Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten

It’s fitting that this year’s Memorial Day observance falls on the 100^th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. As mentioned in the PBS documentary “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten,” over 400,000 Black men served in World War I, several of whom returned to, or settled in, Tulsa after the war. All of them returned to a country that did not love them back. On May 31, 1921, that sentiment was expressed by a 48-hour siege on the area Booker T. Washington called “Black Wall Street,” an area of Black-owned businesses and real estate in the Greenwood district. Hundreds of Black people were killed by the racist White mob, and the entire area was burned to the ground. Assault came not just from the ground, but from the air via planes bombing the district. No one was charged—in fact, the mayor of Tulsa blamed the dead for basically being uppity and bringing about their own demise.

If this sounds familiar, but you didn’t learn it in school, there’s a good chance you watched HBO’s “Watchmen” series. It’s beyond pathetic that one of the worst massacres of Americans on American soil had to be taught by a television show about superheroes rather than by teachers. I certainly didn’t learn about it in my Blackety-Black grammar school nor in any history classes I had throughout my education. As Washington Post reporter DeNeen L. Brown points out, the crime was so heinous that Black people who survived it did not wish to speak about it because it was too heartbreaking to revisit, not to mention potentially dangerous to discuss in polite company. White residents and politicians in 1921 Oklahoma immediately started spinning the brutality as a righteous act, rewriting history in ways that sound disturbingly familiar to what’s going on right now in America.

Brown, a native of Tulsa, wrote the 2018 article that kickstarted the city’s reexamination of this crime. She is the primary reporter in this documentary, which also includes forensic archaeologists, preachers, historians, and current residents among its gallery of talking heads. Brown speaks about her grandmother, whom she occasionally asked for details about growing up in the South. The answer was always a polite dismissal, a refusal to journey back to whatever trauma she endured. Also, and the documentary brings this up several times, talking about events like this could have gotten you killed. This limited the passing of information, as Black history is quite often an oral tradition more than a scholastic one.

One of many related documentaries on the airwaves this week, “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten” focuses on the attempts to find where the victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre were buried. There’s some discussion about how forensic scientists and archaeologists scan underneath the ground for anomalies that may lead them to mass grave sites. This is an activity performed all over the world, and the hope is that any discoveries may reunite descendants with their murdered family members while allowing the fallen to be properly interred and mourned. Oaklawn Cemetery, the oldest one in Tulsa, serves as the location for several attempts. In Oaklawn, only two of the tombstones mark the graves of Black people, but there are entire areas of land where nothing was documented. Brown is there for each excavation.