A tragedy in Tulsa: A 1921 race riot

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Prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, most history books rated the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as the worst urban disaster in American history. That tragedy took 168 lives and was all the harder to bear because it was carried out by domestic terrorists. Yet while Oklahoma City was a horrific event, it was not the worst urban disaster in American history, nor was it the worst in Oklahoma.

That distinction falls to the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, which saw the wholesale destruction of an entire community by a mob and the loss of as many as 300 lives. Because it was a black community, and a white mob, part of which had been deputized by local law enforcement, the riot spent almost eight decades unaddressed by the history texts, shamefully covered up by a conspiracy of silence on the part of white Tulsa. It now stands as one of the defining moments in race relations and one of the most tragic episodes in African-American history.

How Tulsa managed to keep the 1921 riot a virtual secret for years is a disgrace that is almost more scandalous than the riot itself. That finally changed in the past few years, once the Oklahoma Legislature began to debate whether reparations should be granted to the few people still alive who survived that awful night. Those discussions helped inspire Tim Madigan to write "The Burning," his excellent account of the riot, which appeared last fall. And the previous year, Rilla Askew used the riot as the backdrop for her compelling historical novel "Fire In Beulah."

Those efforts are now joined by James S. Hirsch's remarkable "Riot and Remembrance," the best book yet on the Tulsa riots, and one that should be required reading.

Hirsch begins "Riot and Remembrance" with an overview of race relations in the South at the turn of the century, exploring the Jim Crow laws and the segregated economy that effectively kept blacks in practical slavery. He explores the history of Oklahoma, which at first seemed like a refuge for blacks escaping the paternalistic old South, because the large Native American population made the state something of an ethnic melting pot.

In Tulsa, blacks built one of the largest and most successful commercial districts in America, calling it Greenwood. The area became so thriving with businesses, most owned by blacks, that it earned the name the "black Wall Street." Tulsa in 1921 seemed to have created a separate, if not equal, world where blacks could hold out the hope of owning their own home or business, something unheard of in many other communities.

All of that came to an end on May 31, 1921, when a false report of an attack on a white woman circulated. Fueled by sensationalist newspaper coverage that in retrospect seems close to criminal, the white citizens of Tulsa developed a sort of madness.

Hirsch — who also wrote "Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter" — skillfully weaves a narrative which at times reads like a true-crime thriller, and at other points resembles a war novel. He describes how hysteria in both the white and the black communities touched off the riot, and how the result was in truth more of a race war than a riot. Most of the victims were blacks. The exact count will never be known, because many were buried in mass graves.

At the end of the night, Tulsa's black Wall Street lay in ruins, and the blacks that were still alive were jailed or rounded up in camps for "their protection." Many blacks permanently left Tulsa for Chicago and other northern cities, worried for their safety. As the hysteria subsided, Tulsa began to rebuild, though even years later the Greenwood riot was rarely discussed outside of a whisper.

The riot itself takes up only half of "Riot and Remembrance." Hirsch spends the second part of the book chronicling how an attempted genocide of this proportion could be covered up for so long. He documents how the efforts of a few courageous Tulsans, both black and white, forced the city to examine its sordid past. It is a cautionary tale and a reminder during Black History Month that some of our common assumptions about memory are worth challenging.

And for anyone who thinks this is ancient history, Hirsch's recounting of the debate on the riot within the modern-day Oklahoma Legislature will be reason to pause. When the Legislature last year voted down reparations, it was just one more tragic chapter to one of the most shameful and terrible incidents in American history.

Charles R. Cross' most recent book is "Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain." He lives in Seattle.