Memorial to 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street (Photo: Rob Corcoran)Nearly ninety years after what has been described as the worst act of domestic terrorism in US history, Tulsa, OK, is starting to come to terms with its painful racial past and to “turn tragedy into a triumph of reconciliation.”

Leading this effort is the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation, named after the acclaimed historian and Tulsa’s most prominent son. Earlier this month, the center convened a national symposium of scholars and practitioners to consider “Reconciliation in America: Moving Beyond Racial Violence.”

On May 31, 1921 the Greenwood District, described as the Black Wall Street, was burned to the ground. White mobs destroyed virtually every structure in a twenty-two block area including more than 1,200 homes, as well as thriving businesses, churches, and schools. Hundreds of people – mostly African Americans – were killed.

For decades this shocking story was ignored until Scott Ellsworth, one of Franklin’s doctoral students, published his seminal thesis, Death in the Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (LSU Press 1982), which opened the way for hundreds of studies. In 1997, Ellsworth was lead historian for a state commission set up to investigate the facts of the riot.

At the June 2-4 symposium Ellsworth was interviewed at a town hall meeting by Hannibal Johnson, an attorney and author of Black Wall Street and one of the organizers of the symposium. Johnson is a graduate of the Initiatives of Change Connecting Communities Program. In the interview Ellsworth stressed the importance of being able to face the past together and to understand that “while it may have impacted us in different ways, there is only one American history.” 

Tee Turner leads a workshop on walking through history (Photo: Rob Corcoran)John W. Franklin, son of John Hope Franklin and Director of Partnerships and International Programs at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, highlighted his father’s challenge to “tell the whole story, as complex and ambiguous as it may be.” His forebears came to Oklahoma with their Chickasaw owners on the Trail of Tears when Native Americans were forcibly removed from their lands in the east. “Oklahoma and the US are not unique in hiding history we don’t want to hear about,” said Franklin.

Historian Paul Finkelman asked his audience to imagine what America would be like if we had taken the energy we used to find ways to segregate and put that energy into finding ways to come together. He said that if you come to live in America “you get it all: the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Rushmore… you also get (the history)
of slavery …Just like a leaky basement, if you don’t understand where the water is coming from you can’t fix it.”

Rob Corcoran, IofC national director and author of Trustbuilding, and Tee Turner, Hope in the Cities director of reconciliation programs, led an interactive workshop on “walking through history.” Corcoran was the final speaker of the symposium. The Tulsa World quoted him as saying that “tolerance is not a strong enough glue to hold our communities together…Honest conversation means asking serious questions…You have to be inclusive. You have to take the risk of approaching even the most difficult — maybe especially the most difficult — people as potential allies."

Many Tulsans expressed interest in the Richmond experience. Scott Ellsworth told the symposium, “Richmond had a much more difficult path, but they are much further along than we are. We can learn from them.”

See Commentary by Hannibal Johnson