Remembering Black Wall Street in Light of the Barack Obama Nomination: "The True Story"

"I’m sure you’ve heard the news: Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. Many (black and white) have been celebrating this “achievement” - the historically conscious among us are concerned about “the other white America” and their fear of "black" leadership at the presidential level.

Thus, it is very timely that we remember Black Wall Street, as Marcus Garvey say "To Be Forewarned is to be Forearmed". Of all the disciplines of study history is best qualified to reward all research.

1921 Tulsa Race Riot:Survivors & Decendants Recall



Survivors: (l-r) Otis Greenville Clark, 102; Wess Young, 88;
Cathryn Young, wife of Wess Young, and Dr. Olivia Hooker.

1921 Tulsa Race Riot:Survivors & Decendants Recall :PART ONE

1921 Tulsa Race Riot:Survivors & Decendants Recall :PART TWO

Mass graves hold the secrets of American race massacre

Text by James Langton, Electronic Telegraph, Issue 1403, Monday 29 March 1999

Retrieved from:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/148.html
Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 4:00 pm est

New York - INVESTIGATORS are searching for the graves of up to 400 black Americans in an attempt to end the 78-year cover-up of one of the worst acts of mass slaughter in the country's history. Dr Clyde Snow, the world's leading authority in forensic anthropology, is preparing to spend the coming months in his home state of Oklahoma, identifying the remains of hundreds of men, women and children believed buried in communal graves. The dead are the long-missing casualties of the Tulsa race riot in 1921, a little-known chapter in American history which, if substantiated, would eclipse even the 1995 Oklahoma bombing as the country's worst civilian atrocity.

Using accounts from newly discovered witnesses and sophisticated ground-penetrating radar, a team of historians and scientists believes that the death toll from the massacre could have been as high as 400.

Dr Snow, 71, has uncovered the bones of Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz "Angel of Death", in Brazil and the victims of atrocities in every continent from Argentina to Ethiopia and Bosnia. "I was used to seeing such things in Bosnia or Africa," he said. "But this is so close to home. It is important to remember these things can happen in your own backyard."

The Tulsa riot has been largely forgotten for more than seven decades, not least because of a campaign by the local authorities to cover up the full extent of the killing in its immediate aftermath.

Dozens of official documents are missing, believed destroyed in the cover-up. Most controversially, a headline and editorial from the Tulsa Tribune that called for whites to "lynch a negro tonight", which is widely believed to have sparked the slaughter, have been removed from every surviving archive edition. A reward is now being offered for a copy of the original newspaper.

New evidence uncovered in the past months backs long-held views among black survivors of the riot that the number of victims was far higher than the official report of between 36 and 100. One 88-year-old man, Clyde Eddy, has come forward to say that he saw boxes of dead blacks being buried secretly in crates in unmarked graves at a city cemetery. Four other possible sites of mass graves are also to be investigated.

The violence followed the arrest of Dick Rowland, a black shoeshine boy on May 31, 1921. Newspaper reports wrongly claimed that he had sexually assaulted a 17-year-old white girl in the lift of the office block where they both worked. Later, gangs of blacks and whites clashed outside the county courthouse where he was being held. In the violence that followed, gangs of heavily-armed whites poured in to town. More than 30 city blocks were leveled, many of them in a thriving commercial district known as "Black Wall Street". Some 10,000 blacks were left homeless and more than 1,000 houses burnt to the ground. Order was re-established only a day later when National Guardsmen entered Tulsa, detaining at least 4,000 blacks in impromptu prison camps.

An official commission of inquiry was first proposed after the 75th anniversary of the rioting in 1996. The 11-man panel of experts voted earlier this month to establish a "historical record" of the riot and to expand the search for bodies. The prime mover of the investigation, a black Oklahoma senator, Don Ross, says there has been "a conspiracy of silence for 75 years. Some people have worked very hard to keep this hidden".

Despite the passage of time, investigators believe they have found at least 40 witnesses to the violence, the eldest of whom was a 16-year-old girl at the time. One eyewitness report speaks of piles of bodies stacked in lorries "like firewood". The search for human remains will concentrate on five possible sites for mass graves, including land near the Arkansas river and what is now a local park. Most of the dead were buried without ceremony - partly because they constituted a serious health hazard in the early summer heat. y Dick Warner, a commission investigator, says: "We are not trying to set any blame, just to find out what really happened." If the remains of a large number of women and children are found, says Dr Snow, then "what we have here is a form of ethnic cleansing".

Tulsa Race Riot Slide Show

Further Reading, Research and Study

Voxunion.com/ Audio Show posted today
Black Wall Street: 87th Anniversary of U.S. Ethnic Cleansing

(World History Archives):

U.S. ethnic cleansing: The 1921 Tulsa Massacre

By Monica Moorehead, Workers World, 10 June 1999. The U.S. government has never cared about the plight of any oppressed grouping. Its policy is to pit one oppressed group against the other to secure its brutal class rule. Example in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921. Investigations begun in 1997 concluded that this riot could more appropriately be described as a massacre. Mass graves of at least 300 Black victims of racist violence have been uncovered.

Seventy-eight years later, Tulsa re-examines deadly race riot

By Rick Montgomery, Kansas City Star, 7 September 1999. In 1921, when 35 blocks of a black district were burned in what may have been America's worst white race riot, the death toll may have approached 300.

Commission Probes Riot After 78 Years

Associated Press, 9 August 1999. Nearly 80 years after white mobs torched Tulsa's black business district, witnesses and survivors get the chance to share their stories with the Tulsa Race Riot Commission for the first time.

Witness To Disaster

By Scott Richardson, Bloomington Pantagraph, 11 February 2001. The recollections of Julia Duff.

The Tulsa Race Riot and Domestic Terrorism

By Kimberly Ellis, 17 May 2001. If body count, property destruction and the generational affect on human life is the measure, then the worst act of domestic terrorism in peacetime America was the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of mostly African Americans in 1921.

Black Wallstreet: Riot Destroys America's Most Affluent Black Community

By Michelle N. Jackson, [28 February 2003]. Black Wallstreet, a thriving 36-block black business district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, housed over 600 black owned and operated businesses at the turn of the century. Black Tulsa continued to thrive until the night of May 31st. That night, airplanes distributing nitroglycerin bombed the affluent community, and an angry white mob began the destruction of Little Africa.

Mass racial violence in the United States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States

Oh Yeah, The Last Part of "The True Story":

BARACK OBAMA -- White Power in Black Face (Part 1)