Black History Month Thread #3: "Did You Know?" (Fort Pillow Massacre)

Every day for the rest of February, I am posting some form of interesting information regarding African American history.




Engraving representing the Fort Pillow Massacre, source unknown

SOURCES:
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/813/Fort_Pillow_a_Civil_War_dishonor
1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History Jeffrey C. Stewart, Gramercy; New York, 2006

Yesterday's Black History Month Thread #2

:kick:

I thought that was interesting...

You know, when I started combing the net for reports on the OH vote the day after, I thought "we're all black now" -- and my thought was that the Thugs are using all the same horrible strategies on all liberal voters that the Black community has always had to fight to get their vote and to get it counted.

And not surprisingly, the Congressional Black Caucus are the best fighters we have.

"Everything old is new again." The intentions and corruption are the same, and yet some things are different, the technology, the need to be much more subtle (at least to the average American) in how the corruptions in suppressing the vote are manifested.

I recently attended a conference saluting Americans of African descent. There were Seve honorees including one of the original Tuskegee Airmen. he is now 84 years old. what was most interesting was their combined and unified feeling that they were only invited to speak or attend social functions during February.

And February is such a sucky month into which to be segregated! They raise a very legitimate issue. It is the same kind of problem with whether their should be a National Museum of Women and the Arts. It is segregatory, but it also displays artists and their works of which many Americans would never otherwise come across or be aware. I would love to meet and hear from a member of the Tuskeegee Airmen anytime of the year.

They are right, they should be invited all during the rest of the year. I started these threads upon coming across a photograph in a book I had never seen before - it just happened to be in February. Then I started doing more than one post upon realizing it WAS February and I thought I would do a few more, emphasizing LESSER KNOWN information, images and stories. Anyone taking issue with that, please be sure and take over these posts in March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, and January. I would love to read them. Plenty of other posts concerning issues of race show up on DU all through the year.

didn't understand the extent of the violence. At least 300 dead, some claim more, horrific violence. My parents grew up in rural Oklahoma in the 1920's & 1930's (born in 1924 and 1927) - and based on what I know of Oklahoma I don't doubt the worst is true.

:(

http://www.ipoaa.com/tulsa_race_riot_overview.htm

a very good, though discussion by Franklin, an African-American historian whose familiy lived through the riot/massacre, and Ellsworth, who wrote the first scholarly study of the event.....several pictures of the destruction

also a discussion of the cover-up, ie why after less than 10 years afterwards mention of the event disappeared from Tulsa, OK, and the US......

from the article

....

For those hearing about the 1921 Tulsa race riot for the first time, the event seems almost impossible to believe. During the course of eighteen terrible hours, more than one thousand homes were burned to the ground. Practically overnight, entire neighborhoods where families had raised their children, visited with their neighbors, and hung their wash out on the line to dry, had been suddenly reduced to ashes. And as the homes burned, so did their contents, including furniture and family Bibles, rag dolls and hand-me-down quilts, cribs and photograph albums. In less than twenty-four hours, nearly all of Tulsa's African American residential district -- some forty-square- blocks in all -- had been laid to waste, leaving nearly nine-thousand people homeless.

Gone, too, was the city's African American commercial district, a thriving area located along Greenwood Avenue which boasted some of the finest black-owned businesses in the entire Southwest. The Stradford Hotel, a modern fifty-four room brick establishment which housed a drug store, barber shop, restaurant and banquet hall, had been burned to the ground. So had the Gurley Hotel, the Red Wing Hotel, and the Midway Hotel. Literally dozens of family-run businesses--from cafes and mom-and-pop grocery stores, to the Dreamland Theater, the Y.M.C.A. Cleaners, the East End Feed Store, and Osborne Monroe's roller skating rink -- had also gone up in flames, taking with them the livelihoods, and in many cases the life savings, of literally hundreds of people.

The offices of two newspapers -- the Tulsa Star and the Oklahoma Sun -- had also been destroyed, as were the offices of more than a dozen doctors, dentists, lawyers, realtors, and other professionals. A United States Post Office substation was burned, as was the all-black Frissell Memorial Hospital. The brand new Booker T. Washington High School building escaped the torches of the rioters, but Dunbar Elementary School did not. Neither did more than a half-dozen African American churches, including the newly constructed Mount Zion Baptist Church, an impressive brick tabernacle which had been dedicated only seven weeks earlier.

Harsher still was the human loss. While we will probably never know the exact number of people who lost their lives during the Tulsa race riot, even the most conservative estimates are appalling. While we know that the so-called "official" estimate of nine whites and twenty-six blacks is too low, it is also true that some of the higher estimates are equally dubious. All told, considerable evidence exists to suggest that at least seventy-five to one-hundred people, both black and white, were killed during the riot. It should be added, however, that at least one credible source from the period -- Maurice Willows, who directed the relief operations of the American Red Cross in Tulsa following the riot -- indicated in his official report that the total number of riot fatalities may have ran as high as three-hundred.1

more....

I'm both teary eyed and proud, as well as black and white.
And proof we can exist together. Peace

We both are learning a lot .

Thanks for posting these :loveya:

I wish I had learned more about this in school.

Lovely movie and book.

I knew of the massacre but did not know the nameplace. Thanks for the info. If there is a hell, may Nathan Forrest reside there still.

I was gonna back in and put Nathan into the post instead of the initials, but then forgot to do it.

n/t