While writing last year about Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, and the fictional childhood town of her protagonists, with its “coloured” populace peculiarly intent on becoming about as fair-skinned as they could; I diverged to mention the town of Eatonville near Orlando in Florida – one of the first all-black municipalities to be founded after Reconstruction – which was lived in and then “fictionalised” by Zora Neale Hurston. I didn’t investigate any further into where other such communities may have evolved and what their fate may have been. This week, though, I have learnt about one such other. Ended well did it not.
From May 31st into this June 1st day in 1921, a white mob descended on the prosperous Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, murdering hundreds of residents and destroying more than a thousand homes. One hundred years late(r), a US President will visit a place, revisit an abominable event that has found no place in history books or civics classes, and pay respects, homage … and probably not much else. The careful dance around reparations, in this case as in others, and generally, will continue.
What can be said, though, is that remembrance of this event has come at a time when ignorance can no longer be an excuse – not for governments, nor institutions and not for the public. The tragedy of Greenwood is out there for all to come to terms with. It is telling, I think, that it is another glaring omission both in the national historical narrative and, it follows, from many – or most – of the school history curricula in the United States. (If you don’t believe me or the mainstream media on this, Tom Hanks has his say. A rare high spot in the new genre of “celebrity woke essay”!) And it is a tribute to the tenacity and courage of those who have kept the memory alive, who have fought for recognition and justice.
In The New York Times; an excellent photographic and multi-media essay that juxtaposes the flourishing community that was, pulsing with human endeavour and industry, against the decimated remains after the rampage. And this NYT Magazine piece by Caleb Gayle (Black and from Tulsa) about the contemporary legacy of a trauma and a history too long wrapped in silence and rarely admitted to is a good read.