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 Askia At-Large
Askia Muhammad
Columnist Page
Friday, March 18, 2005; Page 21
Race Riot victims seek justice
Before Watts, “race riot” usually meant White mobs unleashing terror against the Black former slaves in this country. But the Harlem riots of 1964, and more spectacularly in August 1965, the Watts (Rebellion) Riot gave new meaning to the race riot.
Before that–as horrible as was the Reginald Denny beating on live TV helicopter-camera at Florence and Normandy in Los Angeles. Rodney King Riot–the terror of the race riot was only visited upon Black folks.
Imagine. You’re powerless against an irresistible tide. Only this tsunami is waves of human beings full of hate–race hate–itching to do harm to people who’ve done them no harm. You’re powerless to defend yourself. There is no law for you. There is no order for you. The sheriff has disarmed your defenders and armed and deputized your tormentors.
They attack you because you are there. You are Black. You are prosperous. These race-haters believe the hate that was taught by film maker D.W. Griffith in his 1915 film “Birth of a Nation”, which was extant in America at the time. They sympathize with the Ku Klux Klan, the way we sympathize today with the Muslim-hating mob we’ve armed, deputized and sent to occupy Iraq.
It’s May 31, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The National Guard is called in, not to rescue the innocent, but to forcibly remove them from their homes, their neighborhood to inter them in a camp they improvised on a baseball field, while the haters, the Kluxers, systematically torched everything they owned.
The reason they revile you so, is because your skin is Black and they made you a slave, a hated Black slave, who only worked for them for no pay in brutal conditions. You were robbed of your name, your culture, your religion, your identity, Toby.
It happened like that in America to a once prosperous community called Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921. And the survivors, who were told they had no legal recourse, have decided to take the matter into their own legal hands.
Ranging in age from 89 to 102– the survivors of that awful day when hundreds of Blacks were killed, 22 square blocks including 1,256 homes and every other structure a library and a hospital, churches and schools were reduced to ashes– the survivors petitioned the Supreme Court in person March 9, demanding reparations, demanding justice, demanding that the facts and the law pertaining to their claims be argued in a court of law.
“Until there is justice in Tulsa, there can be justice in no other place in America,” Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree said recently. Prof. Ogletree is the lead counsel in the case. “It is a strong statement and an appropriate statement,” Prof. Ogletree told this writer. “The 1921 race riots in Tulsa, where hundreds of homes and businesses were destroyed; where hundreds of lives were lost, all African American; where 10,000 African Americans were left homeless; where millions of dollars of damages were done; and yet where no court has ever said, ‘I’m sorry.’ or, ‘We’ll pay you for your losses.’ We have to have justice in Tulsa.
“Until they get justice, there can’t be any sense that we have a just legal or political system in America. I’m so glad that they’re hear with us in Washington,” Prof. Ogletree said in an interview as he and others prepared to file a petition in behalf of the survivors, to overturn a decision by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, dismissing their lawsuit (Alexander, et al v. Oklahoma, et al) against the State of Oklahoma. The plaintiffs include 150 living survivors and more than 300 descendants of those who were killed or lost property.
“If you look at the history of reparations, you see that appropriately after more than 60 years of suffering, Jewish victims of the awful Holocaust finally received some reparations for their losses in the earlier part of the 20th Century,” said Prof. Ogletree.
“You see that after more than 40 years of waiting, Japanese Americans who were in internment camps during the Second World War in the 1940s, finally received reparations late in the 1980s. You see in the city of Rosewood in the state of Florida, Blacks who were victims of another racial mob, finally got reparations 70 years after the devastation of their communities,” he continued.
“Tulsa stands alone as one of those communities where we can document what happened, we have living victims, but we don’t have anyone with the moral courage to say that they need to receive what they were entitled to receive.”
The state of Oklahoma established a commission four years ago, which studied the events which began May 31, 1921, when Blacks and Whites fought outside a courthouse where a Black man was being jailed on a false accusation that he assaulted a White woman, a building elevator operator. The 19-year-old Black man was arrested. A White mob formed outside the courthouse. Shots were fired between the mob and 75 Black men who gathered to protect the man from being lynched.
“The Oklahoma Race Riot Commission concluded something that had not been really known before,” said Prof. Ogletree. “In fact, hundreds of White men who had been deputized by the sheriff there, were given weapons, and they were like a mob, attacked and destroyed the Great Black Wall Street. The hotels like the Stratford Hotel. Theaters like the Dreamland Theater. Other businesses and homes.
“The (Commission) found for the first time that Blacks were victims, not the cause. They recommended reparations for those victims and the state and the city were silent.”
There has also been a “conspiracy of silence” he said, that was so effective that until recently a former Tulsa mayor was unaware of the riot’s occurrence. “So now, we’re going to other forums to have their voices heard, and to get justice for these folks,” Prof. Ogletree said. “So, I intend to fight with other great lawyers who are volunteering their time with me, until our last breath to make sure there’s justice for the Tulsa race riot survivors of 1921,” he said. |
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