Editorials & Other Articles

Judi Lynn

(160,545 posts) Mon Dec 23, 2019, 07:40 PM Dec 2019

The Tulsa Massacre Warns Us Not to Trust History to Judge Trump on Impeachment

DECEMBER 23, 2019 5:35PM ET

America, a nation that is still digging up mass graves of massacred black people, fails too many tests of accountability to be trusted with the president’s impeachment

By JAMIL SMITH

Burned-out ruins of Greenwood, the African American section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 1921

Shutterstock

White racists have long used bombing as a tactic, but they also dropped explosives onto black people from the air. You may have learned this recently from a popular television show. I doubt sincerely that you learned it in a high school history class.

The kerosene bombing of “Negro Wall Street,” as Booker T. Washington initially labeled the prosperous Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, stands out even amid the maelstrom of violence in the opening scenes of Watchmen’s premiere episode. (When it aired, explainers and even curriculums abounded online to help people understand that what they had seen, as horrible as it was, wasn’t fiction.) The superlative HBO series — which expanded the universe of Alan Moore’s seminal late-Eighties graphic novel — imagines a world in which that days-long 1921 massacre of black people in Tulsa sparked a series of events in the city that led to a reckoning 98 years later involving masked heroes and cops, a neo-Klan, two megalomaniac geniuses, and a fight for more power than any human can be trusted with.

Speaking of which, Damon Lindelof and the rest of the show’s creators experienced only dumb luck when Donald Trump, the white-nationalist president of the United States, became the subject of an impeachment inquiry during their run. The show offered a belated lesson on how the 1921 massacre manifested and later resonated throughout generations, much like an inherited cellular mutation, and it seems that the varied cruelties of Trump policy may experience something similar. More indirectly, though, the show is a reminder that history isn’t some objective record, carved into a stone tablet and preserved for all to judge objectively. History, when it isn’t used to manipulate and intimidate, has often been insufficient at holding officials accountable. In that way, the manner in which Watchmen educated the public about Tulsa actually helped expose the folly of much of the rhetoric emerging from impeachment coverage.

This may be Richard Nixon’s fault to an extent, ironic considering the Watchmen comic. The president who thwarted term limits in that world remains soiled by his crimes in this one, in the eyes of perhaps everyone but the Trump confidant Roger Stone, tattooed with Nixon’s visage. History has been on the minds of journalists and other writers tasked with evaluating the impeachment story.

More:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-impeachment-tulsa-massacre-watchmen-930918/

1 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

The Tulsa Massacre Warns Us Not to Trust History to Judge Trump on Impeachment (Original Post) Judi Lynn Dec 2019 OP

thanks for mentioning this subana Dec 2019 #1

subana

(586 posts)

1. thanks for mentioning this

Reply to Judi Lynn (Original post)

Tue Dec 24, 2019, 02:11 AM

Dec 2019

I probably would not have watched this show if not for this article.

I didn't learn about the riot in school either. I have lived in Tulsa for most of my life. I'm 70 so when I went to school that was a long time before republicans tried to censor historical stories that don't make them look good.

There's a cemetery near downtown where mass graves may be located.

Scientists said on Monday that two patches of land in Tulsa, Okla., could be the sites of mass graves holding victims of a bloody 1921 clash in which white mobs attacked black residents and destroyed a prosperous business district known as Black Wall Street.

The evidence of possible mass graves, gathered by two archaeologists from the University of Oklahoma, is the latest discovery to spur more active interest in a brutal chapter that the city tried for decades largely to forget. It could lead to excavation of the sites, and possibly a memorial to the victims.

The massacre in Tulsa was one of the deadliest eruptions of race-motivated violence in the nation’s history. As many as 300 people were killed, and a whole section of the city destroyed, including more than 1,200 homes.

It began on May 31, 1921, after a black man was arrested and accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. (A state commission found in 2001 that it was more likely that the man had just accidentally stepped on the woman’s foot. The assault charges were later dropped.)

Tensions ran high, crowds gathered outside the courthouse and a local newspaper suggested that the man might be lynched, prompting some black residents to arm themselves and patrol the streets. A mob of white men then attacked and set fire to the predominantly black Greenwood neighborhood, including the business district known as Black Wall Street.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/us/tulsa-graves-black-wall-street-massacre.html

Here's an historical website that tells more about the riot.

https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/

Reply to this discussion