting to tell it to
someone like him: a young Reed College student who hadn’t written a book
or even an article yet, and “had grown up on the same side of town that,
54 years earlier, the people who had tried to murder him, his mother and
his father had come from.”
“The Ground Breaking” is filled with moments like these — candid and
self-aware, undergirded by Ellsworth’s earnest efforts to get at this
history, and to get it right. Where the history of the massacre wasn’t
obscured, he found it distorted, deformed by conspiracy theories or
attempts to both-sides it. Part of what makes this book so riveting is
Ellsworth’s skillful narration, his impeccable sense for when to reveal
a piece of information and when to hold something back. During his
research he seized on any numbers that were available. He found one
particularly rich source in medical statistics compiled by Maurice
Willows, who arrived in Tulsa in 1921 to lead the first coordinated
response by the American Red Cross to a man-made disaster.
In his report, Willows listed the number of hospital admissions and the
number of people requiring urgent care. But he didn’t include the number
of dead, and he explained why: “Figures are omitted for the reason that
NO ONE KNOWS.” A century later, Ellsworth says, “that is still the case.”
“The Ground Breaking” makes for sobering reading; but it also sheds
light, and some of it is hopeful. Ellsworth makes clear that Oklahoma is
decidedly not a model of racial reconciliation — it was the only state
where not a single county voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 and 2012
presidential elections, and where all of those counties voted twice for
Donald Trump. Yet with last year’s exhumation of those graves, it’s also
where Tulsa’s Republican mayor has committed to doing something that
Ellsworth calls unprecedented: deliberately setting out to locate the
remains of those murdered by racist violence. The history of homegrown
bigotry and selective amnesia might be very old, but this, Ellsworth
writes, “was something new.”
/Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter:@jenszalai
<https://twitter.com/jenszalai>./
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