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Hey everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's Select, I've chosen our January 2020 episode on the Tulsa Massacre.
It's such a vile event that it left to stain that spread out of Tulsa and even out of Oklahoma to become a blemish on the history of the entire US.
And it's a lesson in how important it is to talk about the past, even the worst of the past to move forward to heal.
It's also a lesson on how you just can't bury the past, no matter how hard you try.
I hope you get a lot out of this episode.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryan over there.
There's Jerry over here.
We have all come together in the year 2020 to wear our silver jumpsuits.
As always, I know right.
And talk about a buried overlooked blemish and the history of the United States.
Are we not going to recount anything about this past year?
No. Talk about this being the first recording of the new year.
Nope. All right. We've had a break here.
I'm going to push forward.
We've been off for a couple of weeks, which was pretty glorious to not have to just overtax my brain, but it was also nice to get back in here into the stank of this room.
This room, I don't think this room stinks.
Well, right now, it smells like your caramel vanilla frappe l'ape.
This is just black coffee.
This is supposed to be flavor black coffee.
It really, I mean, it smells great.
I think a green mountain or something, caramel vanilla coffee pod.
Man, it is super fragrant.
Yeah. It's nice. In a great way, it smells like an ice cream sundae.
It's pleasant. It is very pleasant.
But it's not doing the job.
Like, I'm still, I'm a little tired, a little groggy.
You know, I had a four shot latte earlier.
Oh, yeah. And so I'm kind of...
Gotcha. Maybe that's what I mean.
I'm zippy. You can go downstairs to...
I know you don't like to pay for coffee, but...
Yeah. Go downstairs to Spiller Park.
Okay. Hugh Atchison's place.
A four shot latte. Yes. Okay.
That has me going. Well, I give it about half hour before it choked crashes, everybody.
Yes, seriously. Anyway, I'm glad to be back.
Well, I'm glad you're back, too.
You know where I've been here the whole time.
This is where you spent Christmas and New Year's.
Yes, both. In this room.
And Thanksgiving. And I guess, Yumi and Momo slept over there in the corner.
They come to visit sometimes.
They say, please, please come on.
Please stop working. I say, I can't.
They slide the food tray through the slot.
You know where I got this idea.
And I know you haven't watched it, but the Watchmen.
I came across mention of that.
I was like, why is everybody talking about the Watchmen with the Tulsa race ride?
Or more appropriately, why is everyone all of a sudden talking about the Tulsa massacre?
Yeah, yeah. Because the Watchmen really put it on the map in a big way.
Yeah, that's great. Utilize it quite well in the storyline.
And I have a recommendation for everyone.
Even though it is a marketing piece, there's a thing in the Atlantic called the massacre of Black Wall Street.
Paid for it by HBO. But it tells the story in comic book form.
In the Atlantic. Oh, right.
Very cool. And I didn't notice it was a marketing piece until afterward.
But I'm like, I'm well. It's still good.
Sure. As long as the content's good.
Yeah, it's cool. And very well done.
So this is like, it's great that the Watchmen have brought attention to this.
Yeah. Because it wasn't until about 2001, maybe the late 90s, really, people started talking about this.
And this event that we're going to talk about happened in 1921.
And almost the week after, basically the week after, everyone said, don't talk about this.
Yeah. Just forget it ever happened.
We're just moving forward.
And we're going to bury the past.
Literally. Yeah. Buried people, the evidence, all this stuff that was buried.
And people just acted like nothing happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma for like 80 years.
And when you hear what we're about to talk about, it's astounding that the community, both Black and White, agreed to just basically pretend this never happened, at least publicly or civically.
Yeah. And it's hard to find some information still on some of the key events and definitely some of the key players.
It is a lot of them died of old age.
Yeah. And just without ever having been interviewed.
Yeah. No follow-ups. I mean, we'll get to it, but a couple of the most key players.
This is kind of all we know.
Right. I looked them up too.
I was like, what do you mean you have no idea?
Even who this guy was, let alone, you know, what became of him?
What do you mean? Like, you just, no one kept track?
Yeah. But that's how complete and total this cover up was.
It was a cover up. Yeah. So let's talk about it.
First, let's talk about Greenwood, which I was not familiar with.
But Greenwood was an affluent, I guess almost suburb adjacent to Tulsa, just north of Tulsa.
And what was odd about the fact that it was affluent is that it was an all black community in, you know, the turn of the last century.
And yet it was one of the most affluent communities in the entire United States.
Yeah. I mean, now it's just part of Tulsa, like a neighborhood.
But back then, just sort of like my neighborhood would have been a suburb of Atlanta.
In the 1920s, even though I'm, you know, five miles from downtown.
Right, exactly. But in 1921, it was, like you said, super affluent.
They had a lot of, I think there were 10,000 black residents there.
It's called the Black Wall Street, like I mentioned.
Yeah. And 600 businesses, there were 15 African-American millionaires living in this district.
Yeah. And there were 15 black millionaires in 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Yeah. And it wasn't, I mean, like the whole area was very well to do.
There was like indoor plumbing.
The public schools there were like top-notch.
Yeah. And in many cases, Greenwood had a lot to boast about that, like the white areas in Tulsa, just over the railroad tracks, literally on the other side of the track, didn't have.
Like this is far better off than some parts of white Tulsa.
Yeah, including one of the top African-American surgeons, if not the top, in the country, endorsed by the Dr.
Mayo himself. The Mayo brothers.
Yeah, this guy was Dr. AC Jackson, and he was one of the people murdered in this massacre.
Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say there was a spoiler bag, I guess we've already kind of mentioned.
There's a massacre coming, right?
Yeah. So just to take a step back even further.
So it's pretty impressive to think of like this is the Jim Crow era United States.
Yes. This is, we're talking about, you know, this massacre took place in 1921.
That's, you know, 50 years after the end of the Civil War.
And in many ways, the Jim Crow era was just as bad as the Annabelleam slavery era.
But so the idea to us today looking back at this time of, well, there's a black community in Oklahoma that was one of the most affluent areas in the country.
It's kind of mind-boggling.
But if you dig even deeper into how it was formed, it almost, you develop like a sense of pride in this, that these people came together under these conditions and not only like survived, but like thrive and create a carved out of place for themselves, where like being black was celebrated and where you could be proud and you took pride in your home, in your children, in your children's education, and the healthcare that they were getting in the bus service, and the quality of the theater that you went to, the confectionery, the soda fountain, like that's where you went to go like proposed marriage.
Right. Like there was this incredibly developed community.
And the one of the ways that it was able to flourish, and was able to kind of grow like this, is because the first thing that Oklahoma did when it became a state, remember it was originally a territory for forced relocation of Native Americans, and their African slaves to this area, when it became a state when white settlers came in and said, no, we want this instead.
We're going to take this territory we gave you away and turn it into a state.
The first piece of legislation they passed was that black people have to stay in their own area.
They can't marry outside their race, they can't frequent white owned businesses, they have to stay over here.
And so the people of Greenwood said, fine with us, we're going to pass a covenant that says you have to be a black person to own land here, or to even rent a place here, don't own a business here.
There's a covenant-restricting community.
And we're going to take a tremendous amount of pride in circulating our currency, our harder money, that we're making by working for these white businesses that we're not allowed to patronize.
We're going to make our own businesses over here, and we're going to support them with our community.
Not only because we can't spend our money elsewhere, but because we have a lot of pride in the businesses that we've built over here.
And so in this way, Greenwood flourished because of and in spite of these Jim Crow era laws that black people had to deal with in Oklahoma at the time.
Yeah, and this was Dave Ruse, helped put this together.
And some of the research he got was from the book The Burning Colin, Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Ride of 1921 by Tim Madigan.
And various stutately points out that this happened in Oklahoma, of course, but this kind of thing was happening all over the country.
Not just in the south or whatever you call Oklahoma, I guess the west.
Midwest? Yeah, but not Midwest.
I don't know. I think he just called it Oklahoma.
It's interesting. Some people there identify with the south, but if you're from Georgia, Oklahoma.
It's not the south. Might as well be Montana.
I think of Oklahoma as like Native America.
Yeah. And that what it says on the license plate.
It says middle of.
