n a recent "Activist
Sunday" at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, Atty. Eddie Hadden
gave a riveting talk on the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma race riot that resulted
in the massacre of hundreds of people and now bolsters the case for
reparations.
Before
he spoke, the church's Senior Pastor Rev. Herbert Daughtry asked me, as
the Communications Director for Caucasians United for Reparations and
Emancipation (CURE), to deliver a few words.
I explained to the congregation that the purpose of this organization
is to reach out to fellow white people to have them see that they owe
reparations - big time - and, for those who already are supporters, to
help educate them about how to advocate for reparations most effectively
among whites.
I revealed that one of the points I spend the most time explaining to
other whites is that we will have no input whatsoever into such things
as what reparations should look like, how money will be spent and who
will get it. And I said, "You know us - our sense of white privilege
makes us think it's our right to zip in, take over and tell everyone
else what to do. It comes as a great shock that we're not going to be
doing that in this case!"
I also spoke about what motivated me to join the reparations
struggle: my self-respect. After all, it was my people who committed and
continue to commit these crimes, so who more than me should step up to
the plate and try to rectify them? I ended, "This country has never
ceased waging war on the Black man, and I will not cease my war on that
until it ends or I am 6 feet under - whichever comes first!"
I was moved and humbled when I received a standing ovation.
Then, Atty. Hadden, who is a descendant of the oldest Tulsa race riot
survivor, Joan Hellen Hill Ganbrell, began to relate what she had told
him about the massacre. "I knew that at one time Tulsa was known as the
Black Wall Street," he stated. "It had the largest, strongest Black
economy in America. Bigger, better than Harlem or Chicago, it was the
Black economic engine of this country.
"When she got to the part about the riot she spoke very matter of
factly and kind of built up to it," he said. "First, she talked about
Greenwood Street, the primary commercial street in the Black
neighborhood, just north of downtown Tulsa, which stretched for about a
mile and had all kinds of shops, all of them Black owned. She stated
very emphatically, 'When I grew up in Tulsa, a Black person could go
from cradle to grave and never buy anything from a white person.'"
Hadden talked about the stated reason - a Black man supposedly
assaulting a white woman - and the underlying reason for the massacre.
"The real underlying reason was because the Black people had a
tremendous economic entity in downtown Tulsa and the white people wanted
it. The spark for the riot was an excuse to take that wealth."
As
Joan Gambrell had told it, about a year before, a white man had been put
in jail for stealing horses, and a white mob took him out and lynched
him. The Black community said to themselves, "We will never let them do
this to one of ours." So when the Black man was jailed, some people went
down with their rifles and took him out before he could be lynched.
And that was the spark that started the riot of 1921, the largest,
most devastating racial conflict in the history of this nation. It
marked the first time that aerial bombing was used on United States
citizens. They were also machine gunned by the National Guard. And when
the mobs came through, their purpose was to destroy the economy. They
did so by intentionally burning down businesses. Some 250 homes were
torched as well.
Gambrell told stories of how Black people defended themselves against
the white mobs. One that Hadden remembers in particular was about Peg
Leg Pete, who watched to see which way the mobs were coming. He hid in
the sewer and just as the mob would get in range, he would pop up and
blast away with his two guns, then duck back down into the sewer.
But no matter how hard they fought, the Black community was up
against too much. They finally had to capitulate.
No white person ever went to jail for anything that happened in the
riot. Much of it was blamed on the Blacks who went down to free the
young man before he could be lynched.
"The outcome was devastating because we lost what should have been a
real core to our economic vitality," said Hadden. "All of us are still
paying the price for that loss, and that's where the issue of
reparations comes in."
For many years Tulsans wanted to sweep it under the rug and forget it
ever happened; however, some residents got together and applied pressure
to form a state Reparations Commission to study the issue. In 1999 the
Unitarian Universalist Association of Churches put up $40,000 to start a
fund for reparations for victims of the Tulsa massacre. Joan Gambrell
received two checks.
Eddie Hadden finished with these important words that all white
Americans need to hear, "It's important to understand that you cannot
pay for what we lost there. But when you've done wrong 1) You have to
acknowledge that wrong, 2) you have to apologize, and 3) you have to
make amends as best you can. These three things have to happen before we
can come to the table as brothers and sisters and shake hands. If you
don't acknowledge the fact that you have wronged us, it is difficult for
us to accept you as brothers."
