Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer | Full Documentary

[Music] So [Music] [Music] [Music] I feel a very strong spiritual connection to what's happening in Tulsa. You know, I had to be there when they dug into the ground for the first time to search for Black people who were killed in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Today we remember our community members who lost their loved ones, their friends, their neighbors who simply wanted a piece of the American dream but truly received a nightmare.

It's a significant moment in the history of Tulsa and a significant moment in the history of the United States. The United States has been the landscape for dozens of massacres that many people don't know about. We, in many of our cities, were walking over massacre sites. People don't even know that a massacre occurred there nearly a hundred years ago. There were race riots and massacres across the country, but a hundred years later, there's still racism and hatred, and people are still willing to act on that.

We're going to start with these deadly police shootings sparking outrage and loved ones of Breonna Taylor grieving and outraged. We see the country going through this anti-racism movement where Black and white people took to the streets shouting the slogan "Black Lives Matter" and demanding to be heard. But we are the descendants of a people that endured these atrocities. Out of this past of enslavement, Jim Crow, the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, our people are still standing and they're still fighting. Our people have not been defeated.

This is an article I wrote about the day that Martin Luther King Jr. met Malcolm X. They met in 1964; they met only once in their life at the U.S. Capitol in 1964, and this is a famous photo of that meeting. So here's a story I wrote of a Lilia Bundles, who is the great granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker, one of the country's first Black women millionaires. I love telling people's stories. I love that as reporters, we can stop and ask people questions.

There was a sign in the lobby of the Washington Post that said, "Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," and I walked by that sign for more than 30 years. So I really believe that my mission as a Black woman is to tell the stories of people who might not be presented in the newspaper, and as a Black reporter, I think it's so important that our stories be told.

Telling the stories of the history of this country that has tried to deny Black people citizenship [Music] and even deny their very existence as humans [Music]. I've been doing this reporting a long time, writing about Black history [Music], and then I'm astounded with the progress that Black people made just years out of enslavement during the Reconstruction period that comes after the end of the Civil War—how they were able to establish Black towns and universities, build wealth, become doctors and lawyers and journalists, and build the Black press.

Negro in the 40 years since he was free from slavery has made remarkable progress. He is becoming a more and more valuable member of the community in which he lives. When I look at the footage of the Black families that were so prosperous in towns like Tulsa before the massacre, there's a real sense of pride, but also there's this foreboding, this sense of knowing that soon it will all be destroyed.

So there's a sadness that comes with that. Angry mobs set scores of fires in the predominantly Black south-central part of the city. There were so many blazes the fire department couldn't respond to all the calls and just let some buildings burn to the ground. Firemen reported people were shooting at them and at least two firefighters were wounded. Looting broke out in many neighborhoods before police moved in and began rounding up suspects.

A lot of Americans think today, if they think of the term "race riot," they're thinking of Los Angeles in the ’90s, and you know, African-American kids breaking into shoe stores and things like that. But the truth is that in the breadth of American history, the vast majority of race riots were white mobs attacking Black people, individuals, or communities. You see, there was a great migration of Southerners to the North. There were a lot of differences. You had no segregated transportation, and you could go and eat anywhere you wanted to.

During this period, they were working in the factories and setting up their own businesses. In a relative sense, they had more freedom; however, because they started to succeed and those communities grew, that became a point of real tension, and then eventually riots erupted. [Music] East St. Louis occurred in 1917, and it was a horrific massacre. Some historians believe it was prompted by white workers who believed that Black men were taking jobs that they deserved. White mobs descended on Black neighborhoods, pulling Black people off of streetcars, beating them with their fists, clubbing them, and killing Black people indiscriminately.

It was horrendous and barbaric. The NAACP were so horrified by what had happened, they decided to organize a silent march in which they were saying, “Wake up America, you need to wake up to this. We to America, how would you have us as we are? For sinking, need to load, be there, our eyes fixed forward on a star, or gazing empty at despair?” The NAACP stood up and started to organize on a level that African Americans had not done before and really set the stage for what became the Civil Rights Movement.

People like James Walden Johnson, W.E. Du Bois, and Walter White recruited tens of thousands of new members, and so African Americans started to wake up and say, "We deserve the same rights as every other person in this country, and we have earned it." Strong, willing sinews in your wings or tightening chains about your food. [Music] Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun. Take it on the run, on the run, in World War I. We have segregated military, but Black people are fighting in this war. They have gone overseas to fight; some even fought for the first right away. [Music] And they were very, very successful. There was a group called the Harlem Hellfighters, and they received accolades about their courage and their success. [Music]

So when they come back to this country, they have a sense that they have fought for their country, died for their country in many cases, and that their country will treat them differently. [Music] French people had a great respect and relation from the inaugural soldier. That was the only time that I ever felt like a full-fledged American citizen after a Negro soldier had been discharged.

Some people didn't want him to wear that American unicorn. The American white men did everything to put you in your place. There are many levels of tension created with the African-American veterans returning from Europe. It is felt by the African-Americans that they experienced freedom. They did not live in a segregated society while they were abroad, and they came back defiant that they had fought and died for democracy abroad and they were not going to accept second-class citizenship in the United States.

We know that at the end of the First World War, there was a great deal of white anxiety, resentment, and anger toward Black people. It appears as though any time there is a perception that Black people are rising economically or socially, there are those individuals and forces that seek to put a stop to it. 1919, the summer and fall of 1919 jump out as by far the worst period of that kind of violence. [Music]

Red summer is a term that was coined by James Walden Johnson, who was an executive secretary of the NAACP, and he called this reign of terror Red Summer because he said it best described the blood that ran in the streets that summer of 1919. As many as 26 cities were the sites where these massacres and race riots occurred. In Omaha, there was an allegation that a man named William Brown had raped a white woman.

He's arrested and a mob starts to form outside of the courthouse. Law enforcement said, “We're not going to hand this person over,” and the mob just got louder and bigger, and they started shooting into the building. They started to set fires at the doorways, people waving American flags. I mean, it was considered some sort of patriotic act that they were attacking a U.S. courthouse. They scale the walls of the courthouse, demanding the blood of a Black man. The mayor, who is liberal-minded, tries to intervene and keep the mob from lynching him. They nearly tear the white mayor apart, and finally, they pull Brown to the mob and they hang him.

They shoot him more than a hundred times, and then finally someone cuts the rope; his body drops to the pavement. They beat him, they spit on him, they dismember him, and then someone grabs a new rope, ties him to the back of a car, and then they pull him through the streets, and then they pour kerosene on his body. What you have to know is many of these massacres, all it took was a rumor, and then the rumor would spread. Did he commit that crime? And this is an important part of all of the Red Summer — we'll never know, you know why? Because he was never—there was never a trial.

There was this sense among white people, whether it was up in Omaha, Nebraska, or down in Mississippi, that extrajudicial killing is justified. So this is the story that I wrote in 2018 about Tulsa. The headline says, "Amid Gentrification, a Race Massacre Still Haunts Tulsa," and the story really questions why an investigation that was opened in 1998 was closed without physically digging for mass graves. As a writer, there comes a certain point in the research when you really understand the story at a profound level. This story about the Tulsa race massacre goes to the top of the list of the stories that I've written in my career at the Post, and I feel that I was part of that process of helping to uncover a piece of the truth of what happened in the massacre.

The survivors of the race massacre and activists in Tulsa have been telling their stories for 20 years, for 30 years. So I think what they do in Tulsa is incredible. I'm just adding a piece of that story to the narrative. Let's do a Vernon enemy church about mass grave kind of reaction that we're doing for tonight, but I was wondering, would Dr. Turner be available for a live interview at 6:00 PM, just to kind of give an update? Sure, let me check with Dr. Turner first.

Alright. Okay, you’re talking to him. Oh hey, how you doing? I'm sorry, I just wanted—I need a good laugh with you, but I'm like, I'm not going to assume. Yeah, I answered my own calls. I have the city hall protest at 4:30, and yeah, we march— we're marching here afterwards, and we're doing a letter-writing campaign to the council. So depending on what time that ends, I’m sure I can be available at 6.

So I came to Tulsa in 2017, and you know, I thought I was just gonna be here to, um, you know, kiss babies, go to baby showers, do weddings, do baptism stuff like that. You know, I really didn't come to Tulsa to be like an activist. Dear man G.T. by them, and I’m writing one to each of the council people. As you know, this was done nearly 100 years ago, and to this date, nothing has been done by the city to compensate the families nor prosecute the perpetrators.

The blame of the 1921 race massacre is at the feet of the city and those who were in charge of the city at that time; that is a sobering fact that you not only can rob, burn, kill people, but you don't even want to give them the dignity of having a proper barrier. I've been going every day at the excavation to pray, and I talk to God about leading us, letting them know that we are looking, and I pray that we find them.

Good afternoon everyone, my name is Phoebe Stubblefield. As a forensic anthropologist, I will be looking at the skeletal remains for many features, but for this test excavation, I'll be focusing on are there signs of trauma? If we find it right away, our question may be answered fairly quickly. How did I feel when we first broke ground? I'm extra thankful that we're getting to this point, and I have relatives that lost their house in the massacre.

It's the first stage of some kind of peace for the many Tulsans that are asking questions about what happened to these individuals. This is that moment when Tulsa said, "We're coming clean, we're following up finally on our own history." [Music] The real true healing for us as a people is that when we do look at ourselves, and for the ancestors in particular, but for them we are not here. But for them we are not here. [Music]

So all that they endured, went through, died for, fought for, lived for, loved for— but for them we are not here. [Music] Tulsa was at the time of the riot called the oil capital of the world. People poured in there from all over to get those jobs that the oil industry had available. See Greenwood, Negroes had all kinds of businesses, cafes, dance halls, whatever else you want. We had our doctors, our lawyers, our undertakers—all of the businessmen were down feeling.

I am a descendant of Isaac Evan, who is my great-grandfather, who owned the zoo lounge, just a little club, just a juke joint. My grandfather, Buck Culbert Franklin, in February 1921 moves to Tulsa and establishes a law firm with two other attorneys, and there's a rich set of businesses in Tulsa at that time. My great-grandfather James Henry was the business manager for the Tulsa Star, which was the Black newspaper.

I think what he saw was that sense of industry, and you did it independent of anybody's interference. You did it independent of anybody's oppression. And you did it, quite frankly, because there was segregation, and folks had to depend on each other. [Music] Tulsa proved that the whole idea of white superiority was a myth, was a big lie, and proved that people with assets and education could do as well as anyone else in similar circumstances.

And that's one of the curses of the ideology of white supremacy, which is you make an idol out of whiteness, and whiteness has to always be superior to everybody else. And so what does Allah do when it confronts the truth, right? It either awakens to the truth or it destroys the truth and continues to believe the lie. Woodrow Wilson is alleged to have said that Birth of a Nation was like writing history with lightning. His one regret was that it was all so true. [Music]

The showing of Birth of a Nation in the White House was a love song to the Ku Klux Klan. That film glorifies the clan and its role in the country of protecting the virtues of the white woman who was probably going to be attacked by Black men. This is part of what continues to be the theme, if you will, regarding what happens in 1919 and the start of these riots. [Music]

We have in Washington, D.C., a series of events from June 30, 1919, to July 18, '19, where four white women reported incidents in which they were attacked, accosted in some way, challenged by men who were described as Black. Many people say that it began with a false accusation by a white woman that Black men had assaulted her. There are sailors and soldiers in town from World War One; they decide that they will defend the virtue of this woman. They began pulling Black people off of streetcars in D.C. and beating them. [Music]

It is dangerous for Black people to be on the streets. There are assaults by whites on Blacks on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest. A Black man is beaten in front of the White House, and the media coverage of what is going on adds to or compounds the problem. We know that the Washington Post printed a headline calling for the mobilization of white mobs, and we know that other newspapers across the country reprinted the story that ran in the Washington Post during that race riot of 1919.

We have what you see—we see two Black people—no, I'm not letting you walk away with my phone. Sadly, we have Red Summer-type activity in this country now in terms of white women complaining about Black people who are engaged in legal human behavior and not sleeping in that room. A young woman who's sleeping in her dormitory lounge, we need to make sure that you belong. A white woman calls the police; a family that's barbecuing in the park—charcoal grills are not allowed here. A white woman calls the police in Central Park. A man is birdwatching. He tells a white woman that she's not allowed to walk her dog where she's walking the dog, and then she threatens him, "I'm gonna tell them there's an African American man threatening my life."

Please tell them whatever you like. "I'm being threatened by a man in the Rambo!" Police found the cops immediately. And it's almost as if the white population functions as deputies for the police. You can be questioned at any time—who are you? Why are you here? What is your name? While it's not massacres, it's a massacre of the spirit.

In this editorial from 1919, the headline is "The Rights of the Black Man." The time has come in the history of the colored Americans to protect themselves against the cowardly attacks of a mob, no matter what its nationality may be. The Black man is loyal to his country and his flag, and when his country fails him, fails to protect him, he means to protect himself. The Washington Bee was a phenomenal Black-owned newspaper. Its editor was what they called a race man, so he used the newspaper to advocate for justice for Black people. The Black newspapers performed heroically during the Red Summer, and they provide an understanding of a complex series of events that had life-or-death consequences.

[Music] Black veterans who had just returned from World War One were determined to protect their property and their families. Black people threw bricks from the tops of houses and apartment buildings. [Music] Whites were repulsed from the southwest altogether, and as they came up 7th street, they met stout resistance by Black people, people firing back. They would not surrender. [Music]

And it's not until it escalates to this level that approximately two thousand National Guard are sent in to quash it; but ultimately what does quash it is a rainstorm. A man named William Canfield Marshall found himself in D.C. during the race massacre, and he told his son Thurgood Marshall what he had gone through. Thurgood Marshall would say many years later he had a hell of a time, but he would also know proudly that even though they don't get credit for it, but Negroes won that battle that day—they won that one. [Music]

The resistance seen and shown by Black people in the nation's capital became a hallmark of Black resistance across the country. [Music] I talked to old lamb, and old limb said, "They weigh the cotton, they store the corn; we only good enough to work the roads. They run the commissary; they keep the books. We gotta be grateful for being cheated." [Music]

They make our figures turn somersets; we in the middle say thank you, sir. They don't come by one; they don't come by two, but they come by tens. Before the summer of 1919, Elaine was a fairly new town. Much of the land was bought in large tracks by plantation owners who were trying to figure out how to eke out a profit. Blacks in the region were in servitude to whites just as they had been during antebellum slavery. Immediately following the war, the price of cotton skyrocketed. [Music]

The crops are how the Blacks were able to peak out their survival, and this gave them a unique opportunity to make a lot of money very, very quickly. [Music] But regardless of how much of a boom that they produce, they were never going to be given their shares. [Music] In September of 1919, Black farmers decided to organize to get better prices for their crop. [Music]

Late September, sharecroppers are meeting inside this church in Hoops Spur. They know that there might be problems, so they posted a couple of sentries out front because they were told that if they tried to unionize, there would be trouble. The story varies as to what happens next. From my grandmother's stories, there were white men and law enforcement that pulled up to the church that night. But they pull up and they just start shooting. The police officers would have a different narrative, that they were fired upon. There may have been two Black veterans who fired out to defend those inside the church. One white man is killed.

Word goes out that the Black people in Elaine are in an insurrection. They're uprising; whites poured in from the neighboring counties, all looking for some sense of reprisal for the death of the police officer that had been shot outside of Hoops Spur. Word got out that there was a riot going on in which Black people were going into white people's houses, pulling them out and killing them—all of which was a lie.

The local newspaper was one of the biggest perpetuators of that lie, and that set off three days of what I’d say is just pure carnage, murder. There is this photo from the Elaine, Arkansas massacre that still haunts me: a young Black woman who lived in Elaine is shot in the neck by the white mob; her skirt is pulled up, and her bare bottom is showing directly toward the camera. There's no dignity in her death.

I mean, I've been doing this reporting a long time, writing about the tragedy in Black history, but this particular picture is seared into my memory. It's a terrible thing that happened in Elaine, Arkansas. Tell me where we are right here. This location is called Hoops Spur, where the church house once stood. When this started, it just spread like wildfire, you know? My grandfather said white people were coming from Mississippi, Oklahoma—they was coming from all around just to kill Black people.

Yes, Black people lived all over, right? Yes, there were houses all around. So many, so many—that's not in the place anymore. And so you think the bodies are buried somewhere in a mass grave down there? My grandmother told me a lot of people just got buried where they were, because it took so long to clear everything up, and they just buried them right there. You know, so there's a lot of stories—I mean, this land holds a lot of pain here, a lot of pain. There are still a lot of stigma and repercussions from that massacre that happened back then. [Music]

There was an article in the Arkansas Gazette, something like evaluating the Elaine riot. My father, I saw him reading the newspaper. I looked at him, and I said, "Dad, what's wrong?" And he said, "This person says that the Elaine riot was fiction." And I said, "Yeah, well, okay—'cause I’d never heard of it, and this is high school." He said, "Well, you know, I had four uncles who were killed down in Elaine."

Dr. Johnston, my great uncle, had three brothers, the Johnson brothers, who were an affluent family. They were among the wealthiest Blacks in the county. The youngest brother had gone off and fought in World War One and had just returned. They went down south of Elaine to go hunting, which was a typical event for brothers back in the early 1900s. They were coming out of the woods the day after the shooting at Hoops Spur. My great uncles were not involved in any rioting; they never made it back to Helena.

They were found on the side of the road, all four of them badly butchered. The mother brings the bodies to the sheriff, and she is told that the men had shot one of the white men and killed him, and in return, the mob shot them. The mother asked that they'd be buried in a single shaft; she maintained, “Let them be in death as they were in life.”

This is the Arkansas State Archive, and today we’ll be looking at Governor Bruff’s scrapbook that highlights the Elaine massacre. Just to recap, this massacre is occurring; the governor of Arkansas does what he immediately goes out with his friends, loads up the car, and decides to go out and see what's going on. We know that he's participating in events while he's there.

Um, we do not know, however, if he is involved in the massacre of anyone along the way. He maintains that he's shot at through a cane break and that they notice a Black man running through the field. So they stop the car and they pursue, and we can actually see photographs of them because they are photographs of the governor there. Here's the governor, and you could see him among those individuals in the mob. These photos are astounding.

This is the governor walking along in the thickets with troops. Notice you can see the soldiers have guns, have their rifles. [Music] This is the only account that we have of a governor ever hunting for Black citizens in American history that I know of. This governor, Bruff, calls in the military supposedly to help ease the tensions.

There we know from survivor stories that the Black people who were hiding in the thickets or in the Mississippi River or in the swamps were hiding from the white mobs. When they saw the soldiers walking across the field toward them, Black people would come out of hiding places because they thought they were coming to save them; and instead, the soldiers would fire on the Black people who were hiding in the thickets and in the swamps. The very help had turned out to be an enemy, and so they scattered, and some escaped.

There were some white families who were compassionate and had enough heart to grab some Blacks in and hide them. They had various ways of escaping, but so many lost their lives—so many. Most historians at this point have settled on there being about 200 Black people killed. We don't know that because we have not recovered the bodies; that massacre goes on for days and finally ends in October of 1919. [Music]

We know that hundreds of Black people were rounded up and arrested. In total, there were 122 Elaine defendants that were convicted, and some were sentenced upwards of 20 years in prison, but 12 men were convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a white man. 12 men that were dragged away from their families, thrown in jail, tried, convicted, tortured. One old Black man wrote that he was whipped to nearly inches of his life.

They were strapped to electric chairs, they were suffocated with some kind of chemical and a cloth as these white mobsters tried to elicit confessions from them. Immediately, the community wants all of them dragged out in the street and killed. The governor, however, maintains that there must be order, and he promises the mob that he will give them a trial and he will give them an execution.

The first two or three trials, there was not even any cross-examination or no defense put on at all, from the time the jury wasn't paneled to the time the person was found guilty and sentenced to die—it was less than two hours. [Music] I am descended from three of the Elaine 12. It has been a heavy, heavy weight just remembering my ancestors and remembering what they sacrificed, what they went through. They did not turn on each other. They told their stories; they told the truth.

They stuck to their stories, and they didn’t give up; they didn’t give up. So they had to do something. If we must die, let it not be like hogs hunted and penned in an inglorious part, while rounders bark the mad and hungry dogs making their mock at our cursed lot. Claude McKay wrote this form in 1919 during the summer when all these atrocities are occurring against Black people, and he's saying basically we're gonna fight back like men.

We'll face the murderers, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back. The Black press plays a crucial role in this democracy. There were reporters and columnists at the turn of the century who were advocating for rights for Black people for justice for Black people, and Ida B. Wells is one of the greatest investigative journalists in history. She follows this great legacy of people like Harriet Tubman, who would fight for justice.

She was fearless in a way and not intimidated by white mobs. One of the men on death row wrote to Ida B. Wells asking for her help, and she responded. She traveled to Arkansas, she disguised herself, and went inside the jail to collect stories from these men who were on death row, and she published their stories.

Ida B. Wells wrote, "Convicting and executing the Elaine 12 would destroy the economy in Arkansas," and pretty much threatened that she would help all of the sharecroppers in Elaine and in Arkansas flee this state. Her contribution to helping not just the Elaine 12 but helping the families, helping the survivors telling their stories—the Elaine descendants, oh, Ida B. Wells—her depth, gratitude, her account of their case really brought national attention to what happened in Elaine, Arkansas.

We know that these men are then represented by Scipio Jones, a very well-known attorney. He worked with other attorneys to take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court essentially agreed that the due process rights of these men had been violated, and they were eventually freed. Fighting back by the Black community that year wasn’t just in the streets; it wasn’t just shooting at the mob as they came down the street. It was in the courts as well, and those cases proved pivotal for how we live today.

Anybody, white or Black, if you’re arrested, you get an impartial jury. You can't have a forced confession. These are things that we had to fight for. When it was handed down, the NAACP hailed it as the biggest civil rights victory in the history of the country. And so out of a lot of misery comes some good, I like to think. [Music]

Tulsa did not happen in a vacuum. There's a direct connective thread from East St. Louis through D.C. and Omaha, Nebraska, and Elaine, Arkansas, all the way to Tulsa. The patterns of the white mob attacking Black people are the same in each of these communities. Many of the factors are the same: economic envy, the fallacy of white supremacy, the accusations that a white woman was accosted by a Black man.

There are patterns in each of these massacres. The patterns set the stage for the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. [Music] [Music] Two years before the 1921 race massacre, Tulsa was the site of a convention for the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, and those veterans were treated like rock stars. When these veterans came into town, they drove through Greenwood and it said that those veterans rebuked the white males of that day for allowing the Black population to be so successful.

There's a lot of jealousy associated with Black accomplishment. There's a lot of envy associated with Black accomplishment, and the whole idea that a Black person has a certain space and place that they should remain in, and that that should be dictated to them by white people. The people of Greenwood, they said no to that. People who worked in service used to come to my father's store and tell him that their employers were stockpiling ammunition, so something was planned long before the outburst. They were looking for something to happen that could start it off. [Music]

I was shining shoes, and I was making money hand over fists, but we didn't have the facilities there, and of course, the management had arranged for us to use the restrooms on the fourth floor of this building. I wasn't there, so I can't verify this information, but I am told we had a boy, a young man, whose name was Dick Rowland. Dick Rowland, a shoeshine boy, went up to the upper levels of the Drexel building. He got on the elevator, and sometimes the elevator did not settle correctly, and he stumbled coming into the elevator and brushed up against Sarah Page, who was the elevator operator.

She hollers and he runs out. Now immediately folks come to her rescue. You know, they hear the damsel in distress, and it goes from that to all of a sudden there's an assault and an attack. So the next day, the Tribune came out that afternoon and told about what had happened and said, "It looks as if we're going to have a lynching." Dad heard that they were trying to lynch a Black boy down around that courthouse, so Dad had an old pistol around the house.

He said, "Hey, people put one in his pocket," and he took off, and he just hung around there to see what was going on. So a bunch of Blacks went down there and asked if they could help protect him, and when they went down, they were armed, and a bunch of whites gathered up; they gathered, they gathered, they gathered, and finally there was fifteen hundred, two thousand people down, Black anyway. And one guy said to this Black boy, “What are you doing with that gun?” The boy said, “If I have to, I'm going to use it.”

So a big scuffle broke out, and a shot was fired from what I understand, then all hell broke loose. The first time I ever heard about the race massacre in Tulsa in 1921 was when I was a volunteer on my cousin's mayoral campaign in 2002, and we were at a candidate debate. Somebody at that forum said something about that there had been a riot in Tulsa where bombs were dropped from airplanes onto Tulsa, and I remember hearing that and thinking that's ridiculous. There's no way that something like that happened here and I haven't heard about it or read about it.

My family history goes back to about the 1870s in Tulsa. In fact, my great-great-grandfather, my granddad, and then my cousin, they've been mayors here. I went and asked my grandfathers, neither of whom were alive at the time, but their parents were alive and were here, and they both had stories that had been passed down to them about it. And I—I couldn't believe it at the time that something like that happened here and that it had largely been covered up. Nobody talked about it openly, and then I go back and look at the history and find that in the late 1990s there was a state commission that collected oral history, did geophysical scanning looking for mass graves, and they identified an anomaly in Oaklawn Cemetery.

Then the city would not give them permission to dig, and so I remember just saying, "Man, if I'm ever mayor, we are going to follow through on this." It should not have taken 99 years for us to be doing this investigation, but this generation of Tulsans is committed to doing what's right by our neighbors and to following the truth wherever it leads us, and that is what this investigation and this test excavation today is all about.

I think it's so important to recognize there's no way we're in a position to do this work if you didn't have the members of that commission back in the ’90s who collected that oral history from survivors who are no longer with us. Twenty years later, if they don't do that work, we're not able to find these graves. In 2020, Tulsa's Black community had no option for the beast on the market. My father, state representative Don Ross, now retired, created the Tulsa Race Riot Commission report.

It was mainly because of a so-called conspiracy of silence. White folks didn't want to talk about it because it was an embarrassment to the city, and nobody wanted to rehash what had happened, and it became hush-hush for Black folks. They didn't talk about it because those who committed the atrocities were still around and were threatening another riot if anybody spoke about it. So for decades, no one talked about it. Go ahead. Hi, I’m Eddie Page, chair of the survivors committee of the Oklahoma legislative commission to study the Tulsa race riot of 1921.

I was about 36 at the time when I was asked to videotape the testimonies of the riot survivors. Many of these senior citizens were at the age of five, six, 19 years of age at the time going back in time to tell of the ill-fated days of Greenwood, uh, 1921. I was studying my lesson for an exam for the next day with Washington High School when somebody banged on my door. My mother had gone to bed.

Well, there was a lot of commotion around. I remember my mom was very excited about what was going on, all the noise. My dad just got in work; he went back, went to sleep, and she woke him up and said, "I don't think you ought to go to sleep; it's too much going on." When I was awakened by my mother, I was real frightened because she told me what was happening, and I couldn't imagine that. I just said to her, and I just got up and was real afraid, and she says, "We have to get out."

I said, "She says the white people are killing the God people." The standpoint hill they were shooting from there, and we were out in the backyard. My father came and had us to come in because the bullets were raining down in our backyard. All of us were in the house when we saw coming up the wall four men with torches in their hands. These torches were burning. When my mother saw them coming, she says, "You get up under the bed." While I was under the bed, one of the guys coming past the bed stepped on my finger. As I was about to scream, my sister put her hand over my mouth so I couldn't be heard.

They set our house on fire and went right straight to the curtains and set the curtains on fire, and I remember that. [Music] Bullets were raining down, either from airplanes or from Standpipe Hill. We wish you, and they came and asked my father to use a provocative unacceptable word—n-word. You have a gun? He said, "I don't have a gun," but he said, "Well, please don’t set my house on fire." Well, he and we were fanatics with it. As soon as he left, they set our house on fire. We were up and at it for sure when we got down; every telephone pole was burning and falling, and my poor sister was two years younger than I am.

The Ken is the world on fire. So I don’t think so, but we in deep trouble. We have eyewitnesses that describe being awakened in the middle of the night by loud white men, being told to get out of their homes. As they come down the stairs into their living rooms, they see their prized possessions being stolen—their piano, their furniture, the piggy banks from the children's savings. They came by the thousands and decided first they would pillage, and they just hauled the belongings of the Black population adults away to use for their own use, and they didn't leave anything valuable if they could find it.

These are the original photographs. The first batch of photos, by the way, are the postcards. And you will notice these are literally postcards—yes, "Little Africa on Fire, Tulsa Race Riot, June 1st, 1921." This photograph is actually taken from the roof of the Hotel Tulsa, and over here you can see Standpipe Hill. This is looking across northeast across the tracks. That large batch right there is actually Greenwood and Archer on fire.

So what was the purpose of them creating postcards of Greenwood burning? Souvenirs. Souvenirs. Um, the concept of doing souvenirs of things like lynchings. In fact, what they used to do frequently is while a lynching was occurring, the photographer would go out, take a picture, run back to his lab, print off copies, go back out to the crowd, and start selling them.

This is so amazing to have this treasure trove of photographs and postcards. Because as a historian, you know, over time you've talked about how the story of an event can change. I try to work from the documents as closely as possible because while the documents may not be initially any more accurate than an oral statement, as a rule, the documents don't change. Photographs are even better. The trick with photographs is learning how to read the photograph, and again, there are lots of pictures of Mount Zion burning.

Oh, that's Mount Zion Church burning. So were there, um, I know that Black World War One veterans actively put up a resistance to defend Greenwood. Were they inside Mount Zion? According to the caption, right? Yes, they were. The notation on it claims that they were storing ammunition there.

I'm not sure that's ever actually been proven one way or the other. They got in the basement of Mount Zion Church, and as the whites would come off of Archer Street or coming up Belgium and like that, but they would shoot. They killed quite a few white people there.

There are stories of people being in the basements of churches and having little cubby holes where they would shoot through and be able to defend themselves to the degree that they could. Gun shops were invaded by the white mob who wouldn't get guns, and that's when the skirmish started to break out. Many of the fights occurred along the railroad tracks, which today we regard as one of the dividing lines of North and South Tulsa.

Men of that generation believed in honor and protecting your family, and we put up a valiant effort considering the odds. We defended as best we could until they got the airplanes. When we left our house, I was so afraid because bullets were coming down around us. The planes were up in the air shooting down, and I could hear those bullets falling.

And all of a sudden, when we got to the track, I went over the track, and there were a lot of people running, dodging the bullets. I remember hearing the stories of when people were trying to flee, when the onslaught of the bullets rained down on houses, and folks knew either they were shot to death or they'd be burned alive inside their homes. They had to decide, am I going to stay in the home, and we're going to burn up, right, or do we take our chances and run out and possibly get shot to death?

My grandfather describes the scene in an eyewitness account that he has written. From my office window, I could see planes circling in midair. They grew in number and hummed and darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Midway Hotel on fire, burning from its top. Smoke ascended the sky in thick black volumes and emitted. All the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.

I came out of my office and locked the door and descended to the foot of the steps. The sidewalks were literally covered with burning turpentine bombs. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well what every burning building first caught from the top. Many people indeed deny that Tulsa was bombed from the air. The eyewitness accounts, not just from my grandfather but from other people of airplanes bombing the community, are proof enough for me.

My mother took me to the window and had me peer through the blinds, and she pointed up on the top of the hill. She said, "You see that thing up there? That's a machine gun. You see the American flag on top of it? That means your country is shooting at you." [Music] In Tulsa, martial law is eventually declared. The National Guard is called in, and trucks drove through the streets of Tulsa, picking up all the Black men, women, and children they could find.

Many of the Black folks were rounded up and placed in internment camps around the city—Convention Hall, McNulty Park, the Fairgrounds—all these areas were used to house Black folks. It wasn't long before they had another truck with some soldiers come pick this up, put it all in the truck, took it down to the Convention Center, and we didn't see dead anymore for a couple of days. They had taken him out to this Magnolia Farm, but that's where they took him.

My grandfather's internment in the convention hall for several days. Many other people, African American men, women, and children are interned in the ballparks and other areas where the African American community can be sequestered while the rest of the city decides what to do with this community that they have destroyed. That night we slept in the fairgrounds, and the next morning this young man came out to my mother.

I remember him coming up, and he had a gun, and he asked my mother, "Will you keep my gun while I go with them to help bury the dead?" Well, you know, we didn’t—when he came back, we didn’t even ask him about that. We should have just asked him, but we didn’t. So while people were being held in these camps, bodies of Black people were being taken off the streets and buried.

We don't know how many people died in the Tulsa race massacre, but historians say as many as 300 Black people were killed, and oral history tells us that Black people were buried somewhere in Tulsa in mass graves. These sites included the Keyes, which is near the Arkansas River, the old Booker T. Washington Cemetery, and Oaklawn, which is a public cemetery in Tulsa.

My cousin and I were going over to visit my aunt, and we walked past the cemetery. We looked in, and we saw about six or eight men digging this big hole, and scattered around in the area was a large number—maybe six or so—big wooden crates, like you ship oil field equipment in. We were curious, you know how kids are, so we walked back and went in the gate and walked down to where these boxes were, and I opened it on one, and there were three bodies in this one.

And we went over to the second, and there were four or five bodies, and that was a huge crate. I started overlooking the next crate, and the man came up and said, "You boys, get out of here. You had no business in here." Happening today, in just a few hours, crews will once again search Oaklawn Cemetery for 1921 Tulsa race massacre victims. Back in July, they searched the cemetery but did not find any human remains.

The headlines in July of 2020 were, "Scientists in Tulsa Find No Human Remains in the Search for Mass Graves," and I kept saying to editors, "Look, people only read the headlines these days. That's not the story. The story is that Tulsa is really expanding its search." I know as a reporter from talking to people that that was only the tip of the iceberg, that they were going to be looking in other places in the city and also other areas of Oaklawn Cemetery.

Good afternoon everyone. We will begin excavating some much more discreet sites. I'm very hopeful that we'll at least find these individuals that are just hidden in an otherwise well-organized cemetery. [Music] It's a cold morning on October 19th, and we are watching—we're watching the movements of the scientists. We're peering over the fence to look for any reaction and emotion in their faces.

Now, I know that the state archaeologist had told reporters previously that the minute the team encounters human remains, they would put up a tarp because it is forbidden to photograph the dead. And I was there when we were looking over the fence. We saw a frenzy of activity among the scientists on the other side of the fence. We see them put up a tarp. We see one of them examine something in her hands.

They're pointing to the dirt; they're pointing to the dirt, and I know—I was like, they have found something. The earth had unleashed the truth in that moment. Thank you all for being here this afternoon. So today I'm here to report an update. At this point in time, I can confirm that we have identified the outlines of at least 10 coffins based on the backhoe excavation work that we did.

This constitutes a mass grave. Being a part of the oversight committee and working with the researchers and the scientists inside the graves was very sobering. I noticed that you can see the outlines of the coffins. They were like two by twos, and then they would line up like dominoes. But as the trench went west, we found another coffin and another and another coffin right after each other in the same burial moment.

So for dimension wise, there could be as many as 30 individuals in there, and so those are the signatures of a mass grave. This is emotional to be there in that cemetery, in this space that until that day, everyone when they would drive by would think was just a field. And yet under that earth all these years, there have been these graves. It was like they had found people who had been disappeared by history.

It wasn't a movie; you know. It wasn't a chapter in a book. It happened to real people. It wasn't until I got to my car, I started the engine, and I'm about to leave, then it hit me, and it was just overwhelming. I'm remembering screaming out, "We found them! We finally found them! Thank God we found them." Some people say that like right back here, it's a burial site—they said maybe it could be hundreds of bodies buried over there.

Why do you think they would bury Black people here in unmarked graves? Because the things that they were doing was not out in the open. So it's just like any other murdering event. If somebody do something, they want to dispose of their bodies as quickly as possible. So they just did what they were doing and just dumped them into graves.

It's what we were told. We put a tree out there; somebody came and chopped it down, so now we're gonna put a marker out here. We're treading on bloody soil, and you're talking about entitlements. If reparations is really a word and it has a definition, I think Elaine, we are the poorest people treading on the richest soil.

And it's just a lot of horrible things that happened in this town and in some adjacent towns. You see all this capital roll up in these fields, and there's millions and millions of dollars, but Black people don't own none of it. I worked all my life, and I can't buy me a new vehicle. You know, it wasn't cause I wasn't working. You know, you just—the system here is designed against Black folks.

Black people have been [Music] working, busting their butts, trying to be independent, trying to build wealth for their families. And I think about all these communities and all of our ancestors and what they were working to do from Reconstruction until now, and it seems like every time they were doing just what people say they weren't doing, they came in and they burnt it down. They set it on fire. [Music]

Time and time and time again. When we came to Greenwood, there was not a building standing. It was just the sound of the bricks, stones, buildings blown up. You just sport on plants. [Music] [Music]

What happens after May 31st, June 1st, is that you have a decimated community. Many people flee the city and never return, and those who try to stay and rebuild are forced to gather the bricks and remnants of what were their homes and try to rebuild on the land that they had, and the insurance companies refused to honor the insurance policies that people had taken out on their homes and businesses.

My great-grandmother, she listed the dishes, the property, the homes, things that were items in the home that were due—these things that we worked for, right? And someone needs to make restitution. Of course, she was rejected outright in the court system. My great-grandfather wasn't able to rebuild because all of the monies were no longer there. He attempted to sell the family land in order to reopen but lost the home and business after many attempts, and he would leave the state of Oklahoma, never to return, and died angry.

Black people armed with their faith and ambition built the most prosperous place, not just for Black people but for any people in this country. And what did this racist white community of Tulsa do in response? They burned it to the ground. So every Wednesday, I go to city hall, um, and I tell them about the people that were killed.

And I tell them about the homes that were bombed and burned and the people that were looted and the bodies that were dumped in the mass graves. I tell them that, and I call out the city of Tulsa. This city of Tulsa has never paid reparations to those that they killed. This city and her law enforcement officer, the district attorney, has never filed charges on those who committed acts of mass terror.

Black lives have never mattered in this city. Black lives have never mattered in this country. Black activists on the ground now are agitating that the city do all it can to search for the mass graves and also pay reparations for what was lost in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, and they hold the powerful in Tulsa accountable; they hold their feet to the fire. A lot of folks want to leap ahead and talk about reparations.

I really want us, before we get to that discussion, to just try and find these folks. And so I would like us to do that before we move on to, you know, what that justice may look like. At first, he said it was divisive; now he's pivoting toward it's not time to talk about it yet, and I'm like, if that's your answer, when is the time? Like, I mean, I know we're doing excavations, but it's not like we don't know folk were killed after being placed in an—and I agree, Empire’s still got operations, but if they can get reparations, why not African Americans?

The challenge I run into is that reparations mean different things for different people. And so, for some people, it is a cash payment from the city, and I don't support that because I don't think that Tulsans in 2020 should be financially penalized for something that happened a century ago. But reparations for other people mean making sure that we're doing things today that address historic systemic challenges and racial disparities that still pervade in our city.

How long do you wait? How long do you wait for justice? And Black people have grown impatient waiting for justice, and reparations is part of that cry for justice because there was economic loss. The economic loss was devastating; there was loss of generational wealth, and there's also generational pain. Will continue tomorrow for truth, no testing, no peace. [Music]

A lot of people say reparations. I use restorative justice. We need to start with acknowledging what has happened, and restorative justice is, you know, to me includes reconciliation and healing. I'm here to focus on land loss. There's been committees and commissions and a lot of things that have happened, but there hasn't been healing in the community of Elaine.

Share with us just the name of one person who you believe has been impacted greatly who did not die— that they clearly represent in your view somebody who's walking. My aunt, Justine, uh, just passed on maybe a month ago. After 1919, she went to Mississippi, yeah, and she never came back. Would you call your aunt's name? Because it is important that the names of those who have lived [Music].

Thank you. [Music] A few years ago, I believe it's 2012, we held a ceremony, and we came to this very spot, and we just prayed that the land would be healed. We thank you, dear master, for your amazing grace. We thank you for these who are here, dear God, to help the story be told. We ask that you would be with us, give us wisdom and knowledge, and we say thank you, and we'll forever be grateful in Jesus' mighty name, amen. Amen. Amen. [Music]

Today, people are starting to really look at Tulsa, and people are starting to really look at Elaine, but we have no idea to this day what really happened or the exact number of people who were killed during the Red Summer. If the white community was controlling the situation once the violence was over, the impulse of every community was just: how did that happen? We're better than that, and that was the end of it.

That was not the case in Chicago. In Chicago, a hapless Black man swims by accident into the white swimming space on Lake Michigan. There's a confrontation; the young Black man ends up dying. That leads to a riot where many people are killed in Chicago. [Music]

This enormous vital, important economic hub of the United States was in chaos for a week because the African-American community had grown to the point where it was not only an important economic component of the city, but also political because Black people could vote, and their vote was critical in the mayors getting elected. So the city of Chicago, they did a very, very detailed study of the riot—who was injured, what race they were, where a lot of these incidents occurred.

It's very specific. The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations in a Race Riot. The commission presents for the consideration and action of state and local authorities the following recommendations and suggestions: that all reports and complaints of neglect of duty or participation in writing by police, deputy sheriffs, or militia be promptly investigated and the offenders promptly punished. [Music]

That the newspapers generally apply the same standards of accuracy, fairness, and sense of proportion in publishing news about Negroes as about whites. [Music] We urge all citizens, white and Negro, vigorously to oppose all propaganda of malicious or selfish origin which would tend to excite race prejudice. What immediately stands out for me is they're calling for the end of racial prejudice, and this is 1919, and these are still issues that we're dealing with a hundred years later.

What can you do? We think that we’re so evolved and we're better than the people in 1919, or better than our earlier generations, but the ghosts of the problems that they were facing are haunting us still. And we need to wrestle with those things because it makes us a better country if we incorporate the truth into what happened.

It says, "Place a headstone at this site of your victory," and it's talking about we've got to have that enduring spirit. We've got to know that beyond death, there is a destiny that we're still pursuing. And so what it means is that we cannot let our ancestors down. [Music] [Music]

I still have hope that the stories that are untold will be told. I still have hope the country will give Black people the justice and the Black ancestors justice that they have been demanding for so many years. I cry for my people; I shed the tear that they maybe could not shed, and at the same time I recognize that in telling the story of what happened to us, we can understand what it is that we have come through.

So this idea that we will make America what it was, no, no, no—we will make America where she should be. That's where we are now. [Music] [Music] You.