By Troy Lair

I grew up in Tulsa in the 1960s and 70s. I learned math and science. I took woodworking and metal shop. I learned French and US history. But one thing I never learned about was the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Not a single line in a textbook. Not a whisper between students, white or black. That has changed only recently. Now, it’s known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Just three years ago, a small museum and memorial opened in the Tulsa’s Greenwood District where this terrible event occurred. And, as of 2020, it’s finally part of the Oklahoma school curriculum.

That’s a good start, I guess, but I’ve learned that there is so much more to this story and Oklahoma’s fairly unique relationship with slavery and race helped to set the stage for what many have called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.”

While we were hiking the Natchez Trace through Mississippi, we learned that the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations had adopted the horrible practice of chattel slavery. I’ve since learned that the Cherokee, Creek and even Seminole also had black slaves. As many as 10 percent of Native Americans were slave owners. And when these tribes were forcible removed from their lands in the 1830s to the Oklahoma Territory, they brought their slaves with them.

After the Civil War, the United States negotiated new treaties with each of the five southern Indian nations, abolishing slavery and extending tribal citizenship to more than 8,000 freed slaves in Oklahoma. I knew this. But I did not know about the Curtis Act of 1898, when the five nations were dissolved and both black and Indian tribemen were compelled to accept land allotments and become legal residents of the Oklahoma territory.

This was done primarily to weaken tribal authority, make room for more white settlers, and to pave the way for Oklahoma’s eventual statehood. However, another consequence of this assault on Indian sovereignty was that all-Black communities, and even whole towns, began to spring up throughout Oklahoma. The Greenwood District in north Tulsa was perhaps the most successful example of this. But it was short-lived.

Not surprisingly, Oklahoma was not exempt from the growing racial tensions throughout the nation, fears and jealousies stoked by the Ku Klux Klan and other hateful groups, and the rise of Jim Crow. In fact, the very first law passed by the new State of Oklahoma in 1907 was the segregation of whites and blacks on trains and streetcars. Black communities throughout Oklahoma began to suffer greatly against this onslaught.

In Greenwood, what had taken black families, entrepreneurs and a whole community 50 years to build up took just 2 days in 1921 to burn down.

For too long, I had no idea of my own history.

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https://www.okhistory.org
https://www.greenwoodculturalcenter.org