Of Cover-Ups and Courage
This morning, people who lived through the Tulsa race riot of 1921 and others who have become experts on it testified before a House subcommittee.
Beyond the still-shocking and sickening details of the riot itself _ white people killed dozens of black Tulsans and burned down their thriving community _ is the tale of the cover-up.
According to one witness at the hearing today, you could grow up in Tulsa and never know it happened.
John Hope Franklin, a history professor emeritus at Duke Law School, whose father survived the riot, said former Tulsa Mayor Susan Savage, who grew up in the city, told him she was “a grown woman” before she knew about the riot.
Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a law professor at Harvard University who has been representing survivors of the riot and descendants in court, said the state of Oklahoma and city of Tulsa acted “to supress all talk of the riot as well as the survivors’ attempts to seek legal redress.”
The Oklahoma Legislature approved language in 2001 saying the “conspiracy of silence served the dominant interests of the state during that period which found the riot a public relations nightmare that was best to be forgotten …”
Ogletree said, “Even those (blacks) that fled Tulsa to other parts of the state were not allowed to speak of their experiences and were not believed when they did.”
Down the hall from the hearing this morning on the Tulsa race riot, another House committee was holding a hearing.
This hearing was about the death of Pat Tillman, a former NFL player who enlisted in the Army was accidentally killed by fellow troops in 2004 in Afghanistan.
An Army ranger testified at the hearing that he was ordered not to tell Tillman’s brother, Kevin, that Pat had been killed by friendly fire. The story first released by the military was that Tillman had died engaging the enemy to protect his comrades.
It took awhile for the Tillman family to learn the truth, but they persisted.
For the survivors of the Tulsa riot _ and the people of Oklahoma who knew nothing about it _ it was the late 1990s before a special commission began to unearth details of the riot that had been suppressed for decades.
At the hearing today, Ogletree praised the people who were determined that the chapter be written, including former Oklahoma state Rep. Don Ross and Tulsa historian Eddie Faye Gates, who were at the hearing.
“It took 80 years to unbury an American nightmare,” Ogletree said. “But they did it.”
Chris Casteel
Washington Bureau
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment