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When HBO’s Watchmen (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020) TV series hit our screens, recreating a historical event now known as the Tulsa Massacre, Americans of all races were shocked to say that history was so gross and so significant for history. .
Few people knew that the details of the mass murder of black and white people by the black mafia were believed to be the richest black community in the United States at the time.
After the collective coup, a number of projects were created, such as NBA stars LeBron James and Russell Westbrook, and Dream Hampton (executive producer of the documentary Surviving R Kelly), all hoping to tell this story of black economic success. white racism.
But as is often the case, history is more complex than it seems. Why were there so many African Americans in the twentieth century? At the beginning of the century in Tulsa (Oklahoma)? Why did they achieve such success over a period of time, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, known for the collapse of reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow?
As I discuss in the book, I’ve been here all along: Black Freedom in Native Land, the story of the Tulsa neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street,” has been incomplete since Creek was created as an Indian town, populated by former black slaves of women and men. The freedmen used the land they received through the American government to build a prosperous life for themselves, attracting African Americans from the United States built on the current black landscape.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the massacre, and it is worth getting to know its broader history well, the new awareness we have of it and the continuing importance of unhappiness as we celebrate our modern moment.
In the late 1820s and early 1830s, members of the Cherokee Nation embarked on the now-popular “Tears of Tears” initiative, which forced the Cherokee to evict them from the lands of Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee, which had been called home for thousands of years. , they were not alone. A small number of these members of the tribe brought in black women and men who were slaves, who helped ease the burden, do physical work, and other tasks.
By 1860, these slaves would be about 15 percent of the Cherokee Nation. Members of four other Indian slave nations — Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations — made a similar journey to what was then known as the Territory of India (now part of Oklahoma).
After members of the five nations fought on both sides of the Civil War in 1866, the United States retaliated by forcing these nations to free their slaves, giving them all their rights and privileges for citizenship, and giving them land ties.
The free creeks (formerly enslaved by the rivers) were located in various places, many of which would be Tulsa to create the remaining cities and communities, some black and some racial. In the late 1890s, oil was discovered by white Americans and Tulsa became a site for growing speculators, bringing in many American settlers.
Because they were free people, the Creek voted free in tribal elections, acted as representative tribes, and built schools and churches for them. At the same time, in the United States, after the heyday of the 1870s, African Americans had less federal support to gain their right to vote and the right to live without sadness. When they looked to the West, they saw the land, income payments, and rights that the blacks of the native nations had, and they wanted it for themselves.
They came, brought by newspaper editorials, advertisements, and appeals from village promoters. According to the U.S. Census of 1894 and 1910, between 1890 and 1907, the black population of the Indian Territory rose from 19,000 to more than 80,000. Their presence made Oklahoma the most populous American state created and populated by African Americans, while they were called “all blacks”. While life wasn’t perfect, as black Mildred Robertson of the south said, “my people [formerly] they lived in the lower Mississippi near Louisiana … they had a little more freedom in Oklahoma. “
Some black families became large, like the titanic OW Gurley and serial entrepreneur and financier, while others established comfortable middle-class lifestyles for themselves, supplying their Tulsan with black car repair shops, grocery stores, bedroom houses, and dentists ’offices. among other businesses, creating one of the richest black bars in the country – hence the term “Black Wall Street”.
Some whites in Tulsan didn’t like that, and jealousy was clear, even though racial violence wasn’t a big deal in 1907 after the state of Oklahoma. In 1921, he began sharing the elevator with a white teenager named Dick Rowland with a white woman. to shout, he ended up with whites in Tulsan, including law enforcement, burning buildings, and shooting women, men, and children indiscriminately; Dick Rowland was the spark, but he turned on a lot before.
African Americans moved to Tulsa because of their lives and opportunities to see Creek free and other blacks enslaved by the ancient Indians. In the Territory of India, they were free from the reach of white supremacy, in a space dominated by tribal governments. That was the exact context that made Black Wall Street possible. But the Tulsa massacre was a bitter memory of where the white settlers went, as well as anger with black success and, indeed, black existence.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the attitude of the Al Jazeera editorial.
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