Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street (2021) - full transcript
A documentary celebrating the Black cultural renaissance that existed in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, OK, and investigates the 100-year-old race massacre that left an indelible, though hidden stain on American history.
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- In the 1920s there was
a strong Black community
here in Tulsa
called Greenwood.
These people were the core
of Black entrepreneurship.
People call it
the Black Wall Street.
- Greenwood was like putting
Harlem, Bourbon Street,
and Chocolate City
all in one place.
- But white Tulsans
talked about Greenwood
as Little Africa
or Nigger Land.
- Tulsa was a powder keg
needing only something
to set
the community alight.
♪♪
- Between 100 and 300 people,
most of them Black,
were killed.
- Today, we call it
a mass murder.
They were hastily trying
to get rid of the bodies
by dumping them
in mass graves
around the city.
- We have Tulsans of
an undermined number
who were murdered.
It should not have
taken 99 years.
- Anybody who thinks
that this crime scene
is not gonna speak
doesn't have
the ears to hear.
The ancestors are awake
and the earth is shaking.
[radio tuning]
♪♪
- Ah, yeah!
So rough, so tough.
For all you people
listening to KBOB 89.9,
located right here
in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
This is where we tell
our stories our way.
We can be talking
about these graves,
you know, here in
Tulsa, Oklahoma,
excavation of these graves,
what it means to us.
I guess I'm gonna
start with you, Kristi.
- Uh-oh.
- Uh-oh.
[laughter]
Kristi.
Kristi Williams.
- I came to Tulsa when
I was in the sixth grade.
So, that's been, whoo!
I don't know
how many years.
My mother is from Oklahoma.
There was a strong
Black community in Tulsa
called Greenwood.
These people were the core
of Black entrepreneurship
and they would help you
get your business started.
I mean, Greenwood
was booming.
People call it
the Black Wall Street.
And when you read
the editorials,
and they would also post
events that were happening.
And I imagine they were
having a great time!
♪♪
[sighs]
What I love about Greenwood
is what it was.
And I love what
it could be.
But Tulsa has
a truth problem.
Hiding the truth,
and people
who will not challenge
what is perceived
to be truth.
- What's keeping Tulsa
from being
a great shining city
on a hill
is dealing with the legacy
of the so-called
Tulsa race riot of 1921.
White Tulsans
murdered Black folks
and were hastily trying
to get rid of the bodies
by dumping them in mass graves
around the city.
Awful things were done
to get rid of bodies.
In the late 1990s
when Senator Maxine Horner
and my father,
State Representative Don Ross
created the commission
to study
the Tulsa race riot
of 1921,
which brought
historians, consultants
from around the world
who tried to figure out
what happened in 1921.
I had many conversations
with riot survivors.
- Oh!
- It was one of
the proudest moments that
I can remember
of my father.
When I wrote
their first articles,
uh, "South Tulsa Tales
from the Crypt",
I got a lot of attention.
But nothing was done
until 2018
when the story became
a "Washington Post" story
thanks to a reporter
who came to Tulsa
to do a story about
gentrification of Greenwood.
No mayor,
Republican or Democrat,
never thought about
or even touched the story
of the mass graves.
- You hear about, you know,
history being erased
in, you know,
these authoritarian regimes
or something like that.
You can't imagine
that it would happen
right here
in your own hometown
in the middle
of the United States.
And yet, it had.
♪♪
My name is G.T. Bynum.
I'm the mayor of Tulsa.
I grew up here in Tulsa.
My family has been here
since the 1870s.
My great-great grandfather
was the second mayor of Tulsa.
I heard about the massacre
in 2001 or 2002, maybe.
And I was 24 years old
at this point.
You know, every high school
student in Oklahoma
has to go through
an Oklahoma history course.
It never came up.
My dad had been president of
the Tulsa Historical Society.
It never came up.
Hearing about that,
it was shocking to me
because I love Tulsa.
I couldn't believe that Tulsa
would be the kind of city
where something like that
could happen.
We have Tulsans of
an undetermined number
who were murdered
in this event.
And so, we have
a responsibility, I think,
as a city to try
and find out
where their remains are
and what happened to them.
- You know, our ancestors
literally make up
who and what we are.
We are the physical
manifestation of
our collective ancestors
and their memories.
How can I tap into
his or her brilliance,
their genius,
so that I can really be
the best that I can be?
- I think it's
at Tulsa's best interest
to help heal the wounds,
to go look for our dead
and put them at
a proper rest.
Pay for the damages
and for the lives
that were lost in 1921.
- The city deputized
a lot of white men
during the massacre
who robbed, murdered
a lot of people.
They're accountable.
- The story here is
a story about people.
It's about
the human spirit.
The massacre is a chapter
in a much larger, richer,
more robust narrative.
- Most people you're
going to interview,
you need to ask
this question.
Where are you people from?
And if they say well,
we're from Oklahoma
or Tulsa or Greenwood...
well, when did
they get here?
- Scene Grayson Take 1,
Common Marker, Mid Slate.
- My father,
who's Creek Indian,
was from Oklahoma.
My family is a mixture of
Indian, Black, and white.
And... here I am.
- The story of Oklahoma
really began with
the five civilized tribes
in the 1830s and 1840s.
♪♪
- The Chickasaws,
the Creeks,
the Cherokee, Choctaw,
and the Seminoles,
called the five
civilized tribes.
They were originally
from the South,
from Alabama, Georgia,
parts of Florida,
Tennessee, Mississippi
and the South Carolina area
where these tribes
owned plantations.
- Civilized really
is a veiled reference
to taking on, accepting
Eurocentric ways.
One of those ways was
a practice of chattel slavery
to boost oneself
economically.
- At the Cherokee museum today
are slave Bills of Sale,
including one by then
Principal Chief John Ross.
- I don't ever talk
about it very much
because I think it's
a very shameful part
of, um, of
Cherokee history,
and so I've purposely
avoided involving myself
in that whole issue.
♪ Java man
he made a life ♪
♪ But the mammy
ain't his wife ♪
♪ Choppin' cotton
don't be slow ♪
♪ Better finish out
yo' row. ♪
- Slavery in the five
civilized tribes varied.
What's really important
to remember is that
these people were enslaved.
So, by definition,
it wasn't a good experience
because if you're a slave,
then you don't have
your individual liberty,
which arguably matters
more than anything else.
- Enslaving Black people,
it was part of the economy
of those tribes.
When the Americans now
wanted that land
for their own plantations,
they took the plantations
of the Indians.
This was done in
a legal way...
by passing legislation,
The Indian Removal Act,
the forced migration of
the five civilized tribes
from the Southeastern
United States
into Indian territory,
which is what is
today Oklahoma.
- They said, well,
we're swapping you
this land for the lands
west of the Mississippi
in Indian territory.
You have no choice
but to go.
We know it as
The Trail of Tears.
♪♪
The slaves that the tribes
didn't sell off,
they brought them on
The Trail of Tears.
So, just like
an oxen or a bull
that was pulling a wagon,
the Black folks was
in the same situation.
They didn't have
a choice.
♪♪
- The five civilized tribes
officially aligned themselves
with the Confederacy
during the Civil War
because slaves were still
needed to improve
the economic fortunes
of these tribes.
The Confederacy lost,
by the way.
And so, after
the Civil War,
the Federal government
negotiated with these tribes
on treaties generally
referred to
as the Treaties of 1866.
♪♪
- In Article II of
The Creek Treaty of 1866,
it says that you won't
have slaves anymore.
That's a wrap.
It's not gonna
happen no more.
Those slaves that you have,
they're now your Tribal members.
They're now your citizens.
Black people who had been
with the Indians,
now 10, 15 generations,
either enslaved
or married among them
or their children.
They were called
the Freedmen.
The United States government
forced the Tribes
to divide up this land
with the Freedmen.
- The slaves who belonged
to the Cherokees
could come right back
to the territory
and settle on Indian land.
And when allotment came,
they gave us an equal right
with them in land drawings.
The United States government
forced them to do this,
I have been told.
♪♪
- Okay, so, on this map,
this is the Creek Nation.
This little yellow spot
up here
is Township Tulsa.
The green area are
the allotments of the Freedmen.
Everybody got 160 acres
if you were full-blood Creek,
if you were full Black
from Africa.
If you were female
you got 160 acres.
The Freedmen allotments
totaled 1,192,240 acres.
One million one hundred--
I really want people
to understand that.
That's a lot of land for
a small geographical area.
It's a lot of land
to own.
The most important part
of the story
of Black people here
in Oklahoma
is the Black land ownership.
- As a descendent of
a Creek Freedmen,
I believe land is power,
land is wealth,
land is really the-the core
of Black entrepreneurship.
- You had two types
of Blacks in Oklahoma.
You had those Freedmen.
Then you had state Blacks.
State Blacks came
to Oklahoma looking
for the promised land.
♪♪
- There was a movement
called Boosterism
and this began in 1889
using bulletins
and encouraging Black folks
to migrate from
the deep South
to what is now Oklahoma.
The leader of that movement
was a fellow called E.P. McCabe.
He recruited Black people
to come on the theory
that it represented an escape
from the oppressive deep South,
an opportunity
to prosper economically.
- The time will soon come
when we will be able
to dictate the policy of
this territory, or state.
And when that time comes,
we will have a Negro state
governed by Negroes.
We do not wish
to antagonize the whites.
They are necessary
in the development
of a new country.
But they owe my race homes,
and my race owes to itself
a governmental control
of those homes.
- Land meant rebirth.
It meant renewal.
Land meant survival.
There were 40 other
Black townships around Oklahoma.
The whole state.
Not just Tulsa.
- It was the promised land
for a lot of people
coming out of slavery
wanting to escape
lynchings
and wanting just to raise
their families
in a loving community.
- Freedman had all of
this land with mineral rights
that ultimately made them
very wealthy.
- We put ourselves
in Oklahoma, 1906.
A city called Tulsa.
♪♪
Tulsa boomed after
the discovery of oil.
Tulsa became the oil capital
of the world.
♪♪
The oil drew people
really from all over,
seeking fame and fortune.
The population
just mushroomed.
♪♪
- Back then, people were
moving to the city every day,
whether it's
a sharecropper
leaving some rural
Oklahoma county,
looking for a job
in the oilfields.
Whether it's
a young entrepreneur
who thinks that they can
strike the next one.
People called it
the Magic City
because it just
came out of nowhere.
♪♪
- Back when I was growing up,
they said
the 1921 race riot
and then they changed it
to massacre.
And I wanted people
to know my mother
was a survivor of that.
A lot of people say,
oh, we didn't know
anything about it.
I always knew about it
because my mother
told me about it.
♪♪
- Tulsa has seen a lot of
growth in recent years.
Some might even say it's
showing signs of becoming
a destination city.
- Tulsa is a beautiful
little city
that wants to be
a big city.
♪♪
It's just a little
country town
that had big skyscrapers.
The weather is beautiful.
The cost of living
is wonderful.
People from various
different walks of life.
And I strongly believe
at one time
that we're going
to be the best city
that this world can offer.
Make a left
at the light.
Here we are in the historic
Greenwood community,
AKA the Black Wall Street
of America,
AKA the Negro Wall Street
of America,
AKA my home.
Every day that I've got
money in my pocket,
I go down on Greenwood.
I go get me a haircut.
They give me
the latest scoop,
find out what's going on.
What's up on
Greenwood now?
Yeah, the Tee's Barbershop
is a legacy of my family.
My father got
his hair cut here.
My son got his first haircut
right here.
Well, how long has
a barbershop been on Greenwood?
- The first barbershop
that I'm-- I worked for
was called Mim's Barbershop
and it was in the 1100 block
of North Greenwood.
That was in 1963.
They talking
about Greenwood
and all you can see now
is one block.
But it was businesses
all the way down
from-from Lansing back to
Martin Luther King Drive today.
♪♪
- 1921.
Greenwood was much larger
than just that one block
that you guys see today.
Greenwood's much larger
to the south,
to the east,
to the west,
and to the north.
But the only thing
we have left
is just a sliver
of its former self.
- Every time somebody comes back
every other 20 years,
there's less and less
of Greenwood.
People come here all the time
and say, is this it?
This is Greenwood?
This is what they've
been talking about? Right?
Everybody wants a community
where they can
grow and prosper
and that dollar
can turn over
So, why wouldn't Black folks
want that for themselves?
- I've been ownin'
Blow Out Hair Studio
for 13 years now.
Greenwood is special.
Once you come down here,
you feel the energy.
I would hate to leave
Greenwood.
I will fight tooth and nails
before I leave,
to be honest with you.
- Farmers Insurance
is my first business.
However, I have a studio,
Greenwood Fitness
& Recreational Studio.
You know, we have a debt
to our ancestors here.
You know, we have to bring back
what was once there.
[espresso machine whirring]
And anyone that wants to
do business here
should also be engaged
in that same idea,
that same mentality,
same thought process.
- When I got to Tulsa
in 1984,
I was asked to do a regular
guest editorial column
in the Oklahoma Eagle,
which is
the Black newspaper.
One of my assignments was
to do a historical treatment
of the Greenwood District.
I've had this sort of
obligation of service.
And if I'm going to live
in this community,
I want the community
to be the best it can be.
We can't do that
unless we engage
in the work of
racial reconciliation.
And we can't do that
unless we acknowledge
our history.
♪♪
♪♪
A Black man,
the name of O.W. Gurley
came to Oklahoma
from Arkansas.
He bought land.
He sold land to other
African Americas;
established his first
business in 1906.
Businesses
just proliferated
and they became prosperous,
creating and living
in this insular
economic community
called the
Greenwood District.
The Greenwood District
was Black Main Street.
Mom and pop type operations,
small businesses,
hotels, restaurants,
grocery stores,
theaters, nightclubs.
- You have the offices
of African American lawyers.
There are more than
12 physicians and surgeons
that have their
offices in Greenwood.
- Greenwood had
about 10,000 people.
They were in search
for a way
to be masters
of their own fate.
Today, most of the people
connect to Greenwood
and think
Black Wall Street
and, yes,
that existed here.
You did have people
that were pioneers
and big business tycoons
living in sprawling mansions.
♪♪
And even most people
who were domestic workers
or owning small shops,
living day to day,
everyone has an opportunity
and their skin color
doesn't limit
their capacity here.
That's what makes
Greenwood really special,
that you have
this safe haven,
that oasis
that existed here.
- This is a special edition
of the events
of the Tulsa Disaster.
Mary Jones Parrish
is very important
because she was hired
within a week or two
of the massacre to collect
stories of people--
of survivors,
including herself.
♪♪
- On leavin'
the Frisco Station,
goin' north
to Archer Street,
one could see nothin'
but Negro business places.
Goin' east on Archer
for two or more blocks,
there you would behold
Greenwood Avenue,
the Negroes Wall Street.
- Mary Parrish
was a remarkable woman.
Originally from
Mississippi,
she had set up
a secretarial school
right on Greenwood Avenue
to teach young women
all of these
different skills
so they could get work
as secretaries
to some of Greenwood's
Black doctors and lawyers.
- This section of Tulsa
was a city within a city.
Every face seemed to wear
a happy smile.
♪♪
- We're sitting in
the Mackey house.
That's Lucy.
The Mackeys
are really emblematic
of the kind of
middle-class Black person
who lived in
the Greenwood community
during its peak.
But I think if we only
fixate on the things
that are glamorous
and more flattering
and we forget that
the Greenwood District
is a part of the city
called Tulsa.
You have a Black
segregated community
that's not getting its
fair share of tax dollars
for infrastructure
like roads,
like sewer systems,
and things like that.
♪♪
- There was so much money
in Tulsa these days,
but here's the reality.
Money plays
a complicated role
in the intermingling
between the races.
- Affluence, wealth,
prosperity
created this tie-in
between Black Tulsans,
white Tulsans,
but it's all about
perspective.
White Tulsans
talked about Greenwood
as Little Africa
or Negro Land.
- White Tulsans could control
what justice looks like...
could control the narrative,
could control
whatever they want.
[children playing]
- I would say that I had
a very neutral attitude
about Blacks.
We had, uh, Black maids
work for our household,
but I knew that there was
separation of seating--
restaurants, motels.
♪♪
- Through the years,
I met all sorts of people,
including white people
whose family was in Tulsa
during the people
of the massacre.
You were telling me
that you were born,
uh, in 1915.
- Uh-huh.
Down on 9th and Denver
is where my parents
bought a little house down there
when they got married.
- Did you, as a child,
ever have occasion
to visit the African American
community in Tulsa?
- I-I think that
I would have been, uh,
probably just going
to and from the homes
where our maids lived.
- My mother always
had the colored help.
She just- she got along well
with people and--
- When you say help,
you mean domestic,
as domestic help?
- Yes, domestic help.
Um-hmm.
- My challenge, my charge
really is to help people
come to grips
with their past,
which is not to say that
every person in America's evil
or every
white person is evil.
It's to acknowledge
a series of systems
that exist here
that advantage some people
and disadvantage
other people.
- We were taught
by innuendo
to dislike
or to actually hate.
I think the thing
that bothered me the most
was not being able
to ask questions
and have a discussion
or hear about it
as just a kid growing up,
a white kid.
- The only reason that
Black Wall Street existed
was because of necessity.
These people were not able
to participate
in the regular economy run
by the dominant culture
because of segregation.
- The vast majority
of people
who lived in Greenwood
were not wealthy.
♪♪
But they had regular jobs
in the white community
and they had
a regular paycheck
in the white community.
You've got a lot of
well-to-do white Tulsans
who are going to hire
servants, cooks,
domestic workers.
They would collect their
paycheck at the end of the week
and they would spend it
back in Greenwood.
You know, in Tulsa,
like in other southern cities,
African Americans
can't go into a department store
and try on clothes.
But they can shop
in their own neighborhoods.
So, what happens is
the merchants in Greenwood
had this captive population
and the money just flows
and flows and flows.
- And it was successful
because they were supported
by people
who looked like them,
would purchase from them,
do business with them.
- So, there's people that
are living all different lives
and different
social standings
but everyone here
is making a living
whatever way they-
they decide to.
And they're not feeling
the pressures
and the violence
from the outside world.
- I did not grow up here,
and I'd recognized
the importance that it had,
not just for
this community,
but for the country
and also the world.
And I wish that Greenwood
would be a wonderful community
that would radiate
the likeness of the Lord.
- 1920 Greenwood
was booming.
♪♪
It was a strong community.
- A.C. Jackson was
a prominent Black surgeon.
The Mayo Clinic said
that Dr. A.C. Jackson
was the most able
Negro surgeon in America.
Simon Berry
was a businessman.
His first business
was a jitney service.
A.J. Smitherman
was the editor and publisher
of the Tulsa Star.
His paper included
editorials and articles
really talking about
social justice.
- When you think about
Stradford,
you think about what elegance
and grace looks like.
- By the beginning
of 1917,
I had amassed
quite a fortune.
I owned fifteen
rental houses,
a sixteen room
brick apartment building.
The rental value
was $350 a month.
The income from other sources
were triple.
I had a splendid
bank account
and was living on
the sunny side of the street.
I decided to realize
my fondest hope,
and that was to
erect a large hotel in Tulsa
exclusively for my people.
- J.B. Stradford built
the Stradford Hotel.
- It's 54 rooms
and crystal chandeliers.
- It was acknowledged
in the United States
of America.
It was the crown jewel
of Greenwood.
- Loulah and John Williams,
they were really active
in the community.
Here they had
a rooming house
and a garage
and a confectionary.
Williams Dreamland Theatre
was a grand structure,
really one of the jewels
in the Greenwood community
at the time.
- Imagine putting Harlem,
Bourbon Street,
and Chocolate City
all in one place.
A train stopping
on a Friday night
coming to Greenwood
with excess of 500 people
to listen to
all the greats.
♪♪
- There are speakeasys,
there are pool halls,
there's a lot of action
going on.
In Greenwood you had
hell on one side
and the holy ghost
on the other.
- The church life in those
days were very strong
and the church
was a source,
not just for God,
but also for community.
[piano playing blues music]
♪♪
- Well-to-do families,
Black families in Tulsa
would have pianos.
They would have their daughters
take piano lessons.
You might hear
a blues song,
but you might also hear
a Mozart sonata.
[piano playing classical music]
It's part of
the blood of the city.
This is a part of
the heartbeat of the town.
- And the sky was the limit.
There was nothing
that you could not do.
- When thinking about Tulsa
in the early part
of the 20th century,
it's important to remember
where the Greenwood
community is.
It abuts downtown,
separated by the Frisco tracks.
If you live in a society
in which white supremacy
is the prevailing
paradigm,
but you live in a community
in which you can look across
the dividing line,
the Frisco tracks,
and see Black folks
driving nice cars
and wearing fur coats
and living in nice homes,
then it causes
cognitive dissonance,
garden variety jealousy.
That land was desired
by corporate interest
in Tulsa.
We know that.
The idea was to remove
the Black folks from the land,
move them farther north,
and use the land
for what was considered
to be higher
and better purposes.
- Tulsa appears now to be
in danger of losing its prestige
as the whitest town
in Oklahoma.
Does Tulsa wish
a double invasion
of criminal
Negro preachers,
Negro shysters,
crap shooters, gamblers,
bootlegs, prostitutes,
and smart alecks
in general?
♪♪
- We took Oklahoma history
in the ninth grade.
And in our--
in our textbook,
there was probably a page,
or a page and a half
about the race massacre.
We did not cover that
in class.
I read it because I was
really interested in history
and it was
a real revelation.
It brought home just
how pervasive racism was
in the United States
and in the social system.
- Historians often
refer to the early part
of the 20th century
in America
as the low point of
race relations in America.
- African Americans
are under attack
in all different quarters
in all parts of the Union.
This is an era where
the nature of lynchings
are getting more
and more barbaric.
- Lynching is a form of
domestic terrorism
that targeted primarily
African Americans.
In events to which people
brought their children,
lynching was widespread
in the United States.
That there would be such
a film like "Birth of a Nation"
produced at the time...
neither shocks
nor surprises me.
♪♪
- "Birth of a Nation",
a landmark film
that came out in 1915.
Black people were-
were portrayed
in a very
demeaning manner.
...the Ku Klux Klan
as heroes.
♪♪
- "The Birth of a Nation"
attests to the purity
and chastity of white women
and Black men mixing
with white women
is a distinct taboo,
which often did result
in the death
of the Black men.
- The film became,
uh, you know,
pretty much of
a national phenomenon.
President Woodrow Wilson
endorsed it.
It showed all over
the country.
It showed in Tulsa
in the convention hall.
It certainly validated
these ideas.
- How do you survive
if you're a Black person
in America
during this era?
And part of the answer came
through African American
veterans of World War I
who'd fought in combat units
in France
where they were treated
with respect
and with honor.
And they came back
to the United States
and they found none.
- We have Black veterans
in Greenwood.
They fought for
their country,
they fought for
their freedom.
So, when they come home,
they expect to be respected.
But what they come home to
is, again, more Jim Crow laws,
more prejudice,
and more restrictions
on their freedom
that they fought for.
- After World War I,
in uniform being lynched
by white mobs.
It's pretty stunning
and remarkable.
The idea is we're going to
show you what your place is.
We don't care whether
you've fought for the country.
When you're here,
you play by our rules.
- The Ku Klux Klan
is kind of the bogeyman.
I think, especially
as white people,
we load up all the bad stuff
and we attribute it
to this vague group
over here
that we call
the Ku Klux Klan.
Even the people who
considered themselves friends
of the Black people
didn't really consider them
equals in a social way.
I mean, they-
they didn't want them--
they didn't want them killed,
they didn't want them cheated,
they didn't want
their houses burned down
but they didn't want
to sit next to 'em
in the restaurant either.
In those times,
Tulsa was like
a lot of other places.
You had African Americans
who were just sort of tired
of being sent
to the back of the bus,
literally and figuratively.
They were ready
to stand up for their--
for their right.
There had to have been
tension building up.
- The Tulsa Tribune
published a series
of inflammatory articles...
...that really fomented
hostility in the
white community
against the Black community.
♪♪
Tulsa was a powder keg,
a tinderbox
needing only something
to set the community
alight.
- Many years ago,
I was at a cemetery.
I was taking pictures
of the tombstones.
And I heard
this strange noise.
Tsshh.
I looked around;
it was nothing there.
Then I heard a "tsshh"
to the right.
Then I heard that same sound
surrounding me.
Tsshh.
I ran out of there.
That's when I saw
a flock of redbirds
come out of the trees.
I thought that was
unusual.
Normally you see
one or two redbirds,
but I never saw
a flock of them
flying together like that.
And I told a good friend
of mine and she said,
you saw redbirds
in a cemetery?
Oh, baby, that's nothin'
but an omen, she said.
That was the spirit
of the dead telling you
to go tell somebody
that they are not at peace.
- The ancestors
are speaking to us.
The ancestors
are throwing clues at us.
We have a responsibility
and an obligation
to find the truth.
- The mass graves
investigation
started out in 1997,
actually,
with Don Ross,
Kavin Ross' father.
- When he was first told
about the massacre,
my father, he thought
it was just a lie,
that it didn't happen.
It was not
in the history books.
But then in high school,
he heard first-hand
from survivors
who were schoolteachers
at the time
and that was something
that stuck with him
until he got
to the point
where he could do
something about it.
- White political leaders
tried to bury the truth
along with all those
Black victims of the riot.
And they pretty much
succeeded for 76 years
until 1997,
when the state legislature
appointed a commission
of 11 people to finally
uncover the truth
about the horrific
riot of 1921.
- Don Ross went to the governor
and the legislature and said,
we've never had
an official study
of this
little-known event.
- That was inspired by
the Oklahoma City bombing.
Uh, when they said it was
the largest urban disaster
in America, wrong.
Uh, more people were killed
than any such disaster,
wrong.
- I was asked to be the
historian for the commission.
During that period,
I was thinking
maybe we could use this
to figure out
how many people died
and where they were buried.
- I'm ready.
- Kavin, you good?
- Go ahead.
- Hi, I'm Eddie Faye Gates,
chair of the
Survivors Committee
of the Oklahoma Legislative
Commission to study
the Tulsa Race Riot
of 1921.
- I was a videographer for
the race riot commission report.
I was on it to accompany
Eddie Faye Gates,
who was the commissioner
at the time.
Her job was to record
the testimonies
of the riot survivors.
♪♪
- We have located fifty-one
actual living riot survivors,
ages 78 to 104.
No research takes the place
of eyewitness testimony,
and that is why this day
is so significant.
Mrs. Simms.
Go on and tell it.
- You will never
forget that riot.
That's something that will be
always in your remembrance.
- This has been the age-old
story here in Tulsa.
I never knew what happened
to my great uncle,
never saw
my great aunt again.
You hear those
stories over the ages.
Folks were coming in
with oral history,
where bodies could
be buried.
- We interviewed over
three hundred Tulsans
to identify what we thought
were three very likely spots
in town where massacre victims
were buried in unmarked graves.
- Clyde Eddy took some
of the same steps today
he first took
78 years ago,
days after
the Tulsa Race Riot.
He was ten at the time,
drawn by the curious sight
of men digging a trench
with large boxes
stacked nearby.
- Clyde Eddy talked about
at the age of ten,
when he was at
the Oaklawn Cemetery,
he saw these giant boxes.
He and his cousin would
go to one of these crates.
- We opened the first box,
and there were, um--
excuse me.
There were three bodies
of Black people.
The stench was terrible.
- There were other boxes.
Lift up the lid,
and that saw that there
was Black folks
inside of that one.
Black people
in a box, dead.
That's something that would be
etched in your mind forever,
and so for him to tell
a story with such conviction.
I said, let's
dig 'em up now.
- So many people have said
there were no bodies there.
But you know,
all the Black folk
in the community,
we believe they're there.
Those stories were
passed on to us.
- Inch by inch,
crews are digging into
the history of
the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Tulsa's mayor, G.T. Bynum,
initiated the investigation
to try and find
if there are any victims
buried in mass graves.
- There was a systematic
cover up of the event.
It should not have
taken 99 years.
- We have to pay attention,
we have to pick up
the charred baton
that has been left
in our hands,
and figure out where
the screams are coming from.
♪♪
- Monday,
May 30, 1921.
It happened to
be Memorial Day.
- May 30th could have happened
at any point in time
because Tulsa was
already a powder keg.
We do know that
the deathly KKK members
that are part
of the police force,
proudly marching down
the street on Memorial Day.
People describe
it as a massacre,
I've been calling it a war.
- There's systemic causes for
what happened here in 1921,
but you fixate on
this trigger incident
that involved a Black boy
and a white girl on an elevator.
The teenage boy is a boy
named Dick Rowland.
He's at work
on Memorial Day,
shining shoes
in Downtown Tulsa.
- Dick Rowland was
nineteen years old
in the spring of 1921.
He worked in
a white-owned
and white-patronized
shine parlor
on Main Street
in Downtown Tulsa.
- His nickname
is "Diamond Dick"
so he's known to be
this flashy young guy.
[laughing]
He is just another person
in the community
that everyone knows,
but he's-he's never been
seen as a troublemaker.
- There's not
a restroom facility
in the shine parlor,
so the white owner
has arranged for them
to walk down Main Street
to the Drexel Building.
On the fourth floor there was,
quote, "a colored restroom".
Something happens when
he enters the elevator.
Elevators are-are manually
operated by a wheel,
it takes a great amount
of skill to get the floor
of the elevator
and the actual floor to line up.
That particular elevator
was very difficult to center,
so the belief is,
that as Dick walked
onto the elevator,
he tripped and just,
by reflex,
threw his hands out
to cushion the fall,
that he grabbed Sarah
by the shoulder,
ripped her dress,
she screams,
and he realizes this
is a dangerous moment for him,
and he runs out
of the elevator
and takes off.
But there was a white clerk
at the Renberg's Clothing Store
who heard the scream,
saw Dick run out
of the building,
and in his mind he puts
two and two together,
and says, "This is
an interracial rape attempt."
The Tulsa Police
are summoned,
but they don't put out
an all-points bulletin
for Dick Rowland,
they don't go
searching for him.
They're not particularly
worried about this event.
However, the Tulsa Tribune,
Tulsa's white daily
afternoon newspaper,
decides to portray
this incident
in a completely
different light.
- The "Tribune"
published an account
of the elevator
incident entitled,
"Nab Negro for Attacking Girl
In an Elevator".
The "Tribune" essentially
claimed that Dick Rowland
tried to rape Sarah Page
in broad daylight
in a public building
in Downtown Tulsa.
The article went
out of its way
to make Sarah Page
look virtuous,
and, as a corollary, to make
Dick Rowland look villainous,
playing on that
white female,
Black male taboo.
- So the next morning,
Tuesday, May 31st,
the Tulsa Police decide,
"We're gonna pick up
Dick Rowland".
So they go to where he lives
with his mother in Greenwood,
arrest him,
take him to
the courthouse, and like,
as with other prisoners,
put him up on the--
in the fourth floor jail.
The first edition
of the "Tulsa Tribune"
hits the streets
around 3:00, 3:30.
Within thirty minutes
there's lynch talks
on the streets of Tulsa.
Lynch talk soon turns
into a lynch mob.
Meanwhile, Black people
are trying to figure out
what's going on,
what to do,
how to organize.
On the stage
of the Dreamland Theatre,
an African-American
World War I Vet
jumps up on the stage and says,
"Shut this place down.
"We ain't gonna let
this happen here."
"It" being a lynching.
There was a feeling
amongst Black vets
that if trouble comes my way,
I ain't dodgin' it.
In Tulsa there had not been
an African-American lynched,
and there were Black men
and women who were prepared
to make sure that
didn't happen.
Around 10:30 at night
or a little before then,
a rumor gets greenlit
that whites are
storming the jail.
Seventy-five
African-American men,
all armed,
drive to the courthouse.
They march up
to the courthouse,
they go up to the sheriff,
who's waiting for them
on the steps,
and they say, "We are here
to help to protect the prisoner
"if you need our help."
Sheriff McCullough says,
"Get the hell out of here,
"I don't want you."
[crowd yelling]
As they are leaving,
an elderly white man
goes up to
a tall Black vet,
and says, "Where you goin'
with that gun?"
And the vet says, "I'm gonna
use it if I need to."
The white man says,
"Like hell you are."
Tries to get the gun,
there's a struggle,
a shot goes off.
[gun shot]
The worst incident
of racial violence
in American history begins.
- As the evening starts
to fall, May 31st,
by seven o'clock there
are already hundreds of people
circling around
the courthouse.
By nine, ten is where
things really start to reach
this sort of, uh boiling point,
and shots are fired.
At the same time all this
is happening downtown.
You have people that
are still waiting
to go to their prom
at Booker T. Washington.
You have people that
are still going to movies
in the Dreamland
and the [indistinct] Theater.
You have people that are still
moving about their lives
that aren't aware
of what's happening.
- We went down to
a late show, movie.
Somebody came in and shouted,
"Nigger fight! Nigger fight!"
We went out the door
and just got there
when a Negro ran out
of the alley.
The minute his head
showed outside,
somebody shot him.
And, uh, this man
was shot and rolled out
in the middle of the street
with a revolver in his hand.
And this crowd around him
wouldn't let anybody touch him,
pick him up, wouldn't let
an ambulance take him.
But he was the first man
that was shot in the riot.
- Nobody cares about
Dick Rowland anymore.
The white mob is now out
to get any Black person
in their sights.
- The teeming white mob
spilled over the Frisco tracks
into the Greenwood community...
- ...carrying rifles,
pistols,
matches, and cans
of gasoline.
♪♪
- In the words of one of
the massacre survivors,
"All hell broke loose."
Looting...
shooting...
burning, destroying
everything in sight.
- People are taking
shelter in their homes
or packing up
their stuff and fleeing,
whatever they can.
- My Mother said,
"Here they come,
"here they come."
And they came in
the house with torches
and they set
the house on fire.
Oh, it was like a nightmare.
Everything was in flames.
- On the evening
of May 31st,
my little girl
had not retired
but was watching the people
from the window.
She said, "Mother,
I see men with guns."
Then I ran to the window
and looked out.
There I saw many people
gathered in little squads,
talking excitedly.
There was a great shadow
in the sky,
and upon second look
we discerned that this cloud
was caused by
fast-approaching airplanes.
It then dawned
upon us that the enemy
had organized in the night
and was invading our district
the same as the Germans
invaded France.
I took my little girl,
Florence Mary,
by the hand and fled out
the West door on Greenwood,
running amidst
showers of bullets.
- I was so afraid,
because bullets were
coming down around us.
All of the planes
were up in the air,
shooting down, and I could
hear those bullets falling.
There were a lot
of people running,
dodging the bullets,
and just afraid.
- They're shooting people
on sight,
even if you're complying
with their demands.
That's what happened
to Dr. A.C. Jackson.
- A.C. Jackson was
a prominent Black surgeon,
he was accosted
at his home,
he exited his house
in compliance
with the demands
of the mobsters,
hands held high.
But he was actually gunned
down by a young white man
and he ultimately
bled to death.
Black men put up
a vigorous, robust defense.
They were outgunned,
and outnumbered,
and overmatched.
The violence
lasted sixteen hours,
a unit of the National Guard
sent in from Oklahoma City.
♪♪
When the dust settled,
at least 1,250 homes
in the Black community
were destroyed.
Between 100 and 300 people,
most of them Black,
were killed.
♪♪
- So twenty years ago,
we had a mayor here
that said, "Hey.
"We're gonna go into Oaklawn
and were gonna excavate,
"because we have an idea
of where some bodies might be."
- We brought in ground
penetrating radar;
they showed that there were
anomalies in these areas.
- I was twenty years younger,
standing out in Oaklawn.
We were all out there,
but we were about
to do this, right?
They called it
off abruptly
because there was
a white family
that did not want
that area to be disturbed.
They suggested that
there was a, perhaps,
a white body that
was buried underground
and that that body
would have been disturbed
as you're looking
for race massacre dead.
- Our effort got
caught up in politics.
- A bunch of lawmakers,
they pretty much
didn't really care.
It made the state
look bad.
- I am thoroughly convinced
that the state of Oklahoma
was not culpable.
- We were shut down
by the City of Tulsa,
and at that point,
I, you know,
I thought the ballgame
was over.
- For some people it's like,
"Why are you guys
desecrating the grave?"
- Right.
- We're not
desecrating graves,
we're finding out the truth.
- And those answers--
ancestors had never
had a proper burial.
- Absolutely.
- I was on the City Council
at the time.
Years later,
a local journalist--
- My name's Lee Roy Chapman,
and this is "Public Secrets".
- He did a video series
about Tulsa's hidden secrets.
[squeaking]
And one of them,
I was watching...
- Um, Oaklawn Cemetery
has been rumored
for nearly a hundred years
to be the, uh,
location of a mass grave,
uh, attributed to
the Tulsa Race Riot.
- What's my
immediate reaction?
There is no way that
could possibly be true.
The mass grave
in Oaklawn cemetery,
where my great grandparents
are buried,
and that no one would have
ever bothered to look.
This is a historic day
for Tulsa and for our country
as we begin a test excavation
in Oaklawn Cemetery.
- There's nothing abstract,
there's nothing theoretical.
This is not
a research project.
This is an investigation.
- Scientists are set to
finally break ground
in the effort to find victims
of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
- Nearly 100 years later,
the families to victims
of the 1921 Tulsa
Race Massacre
could get answers
and closure.
- It should have been done
well before now,
but it wasn't.
That is a baton that's
been handed to us,
and it is--
it is not an easy race.
The initial excavation will
be focused on a location
within Oaklawn Cemetery that
we felt had a high likelihood
for encountering
a mass grave.
We focused on
an anomaly,
uh, that had
been detected.
That anomaly to us
was an indication
that it was possibly
a mass grave.
As we were excavating down,
we very quickly realized
that we had materials
that didn't really belong there.
- The search turned up
many old artifacts,
but after reaching three
and a half meters in depth,
the excavation was
called off on Wednesday.
- We do not have indications
of a mass grave, um,
in this portion
of Oaklawn Cemetery.
There is a-a heavy weight
of responsibility
that comes with trying
to assist in this effort.
There is that
sense of optimism
that comes from the fact
that the investigation
has been reopened.
But you-you also are
worried because it has--
there's a perpetual feeling
that the other shoe
is gonna fall,
and this expectation
of disappointment.
But it's extremely important
to remember why we're there
and who we're
trying to find.
- Sometimes stuff just makes
you want to just give up,
but other times those
are those times like,
no, you keep going,
'cause the ancestors are
not gonna let you give up,
they're gonna
keep pushing you.
When you say you quit,
they say, "No, you don't",
it puts you right back up
and do it all over again.
- That's why
it's cold today.
The ancestors are like,
"You're gonna feel the chill
of my bones today, man."
- Ooohh.
- Yes.
- Ooohh.
- That's what-that's
what they want us to feel.
They want everybody to feel
what that feels like.
- There's all kinds
of good things
that you find
in South Tulsa.
You'll find computer stores,
you'll find bookstores,
you'll find
twenty-four hour pharmacy,
you'll find
health food stores.
None of those things
can be found in North Tulsa.
North Tulsa's a food desert,
and that's got to change.
- One of the things that
people don't generally know
is that the Greenwood community
actually came back
after it was destroyed.
- It was rebuilt because
the rural community, uh,
rural lands were still
owned mostly by Black folk.
But by the 1960s,
these towns started
to disappear.
- There is this idea that
Greenwood was destroyed in 1921,
and that's the end
of the story.
But there's 100 years after that
that we need to talk about.
- Tulsa is just a tale
of two cities.
North Tulsa's a predominantly
African-American community.
And South Tulsa you have
predominantly white community.
This city of Tulsa is
the most segregated city,
geographically,
economically,
socially, and all
of the above.
- Growing up in North Tulsa,
I started to notice
buildings looked different,
institutions
looked different.
Wow, there's
a whole 'nother world
I wasn't even aware of.
We've already
experienced dislocation,
urban removal,
eminent domain,
all of those things.
Those people who lived in
Greenwood saw its demise twice.
[explosion rumbling]
- The people who have lived in
an urban center for many years
certainly do have rights.
However, they do not
have the right to frustrate
the creative efforts of
very diligent people
who are trying
to bring back
vitality, and wholeness,
and beauty into the city.
- I grew up at
1415 North Greenwood.
We owned the house
on Greenwood.
When I grew up, I had
a church in front of me,
right literally behind me
was the school that I went to,
to my right was
the Black hospital
that I was born in,
that was Morton Hospital,
and then we had
Jack's Memory Chapel
right there,
so the whole cycle of life
was right within a block
and a half of me where I lived.
That's the community
I grew up in.
As happened in every city
across this nation
in the sixties, seventies,
there was something
called urban,
what they call renewal,
what I call urban removal.
Yeah, I love that.
Yeah, when they want
to talk about Black folks,
right, instead of saying,
"Black folks live over here.
"That's the urban area."
Right?
"That's urban music."
Just call things
as they are.
- To whites,
the words urban renewal
have a promising,
hopeful sound.
But to Blacks,
they mean move out.
In a block like this,
as many as a thousand men,
women, and children
have been forced out
in the name of some
progress yet to come.
- So urban renewal was coming
through telling you all,
"Those houses that
you're living in here,
"we have a better use"
as they say,
"a greater use
for this land."
And they tell you,
"We're gonna renew
your community,
"and this is gonna be better
then you left it."
They moved us out of our houses
for the "greater good".
We were dislocated
from our home.
And when I tell you
there's still a big space
at 1415 North Greenwood,
nothing was ever built there,
but they told us we had to go.
And then you saw
the decline of Greenwood
as you saw folks moved out
of their homes.
- The reason and the causes
of this economic downturn
was the construction
of the Crosstown Expressway
that cut through
the heart of Greenwood.
In fact, they took
the heart out.
Urban renewal and this
major highway construction
really took out the--
most of the entrepreneurial,
uh, businesses
that were there.
- Just this area's changed
a lot with the, uh--
uh, Crosstown coming through.
Hasn't a lot
of the business moved out?
- That's correct.
- What happened in Tulsa
happened all over
the United States.
Highways were located
right through the heart
of communities of color.
- I started photographing
back in 1969
here at North Tulsa,
the Greenwood area.
And what I saw in
the Greenwood area was that
there were a lot of businesses
that were closing up.
One of those photographs
that I took on Greenwood,
he was a tall gentle,
and erect proud Black man,
I call it Baltimore Barbershop
that I took in 1970.
He went to the window
and started
looking out the window,
and what he saw was
bulldozers tearing down
buildings in front of him.
And I asked him
what he thought about that,
and he said, "Well, I think
I'm gonna be next."
So I took his photograph
and, uh,
the next day I came back,
sure enough,
his business was gone
and so was he.
Most of the businesses
in that area were boarded up,
and all that remained
was a [indistinct]
of Black Wall Street.
It was no longer
Black Wall Street,
it was a ghost town.
♪♪
- Oh man, I tell ya...
- We owned
a skating rink there.
During the riot
it got burned down,
our home got burned down.
We lost all of this--
our property, our home.
- Every church,
our schoolhouses was blown up.
People were killed,
and you go in
and see the people mangled.
And then some people
you never heard of anymore of,
you don't know where they--
whether they were killed,
whether they'd just left town.
- On the morning of June 1st,
after the massacres,
the National Guard
and some police
and maybe some civilians
began rounding up
all of the African-American
population in Greenwood
that they-that they could.
There were between five and
seven thousand people detained.
And the reason given
for that was that
it was for
their own protection,
that they were gonna be put
some place safe.
Everybody who was still
in custody
was moved to the fairgrounds
east of Greenwood.
They set up cots
in a kitchen,
they dug latrines.
The people who stayed there
were expected to work.
The women would
prepare the meals,
the men were sent out to work
cleaning up Greenwood.
- Folks in these
internment camps
had to have a green card.
- I don't know how they got
these little cards
printed so fast,
but everybody had
a little I.D. card,
school children and all,
told what you did,
and you had to have
that little I.D.
wherever you went.
- And to get out of these
internment centers,
they needed to be countersigned
by a white person.
Essentially, a white person
would vouch for them
and get them out of
these internment centers.
The theory at--
by the authorities
was that this was done
to protect people
from physical harm
in a context of
this chaotic situation.
There wasn't a lot of
justification that was needed
because who has power
and who doesn't?
- The people who had homes
to go to went to those homes.
Some people left town.
The Red Cross
was operating out of
Booker T. Washington
High School,
and the Red Cross would buy them
a train ticket
if they wanted to leave town.
- I found that
the high school building
was still standing.
I saw a big white streamer
with a red cross on it.
I felt pangs of joy,
for this meant to me
that I was getting in close
touch with friends again.
I breathed a prayer
of thanks.
- The Red Cross began
obtaining these tents
that people could live in.
- Many Black families
spent days, weeks, months
living in tent cities
on the charred earth.
- Everything they had was gone,
and they were expected
to immediately
just go about their lives
like nothing had happened.
Y-You have to think
the trauma was-was terrible.
- When we reaching the house,
I saw my piano
and all my elegant furniture
piled in the street.
My safe had been broken open,
all my money stolen,
all my silverware,
cut glass,
all my family clothing,
and everything of value
had been removed,
even my family Bible.
Our car was stolen
and most of my large rugs
were taken.
I lost seventeen houses
that paid me an average
of over $425 per month.
♪♪
- Riot is a term of art, really.
These events
throughout the nation
during this period were called
"Race Riots".
And it's significant in part
because insurance polices,
for example,
during that period
often had
exclusionary clauses.
And so if your damage
was occasioned by riot
or civil unrest,
the insurance company
didn't have to pay.
One of the things
we know is that
a number of people in the mob
that destroyed
the Greenwood community
were deputized by
local law enforcement officers;
much of that was done
by a wink and a nod.
Those people knew that
they were not going to be
impeded by
law enforcement.
The massacre was referred to,
in some documents,
as a Negro uprising,
which suggests that
the Black community's
to blame.
- In the immediate aftermath
there was a grand jury,
and it indicted,
I think it's 88 people.
Some of whom were white,
most of whom were Black.
- First was the indictment
of J.B. Stradford
who owned a hotel
and was a lawyer.
A.J. Smitherman was the editor
and publisher of
"The Tulsa Star",
which is the leading
Black newspaper.
He, along with a number
of other Black men
was indicted
for inciting a riot.
- Let the blame for
this Negro uprising
lie right where it belongs:
on those armed Negroes
and their followers
who started this trouble
and who instigated it.
And any persons who seeks
to put half the blame
on the white people
are wrong.
- It is one of the big ironies
of-of all of this
that the two people
who are most often seen
at the center of it
are two people
that we know very,
very little about.
Sarah Page left
the day after the massacre.
She left town
and never came back
as far as we know.
Dick Rowland, it appears,
remained in jail
through the summer
and then was released.
In September,
the county attorney said
he'd received a letter
from Sarah Page
asking not to press charges.
People had really
lost interest in it.
- No white person's
ever held accountable
for the some 100 to 300 deaths
that we believe occurred, uh,
during the massacre.
- I've never spoken to
a white Tulsan
who would admit to be
a member of the mob
during the riot.
And one reason is simply this:
there's no statute
of limitations on murder.
These homicides have now entered
the historic realm,
they can no longer
be prosecuted,
there's no one left
to prosecute.
- The massacre destroyed
the superstructure,
but miraculously
the basement survived.
This is a picture
of the basement.
So this picture was taken
August 1921,
and the massacre happened
May 31st through June 1st.
People came and hid
in our basement
during the massacre.
You see ashes
above every window piece
except the back window.
So this is the space
where that window frame
that we saw
that had no ash on top of it,
it's still right there.
If you can imagine people
being in this room
not knowing if the fire
would somehow come through
or come from above,
but they managed to survive
in this space.
When I learn about bodies
being dumped in mass graves
and not ever receiving
a proper burial,
that touched me as a pastor
on a visceral level.
♪♪
As a pastor,
when you bury somebody
it's more than just
giving a eulogy.
When we do what we call
the committal,
which is that ashes to ashes,
that dust to dust
over their bodies,
that is our way of
spiritually releasing them
to go wherever
they're going.
And to deny that to the people
that were dumped or killed
during the race massacre
is evil!
It shows you that
at that time period
people didn't even care about
the souls of Black folks,
let alone their bodies.
I believe there is
no expiration date on morality,
and if it was wrong in 1921
and that it has not
been repaired for today,
then we ought to
do something about it.
- One of the most basic,
I think, responsibilities
that a city has to
the residents who live there
is if you're murdered,
we'll do everything we can
to try to find out
what happened to you,
to find your remains
for your family,
and to render justice for you
and your family.
- It makes me feel, um,
kind of like Charlie Brown said,
"good grief."
Because it's good that
we unveiled the story,
but it's grief to us
as we unveil it.
Tell it right.
They took those planes
from that oil field
and they planned
an aerial attack,
and that's what
makes it different
from all the other
race riots in America.
Tell it right.
They bombed us,
they bombed us.
♪♪
- There's something
very spiritual
about this work.
And anybody who thinks
that this sacred ground
that we find ourselves on,
this crime scene
that we find ourselves on
is not gonna speak,
doesn't have the ears to hear.
♪♪
- Kavin Ross talks about
the redbirds.
He says that they are
the spirits of our ancestors.
Monday morning,
I went out to my garden,
and as I stepped
on my back porch,
I saw a whole bunch of redbirds,
and they were looking at me.
And I ran in here
to get my phone,
"Kavin, I gotta tell you
the story of what happened
"with the redbirds."
He said, "Girly, come"--
he says girly.
"Girly, come get your butt
down here to the cemetery."
Well, I knew something huge
is gonna happen from that,
and it did.
♪♪
- I'm here
to report an update.
I can confirm that
we have identified, um,
a large hole that
had been excavated
and into which
several individuals,
um, have been placed.
This constitutes
a mass grave.
- Tonight scientists
believe they have found
evidence of a mass grave
in Oklahoma.
- More than a year
after work had started
at Oaklawn Cemetery,
the team found human remains.
- Today is a significant moment
in the history of our city
in trying to do right
by the victims of this event.
- When I heard that
they found twelve bodies,
I said, "Finally! Finally!"
It's no longer folklore,
it's no longer a rumor,
it's true.
And that's going
just to be
the beginning of justice.
- People in this community
who've been saying
that bodies were dumped
in mass graves,
their stories
have now been vindicated.
Gets us one step closer
to giving their families
the opportunities
to have the truth be known
and actually give them
a proper burial.
- This is all part of
a-a mission
to get back what was lost.
We've lost a lot of history,
we've lost a lot of testimony,
we've lost a lot
of known heritage
that could have been
passed down
because it wasn't safe
to talk about for so long.
- Nobody said
nothing until now.
We're just now
talking about it.
- Growing up,
old folks have talked,
and they actually kind of hid
a lot of stuff from us.
- Staying quiet was
one of those ways
of protecting yourself.
It's kind of in
the back of your mind,
wondering
could this happen again?
What can I do to prevent this
from happening again
for my children?
- That is another part
of trauma,
the silence that it creates.
And while people
were murdered
and we need to acknowledge that
and we need to find them,
we also need to talk about
how they lived.
We need to talk about
what they built,
we need to talk
about what's left behind
and tell that story,
because that story
lasts for a hundred years,
the massacre was two days.
- Hut, hut.
Come on, boy.
Hut, hut, hut.
Hut.
People say,
"Why don't you leave here?"
Because the memory
of something
that I will never see
anywhere else is still here.
And these pages contain
all of the photographs
of my ancestors
who lived on Greenwood.
The memory,
we're connected to our memories.
Olivia Hooker,
who was a survivor,
was a really beautiful soul.
- At that night
of the massacre, Olivia Hooker,
who was a six-year-old girl,
saw her own home ripped apart.
White folks
came into her house,
destroyed her piano
with a hatchet,
and when they left,
she went over there
and they struck the keyboard,
and there was still sound
coming out of that piano.
That's who Greenwood is.
You might destroy
the outside of me,
you might shoot me,
you might burn me,
you're not gonna
destroy my soul.
We still got a song to sing.
♪♪
- We have these cycles
of Greenwood being built,
destroyed, rebuilt.
If you look at it
all together
in a 100 year journey...
it's a consistent
story of resilience.
- We are so close
to getting over this madness.
In time, we can go on
to be a great city
that we are destined to be.
- There's a resilience
that our people have.
The people here in Tulsa
have kept the story alive.
We know with our people,
it's never the end.
♪♪
- My dreams of
what Greenwood should look like,
it should look like us.
- My hope for Greenwood
is that she can become
back what she used to be.
- I wish Greenwood
would be healed.
A lot of stuff
was buried deep.
- My dream is to have
a replicate
of what we had in 1921
with all
the Black businesses,
everybody supporting each other.
- We are the youngest
business owners on Greenwood.
I would like to see
young people, you know,
rebuilding
Black Wall Street.
- Let there be
some type of closure
and some type of life back here
that we're enjoying.
- We need to reclaim
what was ours
from the beginning.
Our people built
Black Wall Street
by hard work and dedication,
we did it one time,
we can do it again.
- Greenwood can be that again,
we can be
all that we wanna be.
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
- In the 1920s there was
a strong Black community
here in Tulsa
called Greenwood.
These people were the core
of Black entrepreneurship.
People call it
the Black Wall Street.
- Greenwood was like putting
Harlem, Bourbon Street,
and Chocolate City
all in one place.
- But white Tulsans
talked about Greenwood
as Little Africa
or Nigger Land.
- Tulsa was a powder keg
needing only something
to set
the community alight.
♪♪
- Between 100 and 300 people,
most of them Black,
were killed.
- Today, we call it
a mass murder.
They were hastily trying
to get rid of the bodies
by dumping them
in mass graves
around the city.
- We have Tulsans of
an undermined number
who were murdered.
It should not have
taken 99 years.
- Anybody who thinks
that this crime scene
is not gonna speak
doesn't have
the ears to hear.
The ancestors are awake
and the earth is shaking.
[radio tuning]
♪♪
- Ah, yeah!
So rough, so tough.
For all you people
listening to KBOB 89.9,
located right here
in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
This is where we tell
our stories our way.
We can be talking
about these graves,
you know, here in
Tulsa, Oklahoma,
excavation of these graves,
what it means to us.
I guess I'm gonna
start with you, Kristi.
- Uh-oh.
- Uh-oh.
[laughter]
Kristi.
Kristi Williams.
- I came to Tulsa when
I was in the sixth grade.
So, that's been, whoo!
I don't know
how many years.
My mother is from Oklahoma.
There was a strong
Black community in Tulsa
called Greenwood.
These people were the core
of Black entrepreneurship
and they would help you
get your business started.
I mean, Greenwood
was booming.
People call it
the Black Wall Street.
And when you read
the editorials,
and they would also post
events that were happening.
And I imagine they were
having a great time!
♪♪
[sighs]
What I love about Greenwood
is what it was.
And I love what
it could be.
But Tulsa has
a truth problem.
Hiding the truth,
and people
who will not challenge
what is perceived
to be truth.
- What's keeping Tulsa
from being
a great shining city
on a hill
is dealing with the legacy
of the so-called
Tulsa race riot of 1921.
White Tulsans
murdered Black folks
and were hastily trying
to get rid of the bodies
by dumping them in mass graves
around the city.
Awful things were done
to get rid of bodies.
In the late 1990s
when Senator Maxine Horner
and my father,
State Representative Don Ross
created the commission
to study
the Tulsa race riot
of 1921,
which brought
historians, consultants
from around the world
who tried to figure out
what happened in 1921.
I had many conversations
with riot survivors.
- Oh!
- It was one of
the proudest moments that
I can remember
of my father.
When I wrote
their first articles,
uh, "South Tulsa Tales
from the Crypt",
I got a lot of attention.
But nothing was done
until 2018
when the story became
a "Washington Post" story
thanks to a reporter
who came to Tulsa
to do a story about
gentrification of Greenwood.
No mayor,
Republican or Democrat,
never thought about
or even touched the story
of the mass graves.
- You hear about, you know,
history being erased
in, you know,
these authoritarian regimes
or something like that.
You can't imagine
that it would happen
right here
in your own hometown
in the middle
of the United States.
And yet, it had.
♪♪
My name is G.T. Bynum.
I'm the mayor of Tulsa.
I grew up here in Tulsa.
My family has been here
since the 1870s.
My great-great grandfather
was the second mayor of Tulsa.
I heard about the massacre
in 2001 or 2002, maybe.
And I was 24 years old
at this point.
You know, every high school
student in Oklahoma
has to go through
an Oklahoma history course.
It never came up.
My dad had been president of
the Tulsa Historical Society.
It never came up.
Hearing about that,
it was shocking to me
because I love Tulsa.
I couldn't believe that Tulsa
would be the kind of city
where something like that
could happen.
We have Tulsans of
an undetermined number
who were murdered
in this event.
And so, we have
a responsibility, I think,
as a city to try
and find out
where their remains are
and what happened to them.
- You know, our ancestors
literally make up
who and what we are.
We are the physical
manifestation of
our collective ancestors
and their memories.
How can I tap into
his or her brilliance,
their genius,
so that I can really be
the best that I can be?
- I think it's
at Tulsa's best interest
to help heal the wounds,
to go look for our dead
and put them at
a proper rest.
Pay for the damages
and for the lives
that were lost in 1921.
- The city deputized
a lot of white men
during the massacre
who robbed, murdered
a lot of people.
They're accountable.
- The story here is
a story about people.
It's about
the human spirit.
The massacre is a chapter
in a much larger, richer,
more robust narrative.
- Most people you're
going to interview,
you need to ask
this question.
Where are you people from?
And if they say well,
we're from Oklahoma
or Tulsa or Greenwood...
well, when did
they get here?
- Scene Grayson Take 1,
Common Marker, Mid Slate.
- My father,
who's Creek Indian,
was from Oklahoma.
My family is a mixture of
Indian, Black, and white.
And... here I am.
- The story of Oklahoma
really began with
the five civilized tribes
in the 1830s and 1840s.
♪♪
- The Chickasaws,
the Creeks,
the Cherokee, Choctaw,
and the Seminoles,
called the five
civilized tribes.
They were originally
from the South,
from Alabama, Georgia,
parts of Florida,
Tennessee, Mississippi
and the South Carolina area
where these tribes
owned plantations.
- Civilized really
is a veiled reference
to taking on, accepting
Eurocentric ways.
One of those ways was
a practice of chattel slavery
to boost oneself
economically.
- At the Cherokee museum today
are slave Bills of Sale,
including one by then
Principal Chief John Ross.
- I don't ever talk
about it very much
because I think it's
a very shameful part
of, um, of
Cherokee history,
and so I've purposely
avoided involving myself
in that whole issue.
♪ Java man
he made a life ♪
♪ But the mammy
ain't his wife ♪
♪ Choppin' cotton
don't be slow ♪
♪ Better finish out
yo' row. ♪
- Slavery in the five
civilized tribes varied.
What's really important
to remember is that
these people were enslaved.
So, by definition,
it wasn't a good experience
because if you're a slave,
then you don't have
your individual liberty,
which arguably matters
more than anything else.
- Enslaving Black people,
it was part of the economy
of those tribes.
When the Americans now
wanted that land
for their own plantations,
they took the plantations
of the Indians.
This was done in
a legal way...
by passing legislation,
The Indian Removal Act,
the forced migration of
the five civilized tribes
from the Southeastern
United States
into Indian territory,
which is what is
today Oklahoma.
- They said, well,
we're swapping you
this land for the lands
west of the Mississippi
in Indian territory.
You have no choice
but to go.
We know it as
The Trail of Tears.
♪♪
The slaves that the tribes
didn't sell off,
they brought them on
The Trail of Tears.
So, just like
an oxen or a bull
that was pulling a wagon,
the Black folks was
in the same situation.
They didn't have
a choice.
♪♪
- The five civilized tribes
officially aligned themselves
with the Confederacy
during the Civil War
because slaves were still
needed to improve
the economic fortunes
of these tribes.
The Confederacy lost,
by the way.
And so, after
the Civil War,
the Federal government
negotiated with these tribes
on treaties generally
referred to
as the Treaties of 1866.
♪♪
- In Article II of
The Creek Treaty of 1866,
it says that you won't
have slaves anymore.
That's a wrap.
It's not gonna
happen no more.
Those slaves that you have,
they're now your Tribal members.
They're now your citizens.
Black people who had been
with the Indians,
now 10, 15 generations,
either enslaved
or married among them
or their children.
They were called
the Freedmen.
The United States government
forced the Tribes
to divide up this land
with the Freedmen.
- The slaves who belonged
to the Cherokees
could come right back
to the territory
and settle on Indian land.
And when allotment came,
they gave us an equal right
with them in land drawings.
The United States government
forced them to do this,
I have been told.
♪♪
- Okay, so, on this map,
this is the Creek Nation.
This little yellow spot
up here
is Township Tulsa.
The green area are
the allotments of the Freedmen.
Everybody got 160 acres
if you were full-blood Creek,
if you were full Black
from Africa.
If you were female
you got 160 acres.
The Freedmen allotments
totaled 1,192,240 acres.
One million one hundred--
I really want people
to understand that.
That's a lot of land for
a small geographical area.
It's a lot of land
to own.
The most important part
of the story
of Black people here
in Oklahoma
is the Black land ownership.
- As a descendent of
a Creek Freedmen,
I believe land is power,
land is wealth,
land is really the-the core
of Black entrepreneurship.
- You had two types
of Blacks in Oklahoma.
You had those Freedmen.
Then you had state Blacks.
State Blacks came
to Oklahoma looking
for the promised land.
♪♪
- There was a movement
called Boosterism
and this began in 1889
using bulletins
and encouraging Black folks
to migrate from
the deep South
to what is now Oklahoma.
The leader of that movement
was a fellow called E.P. McCabe.
He recruited Black people
to come on the theory
that it represented an escape
from the oppressive deep South,
an opportunity
to prosper economically.
- The time will soon come
when we will be able
to dictate the policy of
this territory, or state.
And when that time comes,
we will have a Negro state
governed by Negroes.
We do not wish
to antagonize the whites.
They are necessary
in the development
of a new country.
But they owe my race homes,
and my race owes to itself
a governmental control
of those homes.
- Land meant rebirth.
It meant renewal.
Land meant survival.
There were 40 other
Black townships around Oklahoma.
The whole state.
Not just Tulsa.
- It was the promised land
for a lot of people
coming out of slavery
wanting to escape
lynchings
and wanting just to raise
their families
in a loving community.
- Freedman had all of
this land with mineral rights
that ultimately made them
very wealthy.
- We put ourselves
in Oklahoma, 1906.
A city called Tulsa.
♪♪
Tulsa boomed after
the discovery of oil.
Tulsa became the oil capital
of the world.
♪♪
The oil drew people
really from all over,
seeking fame and fortune.
The population
just mushroomed.
♪♪
- Back then, people were
moving to the city every day,
whether it's
a sharecropper
leaving some rural
Oklahoma county,
looking for a job
in the oilfields.
Whether it's
a young entrepreneur
who thinks that they can
strike the next one.
People called it
the Magic City
because it just
came out of nowhere.
♪♪
- Back when I was growing up,
they said
the 1921 race riot
and then they changed it
to massacre.
And I wanted people
to know my mother
was a survivor of that.
A lot of people say,
oh, we didn't know
anything about it.
I always knew about it
because my mother
told me about it.
♪♪
- Tulsa has seen a lot of
growth in recent years.
Some might even say it's
showing signs of becoming
a destination city.
- Tulsa is a beautiful
little city
that wants to be
a big city.
♪♪
It's just a little
country town
that had big skyscrapers.
The weather is beautiful.
The cost of living
is wonderful.
People from various
different walks of life.
And I strongly believe
at one time
that we're going
to be the best city
that this world can offer.
Make a left
at the light.
Here we are in the historic
Greenwood community,
AKA the Black Wall Street
of America,
AKA the Negro Wall Street
of America,
AKA my home.
Every day that I've got
money in my pocket,
I go down on Greenwood.
I go get me a haircut.
They give me
the latest scoop,
find out what's going on.
What's up on
Greenwood now?
Yeah, the Tee's Barbershop
is a legacy of my family.
My father got
his hair cut here.
My son got his first haircut
right here.
Well, how long has
a barbershop been on Greenwood?
- The first barbershop
that I'm-- I worked for
was called Mim's Barbershop
and it was in the 1100 block
of North Greenwood.
That was in 1963.
They talking
about Greenwood
and all you can see now
is one block.
But it was businesses
all the way down
from-from Lansing back to
Martin Luther King Drive today.
♪♪
- 1921.
Greenwood was much larger
than just that one block
that you guys see today.
Greenwood's much larger
to the south,
to the east,
to the west,
and to the north.
But the only thing
we have left
is just a sliver
of its former self.
- Every time somebody comes back
every other 20 years,
there's less and less
of Greenwood.
People come here all the time
and say, is this it?
This is Greenwood?
This is what they've
been talking about? Right?
Everybody wants a community
where they can
grow and prosper
and that dollar
can turn over
So, why wouldn't Black folks
want that for themselves?
- I've been ownin'
Blow Out Hair Studio
for 13 years now.
Greenwood is special.
Once you come down here,
you feel the energy.
I would hate to leave
Greenwood.
I will fight tooth and nails
before I leave,
to be honest with you.
- Farmers Insurance
is my first business.
However, I have a studio,
Greenwood Fitness
& Recreational Studio.
You know, we have a debt
to our ancestors here.
You know, we have to bring back
what was once there.
[espresso machine whirring]
And anyone that wants to
do business here
should also be engaged
in that same idea,
that same mentality,
same thought process.
- When I got to Tulsa
in 1984,
I was asked to do a regular
guest editorial column
in the Oklahoma Eagle,
which is
the Black newspaper.
One of my assignments was
to do a historical treatment
of the Greenwood District.
I've had this sort of
obligation of service.
And if I'm going to live
in this community,
I want the community
to be the best it can be.
We can't do that
unless we engage
in the work of
racial reconciliation.
And we can't do that
unless we acknowledge
our history.
♪♪
♪♪
A Black man,
the name of O.W. Gurley
came to Oklahoma
from Arkansas.
He bought land.
He sold land to other
African Americas;
established his first
business in 1906.
Businesses
just proliferated
and they became prosperous,
creating and living
in this insular
economic community
called the
Greenwood District.
The Greenwood District
was Black Main Street.
Mom and pop type operations,
small businesses,
hotels, restaurants,
grocery stores,
theaters, nightclubs.
- You have the offices
of African American lawyers.
There are more than
12 physicians and surgeons
that have their
offices in Greenwood.
- Greenwood had
about 10,000 people.
They were in search
for a way
to be masters
of their own fate.
Today, most of the people
connect to Greenwood
and think
Black Wall Street
and, yes,
that existed here.
You did have people
that were pioneers
and big business tycoons
living in sprawling mansions.
♪♪
And even most people
who were domestic workers
or owning small shops,
living day to day,
everyone has an opportunity
and their skin color
doesn't limit
their capacity here.
That's what makes
Greenwood really special,
that you have
this safe haven,
that oasis
that existed here.
- This is a special edition
of the events
of the Tulsa Disaster.
Mary Jones Parrish
is very important
because she was hired
within a week or two
of the massacre to collect
stories of people--
of survivors,
including herself.
♪♪
- On leavin'
the Frisco Station,
goin' north
to Archer Street,
one could see nothin'
but Negro business places.
Goin' east on Archer
for two or more blocks,
there you would behold
Greenwood Avenue,
the Negroes Wall Street.
- Mary Parrish
was a remarkable woman.
Originally from
Mississippi,
she had set up
a secretarial school
right on Greenwood Avenue
to teach young women
all of these
different skills
so they could get work
as secretaries
to some of Greenwood's
Black doctors and lawyers.
- This section of Tulsa
was a city within a city.
Every face seemed to wear
a happy smile.
♪♪
- We're sitting in
the Mackey house.
That's Lucy.
The Mackeys
are really emblematic
of the kind of
middle-class Black person
who lived in
the Greenwood community
during its peak.
But I think if we only
fixate on the things
that are glamorous
and more flattering
and we forget that
the Greenwood District
is a part of the city
called Tulsa.
You have a Black
segregated community
that's not getting its
fair share of tax dollars
for infrastructure
like roads,
like sewer systems,
and things like that.
♪♪
- There was so much money
in Tulsa these days,
but here's the reality.
Money plays
a complicated role
in the intermingling
between the races.
- Affluence, wealth,
prosperity
created this tie-in
between Black Tulsans,
white Tulsans,
but it's all about
perspective.
White Tulsans
talked about Greenwood
as Little Africa
or Negro Land.
- White Tulsans could control
what justice looks like...
could control the narrative,
could control
whatever they want.
[children playing]
- I would say that I had
a very neutral attitude
about Blacks.
We had, uh, Black maids
work for our household,
but I knew that there was
separation of seating--
restaurants, motels.
♪♪
- Through the years,
I met all sorts of people,
including white people
whose family was in Tulsa
during the people
of the massacre.
You were telling me
that you were born,
uh, in 1915.
- Uh-huh.
Down on 9th and Denver
is where my parents
bought a little house down there
when they got married.
- Did you, as a child,
ever have occasion
to visit the African American
community in Tulsa?
- I-I think that
I would have been, uh,
probably just going
to and from the homes
where our maids lived.
- My mother always
had the colored help.
She just- she got along well
with people and--
- When you say help,
you mean domestic,
as domestic help?
- Yes, domestic help.
Um-hmm.
- My challenge, my charge
really is to help people
come to grips
with their past,
which is not to say that
every person in America's evil
or every
white person is evil.
It's to acknowledge
a series of systems
that exist here
that advantage some people
and disadvantage
other people.
- We were taught
by innuendo
to dislike
or to actually hate.
I think the thing
that bothered me the most
was not being able
to ask questions
and have a discussion
or hear about it
as just a kid growing up,
a white kid.
- The only reason that
Black Wall Street existed
was because of necessity.
These people were not able
to participate
in the regular economy run
by the dominant culture
because of segregation.
- The vast majority
of people
who lived in Greenwood
were not wealthy.
♪♪
But they had regular jobs
in the white community
and they had
a regular paycheck
in the white community.
You've got a lot of
well-to-do white Tulsans
who are going to hire
servants, cooks,
domestic workers.
They would collect their
paycheck at the end of the week
and they would spend it
back in Greenwood.
You know, in Tulsa,
like in other southern cities,
African Americans
can't go into a department store
and try on clothes.
But they can shop
in their own neighborhoods.
So, what happens is
the merchants in Greenwood
had this captive population
and the money just flows
and flows and flows.
- And it was successful
because they were supported
by people
who looked like them,
would purchase from them,
do business with them.
- So, there's people that
are living all different lives
and different
social standings
but everyone here
is making a living
whatever way they-
they decide to.
And they're not feeling
the pressures
and the violence
from the outside world.
- I did not grow up here,
and I'd recognized
the importance that it had,
not just for
this community,
but for the country
and also the world.
And I wish that Greenwood
would be a wonderful community
that would radiate
the likeness of the Lord.
- 1920 Greenwood
was booming.
♪♪
It was a strong community.
- A.C. Jackson was
a prominent Black surgeon.
The Mayo Clinic said
that Dr. A.C. Jackson
was the most able
Negro surgeon in America.
Simon Berry
was a businessman.
His first business
was a jitney service.
A.J. Smitherman
was the editor and publisher
of the Tulsa Star.
His paper included
editorials and articles
really talking about
social justice.
- When you think about
Stradford,
you think about what elegance
and grace looks like.
- By the beginning
of 1917,
I had amassed
quite a fortune.
I owned fifteen
rental houses,
a sixteen room
brick apartment building.
The rental value
was $350 a month.
The income from other sources
were triple.
I had a splendid
bank account
and was living on
the sunny side of the street.
I decided to realize
my fondest hope,
and that was to
erect a large hotel in Tulsa
exclusively for my people.
- J.B. Stradford built
the Stradford Hotel.
- It's 54 rooms
and crystal chandeliers.
- It was acknowledged
in the United States
of America.
It was the crown jewel
of Greenwood.
- Loulah and John Williams,
they were really active
in the community.
Here they had
a rooming house
and a garage
and a confectionary.
Williams Dreamland Theatre
was a grand structure,
really one of the jewels
in the Greenwood community
at the time.
- Imagine putting Harlem,
Bourbon Street,
and Chocolate City
all in one place.
A train stopping
on a Friday night
coming to Greenwood
with excess of 500 people
to listen to
all the greats.
♪♪
- There are speakeasys,
there are pool halls,
there's a lot of action
going on.
In Greenwood you had
hell on one side
and the holy ghost
on the other.
- The church life in those
days were very strong
and the church
was a source,
not just for God,
but also for community.
[piano playing blues music]
♪♪
- Well-to-do families,
Black families in Tulsa
would have pianos.
They would have their daughters
take piano lessons.
You might hear
a blues song,
but you might also hear
a Mozart sonata.
[piano playing classical music]
It's part of
the blood of the city.
This is a part of
the heartbeat of the town.
- And the sky was the limit.
There was nothing
that you could not do.
- When thinking about Tulsa
in the early part
of the 20th century,
it's important to remember
where the Greenwood
community is.
It abuts downtown,
separated by the Frisco tracks.
If you live in a society
in which white supremacy
is the prevailing
paradigm,
but you live in a community
in which you can look across
the dividing line,
the Frisco tracks,
and see Black folks
driving nice cars
and wearing fur coats
and living in nice homes,
then it causes
cognitive dissonance,
garden variety jealousy.
That land was desired
by corporate interest
in Tulsa.
We know that.
The idea was to remove
the Black folks from the land,
move them farther north,
and use the land
for what was considered
to be higher
and better purposes.
- Tulsa appears now to be
in danger of losing its prestige
as the whitest town
in Oklahoma.
Does Tulsa wish
a double invasion
of criminal
Negro preachers,
Negro shysters,
crap shooters, gamblers,
bootlegs, prostitutes,
and smart alecks
in general?
♪♪
- We took Oklahoma history
in the ninth grade.
And in our--
in our textbook,
there was probably a page,
or a page and a half
about the race massacre.
We did not cover that
in class.
I read it because I was
really interested in history
and it was
a real revelation.
It brought home just
how pervasive racism was
in the United States
and in the social system.
- Historians often
refer to the early part
of the 20th century
in America
as the low point of
race relations in America.
- African Americans
are under attack
in all different quarters
in all parts of the Union.
This is an era where
the nature of lynchings
are getting more
and more barbaric.
- Lynching is a form of
domestic terrorism
that targeted primarily
African Americans.
In events to which people
brought their children,
lynching was widespread
in the United States.
That there would be such
a film like "Birth of a Nation"
produced at the time...
neither shocks
nor surprises me.
♪♪
- "Birth of a Nation",
a landmark film
that came out in 1915.
Black people were-
were portrayed
in a very
demeaning manner.
...the Ku Klux Klan
as heroes.
♪♪
- "The Birth of a Nation"
attests to the purity
and chastity of white women
and Black men mixing
with white women
is a distinct taboo,
which often did result
in the death
of the Black men.
- The film became,
uh, you know,
pretty much of
a national phenomenon.
President Woodrow Wilson
endorsed it.
It showed all over
the country.
It showed in Tulsa
in the convention hall.
It certainly validated
these ideas.
- How do you survive
if you're a Black person
in America
during this era?
And part of the answer came
through African American
veterans of World War I
who'd fought in combat units
in France
where they were treated
with respect
and with honor.
And they came back
to the United States
and they found none.
- We have Black veterans
in Greenwood.
They fought for
their country,
they fought for
their freedom.
So, when they come home,
they expect to be respected.
But what they come home to
is, again, more Jim Crow laws,
more prejudice,
and more restrictions
on their freedom
that they fought for.
- After World War I,
in uniform being lynched
by white mobs.
It's pretty stunning
and remarkable.
The idea is we're going to
show you what your place is.
We don't care whether
you've fought for the country.
When you're here,
you play by our rules.
- The Ku Klux Klan
is kind of the bogeyman.
I think, especially
as white people,
we load up all the bad stuff
and we attribute it
to this vague group
over here
that we call
the Ku Klux Klan.
Even the people who
considered themselves friends
of the Black people
didn't really consider them
equals in a social way.
I mean, they-
they didn't want them--
they didn't want them killed,
they didn't want them cheated,
they didn't want
their houses burned down
but they didn't want
to sit next to 'em
in the restaurant either.
In those times,
Tulsa was like
a lot of other places.
You had African Americans
who were just sort of tired
of being sent
to the back of the bus,
literally and figuratively.
They were ready
to stand up for their--
for their right.
There had to have been
tension building up.
- The Tulsa Tribune
published a series
of inflammatory articles...
...that really fomented
hostility in the
white community
against the Black community.
♪♪
Tulsa was a powder keg,
a tinderbox
needing only something
to set the community
alight.
- Many years ago,
I was at a cemetery.
I was taking pictures
of the tombstones.
And I heard
this strange noise.
Tsshh.
I looked around;
it was nothing there.
Then I heard a "tsshh"
to the right.
Then I heard that same sound
surrounding me.
Tsshh.
I ran out of there.
That's when I saw
a flock of redbirds
come out of the trees.
I thought that was
unusual.
Normally you see
one or two redbirds,
but I never saw
a flock of them
flying together like that.
And I told a good friend
of mine and she said,
you saw redbirds
in a cemetery?
Oh, baby, that's nothin'
but an omen, she said.
That was the spirit
of the dead telling you
to go tell somebody
that they are not at peace.
- The ancestors
are speaking to us.
The ancestors
are throwing clues at us.
We have a responsibility
and an obligation
to find the truth.
- The mass graves
investigation
started out in 1997,
actually,
with Don Ross,
Kavin Ross' father.
- When he was first told
about the massacre,
my father, he thought
it was just a lie,
that it didn't happen.
It was not
in the history books.
But then in high school,
he heard first-hand
from survivors
who were schoolteachers
at the time
and that was something
that stuck with him
until he got
to the point
where he could do
something about it.
- White political leaders
tried to bury the truth
along with all those
Black victims of the riot.
And they pretty much
succeeded for 76 years
until 1997,
when the state legislature
appointed a commission
of 11 people to finally
uncover the truth
about the horrific
riot of 1921.
- Don Ross went to the governor
and the legislature and said,
we've never had
an official study
of this
little-known event.
- That was inspired by
the Oklahoma City bombing.
Uh, when they said it was
the largest urban disaster
in America, wrong.
Uh, more people were killed
than any such disaster,
wrong.
- I was asked to be the
historian for the commission.
During that period,
I was thinking
maybe we could use this
to figure out
how many people died
and where they were buried.
- I'm ready.
- Kavin, you good?
- Go ahead.
- Hi, I'm Eddie Faye Gates,
chair of the
Survivors Committee
of the Oklahoma Legislative
Commission to study
the Tulsa Race Riot
of 1921.
- I was a videographer for
the race riot commission report.
I was on it to accompany
Eddie Faye Gates,
who was the commissioner
at the time.
Her job was to record
the testimonies
of the riot survivors.
♪♪
- We have located fifty-one
actual living riot survivors,
ages 78 to 104.
No research takes the place
of eyewitness testimony,
and that is why this day
is so significant.
Mrs. Simms.
Go on and tell it.
- You will never
forget that riot.
That's something that will be
always in your remembrance.
- This has been the age-old
story here in Tulsa.
I never knew what happened
to my great uncle,
never saw
my great aunt again.
You hear those
stories over the ages.
Folks were coming in
with oral history,
where bodies could
be buried.
- We interviewed over
three hundred Tulsans
to identify what we thought
were three very likely spots
in town where massacre victims
were buried in unmarked graves.
- Clyde Eddy took some
of the same steps today
he first took
78 years ago,
days after
the Tulsa Race Riot.
He was ten at the time,
drawn by the curious sight
of men digging a trench
with large boxes
stacked nearby.
- Clyde Eddy talked about
at the age of ten,
when he was at
the Oaklawn Cemetery,
he saw these giant boxes.
He and his cousin would
go to one of these crates.
- We opened the first box,
and there were, um--
excuse me.
There were three bodies
of Black people.
The stench was terrible.
- There were other boxes.
Lift up the lid,
and that saw that there
was Black folks
inside of that one.
Black people
in a box, dead.
That's something that would be
etched in your mind forever,
and so for him to tell
a story with such conviction.
I said, let's
dig 'em up now.
- So many people have said
there were no bodies there.
But you know,
all the Black folk
in the community,
we believe they're there.
Those stories were
passed on to us.
- Inch by inch,
crews are digging into
the history of
the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Tulsa's mayor, G.T. Bynum,
initiated the investigation
to try and find
if there are any victims
buried in mass graves.
- There was a systematic
cover up of the event.
It should not have
taken 99 years.
- We have to pay attention,
we have to pick up
the charred baton
that has been left
in our hands,
and figure out where
the screams are coming from.
♪♪
- Monday,
May 30, 1921.
It happened to
be Memorial Day.
- May 30th could have happened
at any point in time
because Tulsa was
already a powder keg.
We do know that
the deathly KKK members
that are part
of the police force,
proudly marching down
the street on Memorial Day.
People describe
it as a massacre,
I've been calling it a war.
- There's systemic causes for
what happened here in 1921,
but you fixate on
this trigger incident
that involved a Black boy
and a white girl on an elevator.
The teenage boy is a boy
named Dick Rowland.
He's at work
on Memorial Day,
shining shoes
in Downtown Tulsa.
- Dick Rowland was
nineteen years old
in the spring of 1921.
He worked in
a white-owned
and white-patronized
shine parlor
on Main Street
in Downtown Tulsa.
- His nickname
is "Diamond Dick"
so he's known to be
this flashy young guy.
[laughing]
He is just another person
in the community
that everyone knows,
but he's-he's never been
seen as a troublemaker.
- There's not
a restroom facility
in the shine parlor,
so the white owner
has arranged for them
to walk down Main Street
to the Drexel Building.
On the fourth floor there was,
quote, "a colored restroom".
Something happens when
he enters the elevator.
Elevators are-are manually
operated by a wheel,
it takes a great amount
of skill to get the floor
of the elevator
and the actual floor to line up.
That particular elevator
was very difficult to center,
so the belief is,
that as Dick walked
onto the elevator,
he tripped and just,
by reflex,
threw his hands out
to cushion the fall,
that he grabbed Sarah
by the shoulder,
ripped her dress,
she screams,
and he realizes this
is a dangerous moment for him,
and he runs out
of the elevator
and takes off.
But there was a white clerk
at the Renberg's Clothing Store
who heard the scream,
saw Dick run out
of the building,
and in his mind he puts
two and two together,
and says, "This is
an interracial rape attempt."
The Tulsa Police
are summoned,
but they don't put out
an all-points bulletin
for Dick Rowland,
they don't go
searching for him.
They're not particularly
worried about this event.
However, the Tulsa Tribune,
Tulsa's white daily
afternoon newspaper,
decides to portray
this incident
in a completely
different light.
- The "Tribune"
published an account
of the elevator
incident entitled,
"Nab Negro for Attacking Girl
In an Elevator".
The "Tribune" essentially
claimed that Dick Rowland
tried to rape Sarah Page
in broad daylight
in a public building
in Downtown Tulsa.
The article went
out of its way
to make Sarah Page
look virtuous,
and, as a corollary, to make
Dick Rowland look villainous,
playing on that
white female,
Black male taboo.
- So the next morning,
Tuesday, May 31st,
the Tulsa Police decide,
"We're gonna pick up
Dick Rowland".
So they go to where he lives
with his mother in Greenwood,
arrest him,
take him to
the courthouse, and like,
as with other prisoners,
put him up on the--
in the fourth floor jail.
The first edition
of the "Tulsa Tribune"
hits the streets
around 3:00, 3:30.
Within thirty minutes
there's lynch talks
on the streets of Tulsa.
Lynch talk soon turns
into a lynch mob.
Meanwhile, Black people
are trying to figure out
what's going on,
what to do,
how to organize.
On the stage
of the Dreamland Theatre,
an African-American
World War I Vet
jumps up on the stage and says,
"Shut this place down.
"We ain't gonna let
this happen here."
"It" being a lynching.
There was a feeling
amongst Black vets
that if trouble comes my way,
I ain't dodgin' it.
In Tulsa there had not been
an African-American lynched,
and there were Black men
and women who were prepared
to make sure that
didn't happen.
Around 10:30 at night
or a little before then,
a rumor gets greenlit
that whites are
storming the jail.
Seventy-five
African-American men,
all armed,
drive to the courthouse.
They march up
to the courthouse,
they go up to the sheriff,
who's waiting for them
on the steps,
and they say, "We are here
to help to protect the prisoner
"if you need our help."
Sheriff McCullough says,
"Get the hell out of here,
"I don't want you."
[crowd yelling]
As they are leaving,
an elderly white man
goes up to
a tall Black vet,
and says, "Where you goin'
with that gun?"
And the vet says, "I'm gonna
use it if I need to."
The white man says,
"Like hell you are."
Tries to get the gun,
there's a struggle,
a shot goes off.
[gun shot]
The worst incident
of racial violence
in American history begins.
- As the evening starts
to fall, May 31st,
by seven o'clock there
are already hundreds of people
circling around
the courthouse.
By nine, ten is where
things really start to reach
this sort of, uh boiling point,
and shots are fired.
At the same time all this
is happening downtown.
You have people that
are still waiting
to go to their prom
at Booker T. Washington.
You have people that
are still going to movies
in the Dreamland
and the [indistinct] Theater.
You have people that are still
moving about their lives
that aren't aware
of what's happening.
- We went down to
a late show, movie.
Somebody came in and shouted,
"Nigger fight! Nigger fight!"
We went out the door
and just got there
when a Negro ran out
of the alley.
The minute his head
showed outside,
somebody shot him.
And, uh, this man
was shot and rolled out
in the middle of the street
with a revolver in his hand.
And this crowd around him
wouldn't let anybody touch him,
pick him up, wouldn't let
an ambulance take him.
But he was the first man
that was shot in the riot.
- Nobody cares about
Dick Rowland anymore.
The white mob is now out
to get any Black person
in their sights.
- The teeming white mob
spilled over the Frisco tracks
into the Greenwood community...
- ...carrying rifles,
pistols,
matches, and cans
of gasoline.
♪♪
- In the words of one of
the massacre survivors,
"All hell broke loose."
Looting...
shooting...
burning, destroying
everything in sight.
- People are taking
shelter in their homes
or packing up
their stuff and fleeing,
whatever they can.
- My Mother said,
"Here they come,
"here they come."
And they came in
the house with torches
and they set
the house on fire.
Oh, it was like a nightmare.
Everything was in flames.
- On the evening
of May 31st,
my little girl
had not retired
but was watching the people
from the window.
She said, "Mother,
I see men with guns."
Then I ran to the window
and looked out.
There I saw many people
gathered in little squads,
talking excitedly.
There was a great shadow
in the sky,
and upon second look
we discerned that this cloud
was caused by
fast-approaching airplanes.
It then dawned
upon us that the enemy
had organized in the night
and was invading our district
the same as the Germans
invaded France.
I took my little girl,
Florence Mary,
by the hand and fled out
the West door on Greenwood,
running amidst
showers of bullets.
- I was so afraid,
because bullets were
coming down around us.
All of the planes
were up in the air,
shooting down, and I could
hear those bullets falling.
There were a lot
of people running,
dodging the bullets,
and just afraid.
- They're shooting people
on sight,
even if you're complying
with their demands.
That's what happened
to Dr. A.C. Jackson.
- A.C. Jackson was
a prominent Black surgeon,
he was accosted
at his home,
he exited his house
in compliance
with the demands
of the mobsters,
hands held high.
But he was actually gunned
down by a young white man
and he ultimately
bled to death.
Black men put up
a vigorous, robust defense.
They were outgunned,
and outnumbered,
and overmatched.
The violence
lasted sixteen hours,
a unit of the National Guard
sent in from Oklahoma City.
♪♪
When the dust settled,
at least 1,250 homes
in the Black community
were destroyed.
Between 100 and 300 people,
most of them Black,
were killed.
♪♪
- So twenty years ago,
we had a mayor here
that said, "Hey.
"We're gonna go into Oaklawn
and were gonna excavate,
"because we have an idea
of where some bodies might be."
- We brought in ground
penetrating radar;
they showed that there were
anomalies in these areas.
- I was twenty years younger,
standing out in Oaklawn.
We were all out there,
but we were about
to do this, right?
They called it
off abruptly
because there was
a white family
that did not want
that area to be disturbed.
They suggested that
there was a, perhaps,
a white body that
was buried underground
and that that body
would have been disturbed
as you're looking
for race massacre dead.
- Our effort got
caught up in politics.
- A bunch of lawmakers,
they pretty much
didn't really care.
It made the state
look bad.
- I am thoroughly convinced
that the state of Oklahoma
was not culpable.
- We were shut down
by the City of Tulsa,
and at that point,
I, you know,
I thought the ballgame
was over.
- For some people it's like,
"Why are you guys
desecrating the grave?"
- Right.
- We're not
desecrating graves,
we're finding out the truth.
- And those answers--
ancestors had never
had a proper burial.
- Absolutely.
- I was on the City Council
at the time.
Years later,
a local journalist--
- My name's Lee Roy Chapman,
and this is "Public Secrets".
- He did a video series
about Tulsa's hidden secrets.
[squeaking]
And one of them,
I was watching...
- Um, Oaklawn Cemetery
has been rumored
for nearly a hundred years
to be the, uh,
location of a mass grave,
uh, attributed to
the Tulsa Race Riot.
- What's my
immediate reaction?
There is no way that
could possibly be true.
The mass grave
in Oaklawn cemetery,
where my great grandparents
are buried,
and that no one would have
ever bothered to look.
This is a historic day
for Tulsa and for our country
as we begin a test excavation
in Oaklawn Cemetery.
- There's nothing abstract,
there's nothing theoretical.
This is not
a research project.
This is an investigation.
- Scientists are set to
finally break ground
in the effort to find victims
of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
- Nearly 100 years later,
the families to victims
of the 1921 Tulsa
Race Massacre
could get answers
and closure.
- It should have been done
well before now,
but it wasn't.
That is a baton that's
been handed to us,
and it is--
it is not an easy race.
The initial excavation will
be focused on a location
within Oaklawn Cemetery that
we felt had a high likelihood
for encountering
a mass grave.
We focused on
an anomaly,
uh, that had
been detected.
That anomaly to us
was an indication
that it was possibly
a mass grave.
As we were excavating down,
we very quickly realized
that we had materials
that didn't really belong there.
- The search turned up
many old artifacts,
but after reaching three
and a half meters in depth,
the excavation was
called off on Wednesday.
- We do not have indications
of a mass grave, um,
in this portion
of Oaklawn Cemetery.
There is a-a heavy weight
of responsibility
that comes with trying
to assist in this effort.
There is that
sense of optimism
that comes from the fact
that the investigation
has been reopened.
But you-you also are
worried because it has--
there's a perpetual feeling
that the other shoe
is gonna fall,
and this expectation
of disappointment.
But it's extremely important
to remember why we're there
and who we're
trying to find.
- Sometimes stuff just makes
you want to just give up,
but other times those
are those times like,
no, you keep going,
'cause the ancestors are
not gonna let you give up,
they're gonna
keep pushing you.
When you say you quit,
they say, "No, you don't",
it puts you right back up
and do it all over again.
- That's why
it's cold today.
The ancestors are like,
"You're gonna feel the chill
of my bones today, man."
- Ooohh.
- Yes.
- Ooohh.
- That's what-that's
what they want us to feel.
They want everybody to feel
what that feels like.
- There's all kinds
of good things
that you find
in South Tulsa.
You'll find computer stores,
you'll find bookstores,
you'll find
twenty-four hour pharmacy,
you'll find
health food stores.
None of those things
can be found in North Tulsa.
North Tulsa's a food desert,
and that's got to change.
- One of the things that
people don't generally know
is that the Greenwood community
actually came back
after it was destroyed.
- It was rebuilt because
the rural community, uh,
rural lands were still
owned mostly by Black folk.
But by the 1960s,
these towns started
to disappear.
- There is this idea that
Greenwood was destroyed in 1921,
and that's the end
of the story.
But there's 100 years after that
that we need to talk about.
- Tulsa is just a tale
of two cities.
North Tulsa's a predominantly
African-American community.
And South Tulsa you have
predominantly white community.
This city of Tulsa is
the most segregated city,
geographically,
economically,
socially, and all
of the above.
- Growing up in North Tulsa,
I started to notice
buildings looked different,
institutions
looked different.
Wow, there's
a whole 'nother world
I wasn't even aware of.
We've already
experienced dislocation,
urban removal,
eminent domain,
all of those things.
Those people who lived in
Greenwood saw its demise twice.
[explosion rumbling]
- The people who have lived in
an urban center for many years
certainly do have rights.
However, they do not
have the right to frustrate
the creative efforts of
very diligent people
who are trying
to bring back
vitality, and wholeness,
and beauty into the city.
- I grew up at
1415 North Greenwood.
We owned the house
on Greenwood.
When I grew up, I had
a church in front of me,
right literally behind me
was the school that I went to,
to my right was
the Black hospital
that I was born in,
that was Morton Hospital,
and then we had
Jack's Memory Chapel
right there,
so the whole cycle of life
was right within a block
and a half of me where I lived.
That's the community
I grew up in.
As happened in every city
across this nation
in the sixties, seventies,
there was something
called urban,
what they call renewal,
what I call urban removal.
Yeah, I love that.
Yeah, when they want
to talk about Black folks,
right, instead of saying,
"Black folks live over here.
"That's the urban area."
Right?
"That's urban music."
Just call things
as they are.
- To whites,
the words urban renewal
have a promising,
hopeful sound.
But to Blacks,
they mean move out.
In a block like this,
as many as a thousand men,
women, and children
have been forced out
in the name of some
progress yet to come.
- So urban renewal was coming
through telling you all,
"Those houses that
you're living in here,
"we have a better use"
as they say,
"a greater use
for this land."
And they tell you,
"We're gonna renew
your community,
"and this is gonna be better
then you left it."
They moved us out of our houses
for the "greater good".
We were dislocated
from our home.
And when I tell you
there's still a big space
at 1415 North Greenwood,
nothing was ever built there,
but they told us we had to go.
And then you saw
the decline of Greenwood
as you saw folks moved out
of their homes.
- The reason and the causes
of this economic downturn
was the construction
of the Crosstown Expressway
that cut through
the heart of Greenwood.
In fact, they took
the heart out.
Urban renewal and this
major highway construction
really took out the--
most of the entrepreneurial,
uh, businesses
that were there.
- Just this area's changed
a lot with the, uh--
uh, Crosstown coming through.
Hasn't a lot
of the business moved out?
- That's correct.
- What happened in Tulsa
happened all over
the United States.
Highways were located
right through the heart
of communities of color.
- I started photographing
back in 1969
here at North Tulsa,
the Greenwood area.
And what I saw in
the Greenwood area was that
there were a lot of businesses
that were closing up.
One of those photographs
that I took on Greenwood,
he was a tall gentle,
and erect proud Black man,
I call it Baltimore Barbershop
that I took in 1970.
He went to the window
and started
looking out the window,
and what he saw was
bulldozers tearing down
buildings in front of him.
And I asked him
what he thought about that,
and he said, "Well, I think
I'm gonna be next."
So I took his photograph
and, uh,
the next day I came back,
sure enough,
his business was gone
and so was he.
Most of the businesses
in that area were boarded up,
and all that remained
was a [indistinct]
of Black Wall Street.
It was no longer
Black Wall Street,
it was a ghost town.
♪♪
- Oh man, I tell ya...
- We owned
a skating rink there.
During the riot
it got burned down,
our home got burned down.
We lost all of this--
our property, our home.
- Every church,
our schoolhouses was blown up.
People were killed,
and you go in
and see the people mangled.
And then some people
you never heard of anymore of,
you don't know where they--
whether they were killed,
whether they'd just left town.
- On the morning of June 1st,
after the massacres,
the National Guard
and some police
and maybe some civilians
began rounding up
all of the African-American
population in Greenwood
that they-that they could.
There were between five and
seven thousand people detained.
And the reason given
for that was that
it was for
their own protection,
that they were gonna be put
some place safe.
Everybody who was still
in custody
was moved to the fairgrounds
east of Greenwood.
They set up cots
in a kitchen,
they dug latrines.
The people who stayed there
were expected to work.
The women would
prepare the meals,
the men were sent out to work
cleaning up Greenwood.
- Folks in these
internment camps
had to have a green card.
- I don't know how they got
these little cards
printed so fast,
but everybody had
a little I.D. card,
school children and all,
told what you did,
and you had to have
that little I.D.
wherever you went.
- And to get out of these
internment centers,
they needed to be countersigned
by a white person.
Essentially, a white person
would vouch for them
and get them out of
these internment centers.
The theory at--
by the authorities
was that this was done
to protect people
from physical harm
in a context of
this chaotic situation.
There wasn't a lot of
justification that was needed
because who has power
and who doesn't?
- The people who had homes
to go to went to those homes.
Some people left town.
The Red Cross
was operating out of
Booker T. Washington
High School,
and the Red Cross would buy them
a train ticket
if they wanted to leave town.
- I found that
the high school building
was still standing.
I saw a big white streamer
with a red cross on it.
I felt pangs of joy,
for this meant to me
that I was getting in close
touch with friends again.
I breathed a prayer
of thanks.
- The Red Cross began
obtaining these tents
that people could live in.
- Many Black families
spent days, weeks, months
living in tent cities
on the charred earth.
- Everything they had was gone,
and they were expected
to immediately
just go about their lives
like nothing had happened.
Y-You have to think
the trauma was-was terrible.
- When we reaching the house,
I saw my piano
and all my elegant furniture
piled in the street.
My safe had been broken open,
all my money stolen,
all my silverware,
cut glass,
all my family clothing,
and everything of value
had been removed,
even my family Bible.
Our car was stolen
and most of my large rugs
were taken.
I lost seventeen houses
that paid me an average
of over $425 per month.
♪♪
- Riot is a term of art, really.
These events
throughout the nation
during this period were called
"Race Riots".
And it's significant in part
because insurance polices,
for example,
during that period
often had
exclusionary clauses.
And so if your damage
was occasioned by riot
or civil unrest,
the insurance company
didn't have to pay.
One of the things
we know is that
a number of people in the mob
that destroyed
the Greenwood community
were deputized by
local law enforcement officers;
much of that was done
by a wink and a nod.
Those people knew that
they were not going to be
impeded by
law enforcement.
The massacre was referred to,
in some documents,
as a Negro uprising,
which suggests that
the Black community's
to blame.
- In the immediate aftermath
there was a grand jury,
and it indicted,
I think it's 88 people.
Some of whom were white,
most of whom were Black.
- First was the indictment
of J.B. Stradford
who owned a hotel
and was a lawyer.
A.J. Smitherman was the editor
and publisher of
"The Tulsa Star",
which is the leading
Black newspaper.
He, along with a number
of other Black men
was indicted
for inciting a riot.
- Let the blame for
this Negro uprising
lie right where it belongs:
on those armed Negroes
and their followers
who started this trouble
and who instigated it.
And any persons who seeks
to put half the blame
on the white people
are wrong.
- It is one of the big ironies
of-of all of this
that the two people
who are most often seen
at the center of it
are two people
that we know very,
very little about.
Sarah Page left
the day after the massacre.
She left town
and never came back
as far as we know.
Dick Rowland, it appears,
remained in jail
through the summer
and then was released.
In September,
the county attorney said
he'd received a letter
from Sarah Page
asking not to press charges.
People had really
lost interest in it.
- No white person's
ever held accountable
for the some 100 to 300 deaths
that we believe occurred, uh,
during the massacre.
- I've never spoken to
a white Tulsan
who would admit to be
a member of the mob
during the riot.
And one reason is simply this:
there's no statute
of limitations on murder.
These homicides have now entered
the historic realm,
they can no longer
be prosecuted,
there's no one left
to prosecute.
- The massacre destroyed
the superstructure,
but miraculously
the basement survived.
This is a picture
of the basement.
So this picture was taken
August 1921,
and the massacre happened
May 31st through June 1st.
People came and hid
in our basement
during the massacre.
You see ashes
above every window piece
except the back window.
So this is the space
where that window frame
that we saw
that had no ash on top of it,
it's still right there.
If you can imagine people
being in this room
not knowing if the fire
would somehow come through
or come from above,
but they managed to survive
in this space.
When I learn about bodies
being dumped in mass graves
and not ever receiving
a proper burial,
that touched me as a pastor
on a visceral level.
♪♪
As a pastor,
when you bury somebody
it's more than just
giving a eulogy.
When we do what we call
the committal,
which is that ashes to ashes,
that dust to dust
over their bodies,
that is our way of
spiritually releasing them
to go wherever
they're going.
And to deny that to the people
that were dumped or killed
during the race massacre
is evil!
It shows you that
at that time period
people didn't even care about
the souls of Black folks,
let alone their bodies.
I believe there is
no expiration date on morality,
and if it was wrong in 1921
and that it has not
been repaired for today,
then we ought to
do something about it.
- One of the most basic,
I think, responsibilities
that a city has to
the residents who live there
is if you're murdered,
we'll do everything we can
to try to find out
what happened to you,
to find your remains
for your family,
and to render justice for you
and your family.
- It makes me feel, um,
kind of like Charlie Brown said,
"good grief."
Because it's good that
we unveiled the story,
but it's grief to us
as we unveil it.
Tell it right.
They took those planes
from that oil field
and they planned
an aerial attack,
and that's what
makes it different
from all the other
race riots in America.
Tell it right.
They bombed us,
they bombed us.
♪♪
- There's something
very spiritual
about this work.
And anybody who thinks
that this sacred ground
that we find ourselves on,
this crime scene
that we find ourselves on
is not gonna speak,
doesn't have the ears to hear.
♪♪
- Kavin Ross talks about
the redbirds.
He says that they are
the spirits of our ancestors.
Monday morning,
I went out to my garden,
and as I stepped
on my back porch,
I saw a whole bunch of redbirds,
and they were looking at me.
And I ran in here
to get my phone,
"Kavin, I gotta tell you
the story of what happened
"with the redbirds."
He said, "Girly, come"--
he says girly.
"Girly, come get your butt
down here to the cemetery."
Well, I knew something huge
is gonna happen from that,
and it did.
♪♪
- I'm here
to report an update.
I can confirm that
we have identified, um,
a large hole that
had been excavated
and into which
several individuals,
um, have been placed.
This constitutes
a mass grave.
- Tonight scientists
believe they have found
evidence of a mass grave
in Oklahoma.
- More than a year
after work had started
at Oaklawn Cemetery,
the team found human remains.
- Today is a significant moment
in the history of our city
in trying to do right
by the victims of this event.
- When I heard that
they found twelve bodies,
I said, "Finally! Finally!"
It's no longer folklore,
it's no longer a rumor,
it's true.
And that's going
just to be
the beginning of justice.
- People in this community
who've been saying
that bodies were dumped
in mass graves,
their stories
have now been vindicated.
Gets us one step closer
to giving their families
the opportunities
to have the truth be known
and actually give them
a proper burial.
- This is all part of
a-a mission
to get back what was lost.
We've lost a lot of history,
we've lost a lot of testimony,
we've lost a lot
of known heritage
that could have been
passed down
because it wasn't safe
to talk about for so long.
- Nobody said
nothing until now.
We're just now
talking about it.
- Growing up,
old folks have talked,
and they actually kind of hid
a lot of stuff from us.
- Staying quiet was
one of those ways
of protecting yourself.
It's kind of in
the back of your mind,
wondering
could this happen again?
What can I do to prevent this
from happening again
for my children?
- That is another part
of trauma,
the silence that it creates.
And while people
were murdered
and we need to acknowledge that
and we need to find them,
we also need to talk about
how they lived.
We need to talk about
what they built,
we need to talk
about what's left behind
and tell that story,
because that story
lasts for a hundred years,
the massacre was two days.
- Hut, hut.
Come on, boy.
Hut, hut, hut.
Hut.
People say,
"Why don't you leave here?"
Because the memory
of something
that I will never see
anywhere else is still here.
And these pages contain
all of the photographs
of my ancestors
who lived on Greenwood.
The memory,
we're connected to our memories.
Olivia Hooker,
who was a survivor,
was a really beautiful soul.
- At that night
of the massacre, Olivia Hooker,
who was a six-year-old girl,
saw her own home ripped apart.
White folks
came into her house,
destroyed her piano
with a hatchet,
and when they left,
she went over there
and they struck the keyboard,
and there was still sound
coming out of that piano.
That's who Greenwood is.
You might destroy
the outside of me,
you might shoot me,
you might burn me,
you're not gonna
destroy my soul.
We still got a song to sing.
♪♪
- We have these cycles
of Greenwood being built,
destroyed, rebuilt.
If you look at it
all together
in a 100 year journey...
it's a consistent
story of resilience.
- We are so close
to getting over this madness.
In time, we can go on
to be a great city
that we are destined to be.
- There's a resilience
that our people have.
The people here in Tulsa
have kept the story alive.
We know with our people,
it's never the end.
♪♪
- My dreams of
what Greenwood should look like,
it should look like us.
- My hope for Greenwood
is that she can become
back what she used to be.
- I wish Greenwood
would be healed.
A lot of stuff
was buried deep.
- My dream is to have
a replicate
of what we had in 1921
with all
the Black businesses,
everybody supporting each other.
- We are the youngest
business owners on Greenwood.
I would like to see
young people, you know,
rebuilding
Black Wall Street.
- Let there be
some type of closure
and some type of life back here
that we're enjoying.
- We need to reclaim
what was ours
from the beginning.
Our people built
Black Wall Street
by hard work and dedication,
we did it one time,
we can do it again.
- Greenwood can be that again,
we can be
all that we wanna be.