95th Anniversary of Tulsa’s ‘Black Wall Street’ Race Riot - 100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance


An unidentified Black Man stands outside a tent in Tulsa’s previously-affluent Greenwood District. Following the 1921 riot many African American survivors were forced to live for months in tents and other makeshift accommodations.(photograph courtesy of the Black Holocaust Society)

Most of us have seen a filmed interview or 2 where an African-American veteran of World War I or World War II talks about how they had to fight one war overseas and then returned home to fight a different kind of war—for equal civil rights—here in America. What many of us may not know is how truly war-like some of the confrontations at home could become.

 It is because of what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from May 30-June 1, 1921, and past those dates that many people’s thoughts turn to a different kind of commemoration when observing Memorial Day every year. I was unaware of the event that has become known as the Black Wall Street Riots until conducting research to write Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance.

 To call it a stunning revelation is to put it mildly. Yet Dr. Gregory E. Brown of the Black Holocaust Society cautioned me that I had barely glimpsed a fraction of what I needed to know, whether or not it was included in the #encyclopedia. 

 When comparing the riots of the early 20th century to those of the century before, and to those in recent years, it seems history not only repeats itself. But sometimes does so with a wicked kind of vengeance. What is most intriguing––perhaps––is our tendency to fall into the same traps of self-destruction when the patterns of behavior and conditions outlining them have become so well-worn and visible. Just as parents often admonish growing children that they are “old enough to know better” after they make a costly mistake, humanity as a whole now has more than enough accumulated lessons from history to learn, and to do, better:

 95th Anniversary of Tulsa’s ‘Black Wall Street’ Race Riot - 100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance

Aberjhani

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