Back in 2023, my partner and I went on a two week road trip 'in search of the American Dream.' Although we spent most of our time searching for it in New Mexico, we also made time to look for it along the way. One of the places we stopped to have a see was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. With the Breonna Taylor protests here in Louisville still fresh in our minds, we had to pay a visit to Greenwood Rising History Center to learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre and the community it affected.
In 1921, the worst single incident of racial violence in the United States occurred in Tulsa, devastating the African-American community of Greenwood, destroying more than 35 square blocks and killing hundreds. In little more than 24 hours, a prosperous community dubbed "the Black Wall Street" by Booker T. Washington was burned to the ground by a white mob, it's inhabitants dead, fled, or rounded up. In the aftermath, the facts and details of what happened were suppressed, buried for decades as the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre picked up the pieces and rebuilt their lives.
Although we already had some awareness of what had happened there, taking in Greenwood Rising was still an eye opening experience, one that stuck with us. One thing that particularly resonated with me was a room that just played audio recordings of survivors describing their experiences. One survivor spoke of the planes that had circled overhead, dropping bombs and incendiaries on Greenwood, which was something that would be repeated just a few months later with my kith and kin at the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia.
We had a schedule to keep and couldn't spend more than half a day in Greenwood, but my mind never fully left. When I spotted The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City's Search for Justice by Tulsa native Scott Ellsworth at the neighborhood book store last year, it had to come home with me. Ever since 2020, it's been hard for me to pick up a book and read, but when I finally got around to picking this one up it was equally difficult to put it down.
In 1982, Scott Ellsworth published Death In A Promised Land, the first comprehensive history of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the book that really helped to bring the events of the spring of 1921 into the public consciousness. The Ground Breaking is a follow up of sorts, one with the benefit of forty years of perspective.
The book starts off by taking you back to those blood soaked days of late May and early June 1921 in Tulsa, walking you through how an attempted lynching turned into something even worse. From there it lays out what came after, the aftermath and the rebuilding, the attempted land grab and the suppression of the story by the white population. Alongside that, Ellsworth gives you a bit of his story, how he got started digging up his hometown's dirty secret and the struggles he and others before him faced in researching and publishing the story. Reading about how he went about researching the story was quite helpful to me for journalism purposes, but it also serves as a kind of 'behind the scenes' to the making of Death In A Promised Land.
The book doesn't stop there though, rather it covers what has happened in the forty years since, the continued struggle for awareness and redress, the search for victims (graves) and the slow destruction of Greenwood once again. Should probably stop there or I might spoil something, but it's definitely a book worth checking out. And if you're ever planning to visit Tulsa you really should read it and pay Greenwood Rising a visit.
We'd wandered Greenwood and gotten a feel for the lay of the land a bit before our visit to Greenwood Rising, but it wasn't until I read the book that I was able to fit all the pieces together and visualize what had happened and where. Didn't realize at the time I took it that the second photo shows Archer Street and beyond it the bridge over the railroad tracks that served as the de facto boundary in segregated Tulsa as well as the scene of much fighting on the first day of the massacre.
And just in case you don't believe me on the book, you don't have to take my word for it.
