Tulsa's 1921 Race Massacre not a secret anymore
TULSA, Okla. (KTUL) — It’s been called a conspiracy of silence, the secret of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Something so dark and destructive seemed to disappear from newspapers, from family conversations, as if it never existed. Historians explain how something so tragic could seemingly be forgotten.
“I think there was some fear in the African American community immediately after these events, like this could happen again. It happened once, why couldn’t it happens again?” Questions Hannibal Johnson, author, and historian.
It was fear handed down for generations.
“I think it was such a bad thing that nobody wanted to talk about it,” Lacy Murrell, who graduated from Booker T. Washington High in 1957 but says never learned about it growing up in school and neither did his classmates.
Even the media, newspapers, seemed to forget the riot happened, even though the newspapers covered it intensely at the start. And the Tulsa Tribune was even criticized and accused of sensationalism.
“There are eyewitnesses who say there was an article May 31st, 1921 entitled ‘To Lynch a Negro Tonight,’ or ‘To Lynch a “N-word” tonight,” said Johnson.
That article seems to have disappeared but there are others that were written immediately after the riot that showed the spirit of racism in Tulsa.
“The Tulsa Tribune published an editorial entitled ‘It must not be again.’ And the first line is, ‘such a district as the old “N” town, must never be allowed in Tulsa again,” said Johnson.
He and others have worked to make sure the massacre is not a secret anymore. Johnson has written books to educate others and serves on the Massacre Centennial Commission. One of their efforts is working with the department of education to improve the classroom curriculum so that Oklahoma children may learn about the massacre in school.
Marc Carlson is head of Special Collections at the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa. He has spent 30 years working and researching the massacre.
“I know that when I started doing my research here back in 1989, I discovered all the magazines in the university’s collection had been razored out,” said Carlson, who had to request those articles on inter-library loans to read them.
Now, he presents the exhibit, The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and the Aftermath, a collection of newspapers and photographs. It is open to the public so that people do not forget what was once covered up.
Right now the community is waiting for results from a search of Oaklawn Cemetery and Newblock Park, for mass graves. Researchers expect their findings to be released in December.
