Commemorating the Tulsa Massacre: A Search for Identity and Historical Complexity

04 June 2020 – Alaina Roberts

Aftermath, hunting through the rubble. Photo credit: Ella Mahler Collection, Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society

When HBO’s Watchmen aired on October 20th last year, it introduced millions of Americans to the explosive episode of racial terror that gripped the black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma from May 30th to June 1st, 1921. The TV show dramatizes how white Americans used guns and even makeshift bombs to destroy millions of dollars in property and murdered an estimated 100 to 300 African Americans over the course of three days (the “aftermath” of which is pictured here). Given my personal connection to this region— and as a historian—I was pleased that this historical milestone, however tragic, was getting the attention it warranted, including in mainstream press. But I was all too aware that, despite this surge of renewed interest, public audiences might not have an opportunity to learn about the broader historical context behind this violence. Many people might never know about the Native American and black people who immigrated to and shaped this place almost 100 years before 1921. This history has been the topic of my research for more than ten years, and it began as a search for my identity.

Like many African Americans, I grew up hearing stories about my family’s alleged Native American ancestry, but I was not presented with any verifiable sources. Furthermore, I grew up in the Northern California Bay Area, while the members of my family who could have shared their knowledge lived in Oklahoma. The distance might as well have been infinite for a young girl whose historical interests at the time primarily revolved around the RMS Titanic and Henry VIII.

As an undergraduate student, I had an identity crisis—a cliché to be sure, but nonetheless real. Far away from home, at a large university, I sought community in the Black Student Union, at the student newspaper, and at a variety of organizations and clubs. None of them felt right. So I decided to look inward, abandoning my other historical interests and finally focusing on the family history that had been right in front of me all along. I purchased an Ancestry.com membership and explored genealogy websites, piecing together the nuggets of information I’d acquired about my family over the years. One day: eureka! I discovered that my family was well known online on a certain message board—one that housed the conversations of descendants of black and mixed-race people owned by Native Americans.

But I was confused. The Native American genealogy my family possessed had never been said to be connected to enslavement. And yet, here it was in black and white: a history I’d never heard of. I quickly learned that due to the United States’ eighteenth-century Indian policy, five tribes (the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations) had adopted African chattel slavery in the same model as white Europeans and Americans. Some members of these tribes became stunningly wealthy through the plantation-style agricultural fruits of black labor. My personal connection to this history, paired with the fact that there was still much work to be done to uncover the specific experiences of the enslaved people who lived within Native American nations, led me to study the intersection of black and Native history in the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations.

How does this history connect to the 1921 Tulsa Massacre?

After the Civil War, the U.S. government forced all five of the slaveholding Indian nations to free their slaves and give them forty acres of land. On their acres, in what is now Ardmore—a small South Central Oklahoma town about a three hour drive from Tulsa—my family raised cows and chickens, planted fruit trees, and operated a general store. The land and freedoms enjoyed by people like my family and other former slaves of Indians served as a beacon of hope for many southern African Americans searching for a place free from violence and open to black settlement. At the same time, oil and natural gas exploration began in earnest in the region, minting white, black, and Native American millionaires and serving as an additional motivator (along with the 1862 Homestead Act) for African American migration.

Per the 1894 and 1910 U.S. Census, the black population of Indian Territory (which became the state of Oklahoma in 1907) increased from 19,000 to over 80,000 between 1890 and 1907. These black immigrants became settlers and entrepreneurs, building businesses, schools, churches, and communities. At its height, Tulsa’s Black Wall Street was home to rooming houses, movie theaters, grocery stores, auto repair shops, and dentists’ offices, among other businesses. The region became known as one of the wealthiest black locales in the country—hence the term, “Black Wall Street.” The city’s Black Wall Street became famous for the wealth of its entrepreneurial African American citizens, and the land these businesses and homes were built on was previously occupied by members of the Creek Nation and their black slaves.

Unfortunately, as was often the case after emancipation, black prosperity drew the ire of nearby whites, who used a minor incident as pretext for the destruction of black economic and social success. On May 30, 1921, an African American teenager had an interaction of some kind with a white, 17-year-old elevator operator, leading the operator to scream. It is doubtful that the elevator operator, Sarah Page, was sexually assaulted, but this was the story that quickly spread across Tulsa. Whites reacted, rousing friends and family members to violence under the cover of avenging white femininity. The violence did not end until the morning of June 1st.

Though businesses on Black Wall Street rebuilt and new ones appeared, the loss of generational wealth was never regained. Tulsa schools did not teach about this event that shaped the socioeconomic background of the city. The history was predominantly kept alive through oral remembrances and the occasional academic monograph or article. Until Watchmen. The HBO program revealed the white supremacist motivations behind the attack on Black Wall Street and alerted many people to the fact that the West has an important black history. But without the additional context of Tulsa’s Black-Native history, the viewer is left without the knowledge of why these African Americans came to Oklahoma and how the unique circumstances of the region allowed them to prosper.

Next year, May 30th-June 1, 2021, will mark the 100^th anniversary of the massacre. I ask that as historians and educators commemorate this event, we include the history of Native and Black-Native people that laid the groundwork for the economic successes of Black Wall Street. Digital archives offer primary sources that public historians might use to bring this deeper history of Tulsa and Oklahoma to life. For example, oral histories recorded in the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration, together referred to as the Indian Pioneer Papers, offer a rich look at what Indian Territory was like before mass American migration, painting a picture of a lush region, rich in natural resources. Additionally, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black newspapers like the Washington Bee (available on the Library of Congress website, Chronicling America) provide a window into Southern African Americans’ migration patterns and hopes for the prosperity they would attain in Indian Territory. These are primary sources I plan to have my students read and analyze this fall as I teach my first class on black history in the West. Through these archival documents, students and the public alike can visualize the diverse, gradual waves of movement into the region and even trace specific settlers as they begin their new lives in towns like Tulsa.

Creek people and their black slaves built the town that became Tulsa. After the Civil War, as white supremacists in the United States stole the rights African Americans had waited so long to see realized, within the Creek Nation, Creek freedpeople had a different experience: they owned land and could vote, serve on juries, and participate in the political and social life of their nation. This radical contrast in the opportunities available in the West drew African Americans to the area and other places in Indian Territory/Oklahoma.

Just as my research on Black-Native history helped me better understand myself and my career trajectory, the broader history behind the Tulsa Massacre allows us to better understand that Tulsa was a place shaped by its history of settlement by Native Americans and the people of African descent who lived within their nations. American history has involved many different interactions between black and Native peoples. Acknowledgment of these intersections makes the process of telling and illustrating history more complex but also more accurate and inclusive.

~ Alaina E. Roberts is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, which explores the history covered in this essay, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in April 2021. She tweets @allthewhile1.