How Much Money Was Lost Overnight In The Tulsa Race Riot
In 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma'south Greenwood District, known as Black Wall Street, was one of the most prosperous African-American communities in the United States. Only on May 31 of that year, theTulsa Tribune reported that a blackness man, Dick Rowland, attempted to rape a white adult female, Sarah Page. Whites in the surface area refused to wait for the investigative procedure to play out, sparking two days of unprecedented racial violence. 30-5 city blocks went up in flames, 300 people died, and 800 were injured. Defense of white female virtue was the expressed motivation for the commonage racial violence.
Accounts vary on what happened between Page and Rowland in the lift of the Drexel Building. Yet as a issue of the Tulsa Tribune's racially inflammatory study, black and white armed mobs arrived at the courthouse. Scuffles bankrupt out, and shots were fired. Since the blacks were outnumbered, they headed back to Greenwood. But the enraged whites were non far behind, looting and called-for businesses and homes along the way.
Nine chiliad people became homeless, Josie Pickens writes in Ebony. This "modern, majestic, sophisticated, and unapologetically blackness" community boasted of "banks, hotels, cafés, clothiers, motion-picture show theaters, and contemporary homes." Not to mention luxuries, such every bit "indoor plumbing and a remarkable school system that superiorly educated black children." Undoubtedly, less fortunate white neighbors resented their upper-grade lifestyle. As a issue of a jealous desire "to put progressive, high-achieving African-Americans in their place," a wave of domestic white terrorism caused black dispossession.
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The creation of the powerful black community known as Black Wall Street was intentional. "In 1906, O.W. Gurley, a wealthy African-American from Arkansas, moved to Tulsa and purchased over xl acres of land that he made sure was merely sold to other African-Americans," writes Christina Montford in the Atlanta Black Star. Gurley provided an opportunity for those migrating "from the harsh oppression of Mississippi." The average income of black families in the area exceeded "what minimum wage is today." As a upshot of segregation, a "dollar circulated 36 to 100 times" and remained in Greenwood "almost a twelvemonth earlier leaving." Even more than impressive, at that time, the "state of Oklahoma had just two airports," still "six black families owned their own planes."
These African-Americans' economical status could non save them from the racial hostility of their day. Greenwood survivors recount disturbing details about what really happened that night. Eyewitnesses claim "the expanse was bombed with kerosene and/or nitroglycerin," causing the inferno to rage more aggressively. Official accounts state that private planes "were on reconnaissance missions, they were surveying the area to run across what happened."
Despite all of the economical damage, Hannibal Johnson, writer of Black Wall Street: From Anarchism to Renaissance in Tulsa'due south Historic Greenwood Commune, explains that neither the survivors nor their families e'er received the reparations suggested past the Tulsa Race Riot Commission. The commission recommended reparations for "people who lost property" and proposed "the establishment of a scholarship fund—that did happen, for a express time." The committee besides proposed initiatives for the economic revitalization of the Greenwood community. Despite the tragic events, these grand ideas never manifested into a tangible reality.
Underlying Causes of the Massacre
In "The Tulsa Race Anarchism of 1921: Toward an Integrative Theory of Collective Violence," the sociologist Chris K. Messer explores the underlying causes of the massacre. As a event of mass migrations to the area, driven in part past increased job opportunities, Tulsa became the city with the virtually African-Americans in the state. With a boom in the black population and their demands for equality, "perceptions of discrimination and shared experience amidst African-Americans…allowed for piddling time for adaptation amongst whites." Tulsa's rapid alter in racial demographics made the city ripe for a riot motivated by white animosity against black economic progress. Whites of the era equated improvements in "wages and working conditions" every bit communistic threats. In essence, whites were resentful that blacks no longer passively accepted 2d-grade citizenship in their own homeland.
Some other structural gene that played a vital role in the Tulsa race anarchism was segregation. Ironically, black businesses benefited from self-sufficiency, which held both benefits and drawbacks for entrepreneurship. "Through maintenance of the legal separation of race in sociality, business, education, and residential areas, the construction of segregation encouraged initiative, only likewise placed parameters by restricting African-American opportunities," Messer writes. In other words, since information technology was against the law for blacks to shop at white-owned stores, blackness businesses flourished. Nevertheless, even though black businesses profited from how segregation reduced competition for black patrons, segregation also limited blacks' mobility and opportunities to attain exterior their community.
According to Messer, the police force too contributed to the riot. Due to their ineffective leadership, they allowed mobs to gather at the courthouse for hours earlier seeking additional assistance. Furthermore, they actively participated in the riot by deputizing whites without discretion, arming them with guns to multiply the police force overnight. The police disregarded due process, absorbing blacks and interning them in detention camps; meanwhile, no whites were arrested during the anarchism.
Both politicians and the media falsely framed the Tulsa anarchism as an uprising started by lawless blacks. Tulsa newspapers regularly referred to the Greenwood commune as "Niggling Africa" and "north—–town." African-Americans in the district were labeled "bad northward—–s" who drank booze, took dope, and ran around with guns. Perhaps as a consequence of government officials' stereotyping rhetoric and the media'south biased reporting, whites and blacks interpreted the racial violence differently. Generally, white politicians and residents perceived the black community "every bit predisposed to crime and in need of social control," Messer explains. In other words, due to assumptions of black criminality, whites justified deadly violence on Blackness Wall Street, considering blacks needed to be subjugated.
The Tulsa World newspaper inflamed the tensions betwixt blacks and whites by suggesting that the Ku Klux Klan could "restore order in the customs." Since the KKK asserted white superiority with terroristic acts, such as lynchings, the mere suggestion from a mainstream newspaper that the KKK should intervene demonstrates how white supremacy was not just legitimized just likewise promoted with legal impunity. In the early 1900s, there was a ascent in Black Nationalist organizations that refused to cower in the face of KKK violence or submit to societal subordination.
Whites responded to black pride and demands for equality with "social command, including segregation, lynchings, and pogroms," Messer writes. In "Mass Media and Governmental Framing of Riots: The Instance of Tulsa, 1921," Messer and his colleague Patricia A. Bell offer further detail most how the media framed the anarchism, igniting tensions. In essence, blacks' want for socioeconomic progress and assertion of their rights was seen as a grave threat to white hegemony. Portraying all blacks every bit criminals served the black inferiority narrative, maintained Jim Crow segregation, and promoted the vehement enforcement of racist ideology.
For instance, the racial framing of blacks as criminals legitimized whites' congregation "at the courthouse and the subsequent destruction of the Greenwood area." Consequently, information technology's no surprise that blacks perceived the riot started past whites "every bit a massacre of their community." The massacre of Black Wall Street primarily occurred due to whites "generalized perception that African-Americans were 'out of line'" and needed to be put "back in their place."
Despite racial bigotry and Jim Crow segregation, the Greenwood commune offered proof that blackness entrepreneurs were capable of creating vast wealth. Based on critical analysis of the events, Messer asserts "there is evidence that whites perceived African-Americans every bit an economic threat to the city." For those who supported blackness subjugation, witnessing blacks thrive and defy the stereotypes of black inferiority was too much.
Soon after the riot, Walter F. White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) visited Tulsa. According to him, black economical prosperity contributed to the destruction of the Greenwood District. White reported in The Nation how the city prospered under the oil boom. He stated that the boondocks had grown from a population of 18,182 in 1910 to somewhere "betwixt 90,000 to 100,000" residents by 1920. White claimed that the sudden wealth of the townspeople rivaled the "forty-niners" in California. However, when blacks experienced wealth, lower-grade whites resented their success.
Many whites believed they were "members of a divinely ordered superior race." Despite their inflated perceptions of themselves, there were three blacks in Oklahoma "worth a one thousand thousand dollars each." A man named J.Westward. Thompson was worth $500,000. There were "a number of men and women worth $100,000; and many whose possessions" were "valued at $25,000 and $l,000 each. This was peculiarly true of Tulsa, where there were two colored men worth $150,000 each; two worth $100,000; three $50,000; and four who were assessed at $25,000."
White concluded that many of the white pioneers in Oklahoma were former residents of "Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, [and] Texas." Unfortunately, they failed to get out their "anti-Negro prejudices" backside in the Deep South. White had no positive words for Oklahoman whites. He considered them "[fifty]ethargic and unprogressive by nature, it sorely irks them to see Negroes making greater progress than they themselves are achieving." In ane example, a white worker burned and demolished his black boss's "printing constitute with $25,000 worth of printing machinery in it." In the process of leading the destructive mob, this disgruntled white employee was killed at the site.
The destruction of this successful African-American community was no accident. Messer asserts that "[t]he destruction of the community was rationalized every bit a necessary and natural response to put them back in their place." Evidently, private manufacture and the state stood to do good economically from the destruction. Two days after the riot, the mayor wasted no time in establishing the Reconstruction Committee to redesign the Greenwood Commune for industrial purposes. Blacks were offered below market place value for their property. White men who offered "nearly whatever price for their property" perceived survivors equally drastic and destitute.
In essence, African-Americans posed a "geographical problem considering their community was situated in an ideal location for business expansion." The regime and private industry worked in concert to bring down state prices and maintain white say-so in the Tulsa area. Poor whites' resentment of successful, landowning blacks immune elite whites to use them as pawns to obtain more country, wealth, and prosperity. Judging by the legal impunity granted to whites by law enforcement, the country endorsed and, in fact, supported the Tulsa riot for self-serving, capitalistic gains.
Historically, American capitalism has thrived with an elite few maintaining power and wealth. When blacks proceeds a potent foothold in a customs or industry, they accept the ability to outcome meaningful change. Thus, the socioeconomic progress of African-Americans on Blackness Wall Street threatened the power structure of white-dominated American commercialism. When white people destroyed black business concern establishments and homes, the façade of white superiority was maintained.
Past the 1940s, the Greenwood District was rebuilt, merely due to integration during the Civil Rights era, never regained as much prominence. The fate of Black Wall Street illustrates that as long as ability remains in the hands of elite, mainly white families, America's socioeconomic system tin be marshalled to support and advance the tenets of white supremacy. Regardless of the progress made past prominent African-Americans, American capitalism is structured to keep a white segment of gild ahead of the remaining marginalized many.
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Source: https://daily.jstor.org/the-devastation-of-black-wall-street/
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