KGOU Readers Club; Tulsa Race Massacre Episode 4 Part 2

And back with Dr. Carlos Cahill here on KGOU, the KGOU Readers Club, as we continue our look into the Tulsa race massacre, the 100 year anniversary coming up. Started there on Memorial Day and went through, I guess about early afternoon, the following day until the violence itself ended, and of course much more to talk about after the actual incident itself was over. Wanted to ask you though, you mentioned just a few, just a moment ago about the lynching culture at the time and why there are so many photographs because there are, and many of them are right here in your book, what, what was that where people trying to make postcards that they want to commemorate these events, somehow it's so hard to wrap your head around in 2021. But you know, I mean, lynching culture really revolved around sort of the white supremacist

culture of America at the time and in sort of American culture at the time, white supremacist culture, you know, black people were decidedly inferior in all ways to white Americans and all other people. And this culture of, you know, understanding black people as inferior, this culture of benign black people, civil and political rights, a culture in which black people become targets of racial violence, white racial violence, terrorist violence. There is a culture in which, you know, not only, you know, taking the lives of black people as a means of kind of control, racial social control is something that was practiced, but

also as a part of that, the goal was to kind of humiliate black people through the photography of the, of the violence in which they suffered. And to use photographs of that violence to communicate even deep in for people and understanding that black people were decidedly, you know, inferior and unequal to whites. So, lynching photographs were created by whites for whites, but one of the hope for impacts is that the photograph when witnessed by black people would terrorize, would deepen the terrorism that the violence was meant to create. And so, lynching photographs play a really important role in ensuring that that terror actually is disseminated to whites as well as to black people who did not take part in

or did not witness what occurred. And so, there's a way in which these photographs helped to transmit this culture, this lynching culture that was rooted in white supremacy to otherwise and especially to black Americans. And so, for me to use those photographs that were created for those reasons, what's the big decision because what I wanted to do most, assuredly, was to honor victims of virus and their descendants. And I wanted to tell their story as compelling as possible. And I settled upon a theory that if I could gather up some of the most compelling photographs of the massacre, again, told from the vantage point of white spectators and participants, but at the same time, have alongside of those photographs, you know, accounts, survivor

accounts of what had happened, it would be possible for me to perhaps disrupt that narrative that was supportive of what occurred. And in fact, not just disrupt it, but replace that narrative with the narrative of victim survivors and descendants. And so, my whole goal in pairing those two together, the survivor testimony and the images, also try to tell a whole new story, one that the original, you know, so the creators of the photographs never meant to. And so, to the extent that the book succeeds in sort of doing that, you know, it's a successful book, but my main aim was to try to tell the story from the vantage point, the victim survivors and descendants. Well, I think you did. I mean, if the photos, if some of these photos were taken for the purpose of, you know, instilling terror in black people, certainly there, that has changed over the course of

the century, because now they serve as a, as a stark reminder of, of the history of the event and uncomfortable, not something anyone would be, would be proud of, you know, and, but that's not the, those aren't the only photos in the book. I want to make that, you know, really clear, because we start out even before the massacre. And we talked a little bit a few weeks ago about the history of Greenwood, and I wanted to get your perspective on that, but because by the time of the race massacre, this was such a thriving community, over 10,000 people in Greenwood, how did that come to be? Why did that end up being such a center? Why, how did it become the black Wall Street? It wasn't the case in other cities in the country. I mean, the story of Greenwood is connected to the story and the rise of Tulsa. You know, Tulsa, we could see it, or we could understand it is kind of a sleepy, back

water. And I'm, I don't mean that in a, in a negative way, I just mean that, you know, at the turn of the century, Tulsa's population would exponentially grow, you know, from roughly 1,000 residents to nearly over 100,000 by 19, 20, 19, 21, the same for the Greenwood district. It goes from, you know, lightly populated to 10,000 residents, you know, by 1920. And so the reason for Tulsa's explosive growth in the reason for Greenwood's explosive growth revolves around the discovery of oil in the area, specifically, there were several oil discoveries, but most significantly the discovery of the Glenpool in 1905, you, you know, Tulsa becoming a boom time, an oil boom time, and speculation, oil speculation,

drove migration, drove investment, and also drove interest amongst immigrants such as Black Americans and others. And so in 19, 1905 is very important because in 1906, you had OW Girlie who is seen as understood as the founding visionary for the Greenwood district. He came to Tulsa to the Greenwood area just one year after the discovery of the Glenpool. And so from 1906 into 1921, you had this just impressive growth of a community, you know, the Greenwood district in 1900 had virtually no businesses, no institutions, by 1921, nearly 200 businesses. There are nearly 11,000 Black people who call Greenwood home.

There are at least, I believe, based on, based on sort of what we know about the wealth that Black Americans in Tulsa had accrued by 1921, there were at least four Black millionaires in today's dollars in Greenwood. There were several other, you know, at least a half a dozen near, you know, millionaires in today's dollars in Greenwood. And that's related to the rapid growth in both in population, as well as in investment in Tulsa. And so because of the possibility of land ownership in Greenwood, but also in Oklahoma, this sparks real robust interest, as well as migration, Black migration into Oklahoma. And so, you know, this occurs really, really rapidly.

And so imagine O.W. Girly in 1906, by 1913, you have the likes of Booker T. Washington, who was perhaps the most important Black leader of the time, certainly the most influential. In 1913, talking about, thinking about Greenwood as a kind of symbol, and, you know, he framed Greenwood as a Negro Wall Street of America. And, you know, to be clear, you know, Greenwood was not a home, was not home to a stock exchange, it was not a capital of finance, there were no banks and insurance companies that called own Greenwood, but what Greenwood was was this vibrant business community, this place, this space where Black entrepreneurship, you know, was taking off in incredible ways, in ways that in other parts of Oklahoma, even other parts of the South, had not occurred

as quickly and as thoroughly, and I would say as impressively as the Greenwood district. And so the Greenwood district is much more than a neighborhood or a district, it really was, and I think still is a symbol of Black entrepreneurship, but even more broadly of Black excellence, because not only was this one of the most prosperous communities, Black communities in the country, it was also one of the most educated Black communities in the state of Oklahoma, I would also argue in the Jim Crow South, it was, you know, it was a community that in so many ways represent it, what was possible in America for Black people who strived to succeed in spite of the violence and the segregation and just

the white hostility to Black advancement. And so for all those reasons, Booker T. Washington, as well as others, referred to it, talked about Greenwood, you know, as the Negro, quote unquote, the Negro Wall Street of America. Yeah, and we get some images in the first part of your book of Greenwood before the massacre took place, not as many as certainly of the massacre and then of the aftermath of it, of course, and we'll get to that here in just a second, but I want to remind everybody once again, if you're on Twitter, Facebook, it's at KGOU News, or a phone number 405-325-KGOU. If you have any questions for Dr. Carlos Hill, author of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre of Photographic History. Now we come to the massacre itself, and then we see you've curated so many photos here

and like we talked about a lot of them of white people sort of posing with their weapons and things like that. How difficult, in putting this together, take me through the process a little bit of trying to track down all of these photos and put them together in sort of a logical chronology. What was that effort like? You know, it was pretty intense. There are lots of photographs of what occurred, the ones that appear in the book were a part of archival collections, whether it's from the University of Tulsa, Tulsa Historical Society, Oklahoma Historical Society, Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and then other research libraries across Oklahoma. My first task was to try to track down all of the archive photographs and just really try to understand what the photographs were trying to tell me, and of course I've talked

about that these photographs were created for whites and by whites to tell the story of a negro insurrection in a quote unquote, you know, the successful sort of suppression of insurrection. So those, the photographs were meant to tell that story and so part of what my research became about is could those photographs tell a different story if they could, how would I go about doing it, and so my idea to try to tell a different story was to really pair those photographs that, you know, that appeared in the book, and the ones that appeared in the book were the photographs that helped me to make a visual case for why this, why does this event should be considered a massacre versus a race, right? All of the photographs were selected with that in mind because it was really important

for me to try to make the most compelling case so that people understood this history differently than they typically have, and when this book is sort of, when we're gestating over it, it's still common for people to use race, right, and massacre interchangeably. It's only really become the massacre since 2019, 2020, but even in 2018, there were still, you know, news reports that refer to it as a riot or refer to it as a massacre. It's only been in the last year and a, you know, I would say year to half, 18 months that it's solidly referred to and exclusively referred to as a massacre, but when I was writing at the forefront of my mind was making this case as compelling as possible because I mean, I was anticipating a much larger debate about whether it should be considered a

race or a massacre, but in sort of framing the book and selecting images that could tell that story as a massacre most compellingly, I was also really concerned with telling a story of victims of virus and descendants and, you know, the photographs do not attempt to do that in any way by themselves. And so I needed to pair alongside those images that I selected oral history accounts that would speak directly to what people saw in the images. And so, you know, the, some of the most striking images to me are the images of black men who are being, you know, forcibly detained by members of the mob and national guard as well as police authorities.

And there's an inscription on one of the photos in which black men are being, you know, marched through downtown and one of the inscriptions on the photographs and the photograph that I'm referring to is a was was was transformed into a postcard, but there's just one little brief phrase that says captured me grows. And that tells you a lot about the kind of what was on the hearts and minds of whites who participated, who were spectators, they saw these individuals as insurrectionists who had been captured. They didn't see them as fellow Tulsons. They didn't see them as individuals who were defending their community. They saw them as insurrectionists that needed to be detained that, you know, that that were in rebellion.

And so there's a there's one that that talks about the, you know, black survivors as captured. And so for me, the photographs went when I began to carefully study the the inscriptions. It became very clear to me that these photographs were meant to tell a story of white conquest. And so it became if I was going to use these photographs, it became really important for me not to just have a book of photographs and captions, but to weave through those photographs and have alongside those photographs the voices of survivors because my belief was that, you know, survivor testimonies could actually bring to life and tell a new story of the, and certainly one that was different from the original goals of creating them. Yes, indeed. Dr. Carlos Cahill with us here on KGOU is the KGOU Readers Club. We're back in just a moment.

More about 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, a photographic history.