9) Make a plan to seek racial justice and healing

Sadly enough, what seemed so clear to me is the cause/effect sequencing of the entire, awful story--how this led to that and that led to this and so forth and so forth and so forth, an almost inexorable chain of events. 

Begin here. I have no desire to be unkind to Oklahomans, but what needs to be said is that its white founding fathers were not of New England Puritan stock. Many of its pioneers were the rough-hewn stuff of Western legend. Oklahoma, once called Indian Territory, was home to more than its share of tough hombres.

After the war, scores of ex-slaves left the cotton-picking south following the dreams of the West, just thousands of others up north. In Oklahoma, those emigres were Southerners especially, many of whom had never touted Abraham Lincoln. What's more, they considered his "emancipation" talk astutely unnatural because it was clear to them that Lincoln had never had to live with. . .well you know, the n-word. 

By 1890, the Five Civilized Tribes who'd suffered through the Trail of Tears assessed their plight in Indian Territory and signed on to the provisions of the Dawes Act (1887), which offered land ownership to Native people if they would give up their tribal governance and associations. The effect, in Oklahoma as elsewhere, was to free up land for thousands more white pioneers, many of whom were embittered Southerners not so much leaving Dixie behind as lugging their losses, theirt grievances and their bigotry with them.

Memorial flowers at Gathering Place

Thus, while freed slaves moving into the region expected freedom in Indian Territory--the movers and shakers in city hall were, often as not, ex-Rebs who were not particularly interested the "equality" (whatever that meant!) for, well, the n-word once again.

What's perfectly understandable is that, thus, a city like Tulsa, before the oil strikes, was the very model of segregation in the late 19th century, maybe not as blatant as it was in the Jim Crow South, but as segregated as any devised by apartheid South Africans. There was Tulsa--the white world--and there was Greenwood--the black. It was very simple, and the lines were very clearly drawn.

Segregation or not, those ex-slaves not only survived, they flourished. Right there on the streets of Greenwood, their city, they did well, did better than well, in fact, so much so that some people called the place Black Wall Street.  

Then something happened. 

For a moment in time, the old South-level hate threatened the barriers already set between the races in Tulsa: to white folks, what a black boy did to a white girl was an abomination, worthy of death. Furthermore, the lynching of a white man had occurred recently, an event at which the Sheriff and the police chief had condemned the mob violence but made it clear that the hanging had been a benefit to life in the city. In other words, lynching didn't seem barbaric.

It all seems so perfectly understandable: this happened, then that happened--a series of almost inevitable cause and effect sequences. Thus, when crowds of white men, 2000 strong, were milling around the courthouse where the "Diamond Dick" Rowland, the kid who touched the white girl, was held, dozens of African-Americans in Greenwood, some of them vets who'd only recently returned from the Great War, determined that what seemed inevitable was, this time, not going to happen. The African-Americans went, single-file, to the courthouse and offered their protection to the Sheriff, who just waved them off. 

Tulsa had become a tinderbox. On May 31, at 10:30 at night, a white man attempted to disarm an African-American World War I vet. A shot was fire, and thus it began. 

It was all so clearly a matter of this cause and that effect, that cause and this effect--it was so perfectly understandable. 

And so horribly evil.

For years, no one talked about it. It wasn't in any Chamber of Commerce picture books, of course, but neither was it in any school kid's local history text or class. For years, no one brought up the Tulsa-Greenwood Massacre. Even today, no one knows exactly what to call it.

No one ever got a dime in reparation for the nearly 400 homes and businesses destroyed in what was not a race riot but a massacre. No one ever received a dime for reparations, a word so many white people can't stand to hear.

Tulsa's Gathering Place is 66-acre riverside park dedicated and designed to create activities for a diverse community. During the 100-year commemoration of the 1921 racial conflict, it was the centerpiece of activities. 

But the sign (above)--I was given one--was meant to register defiance because a park is not reparations.

The ninth bit of advice Tish Warren listed in that op-ed about New Years Resolutions is something I don't need a resolution to fulfill: "Make a plan to seek racial justice and healing." Most of what you just read appeared here in six months ago. 

I'm not young, not looking for new fields to conquer. I'm no longer an idealist; there are too many miles on the register of my experience. 

But I can crow from my little corner of the world, and I plan to. I will. 

That's a resolution I don't have to make.