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    The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
    The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
    The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
    Ebook404 pages7 hours

    The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

    By Tim Madigan

    4.5/5

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    “A powerful book, a harrowing case study made all the more so by Madigan's skillful, clear-eyed telling of it.” —Adam Nossiter, The New York Times Book Review

    On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous. 34 square blocks of Tulsa's Greenwood community, known then as the Negro Wall Street of America, were reduced to smoldering rubble.

    And now, 80 years later, the death toll of what is known as the Tulsa Race Riot is more difficult to pinpoint. Conservative estimates put the number of dead at about 100 (75% of the victims are believed to have been black), but the actual number of casualties could be triple that. The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, formed two years ago to determine exactly what happened, has recommended that restitution to the historic Greenwood Community would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional as well as physical scars of this most terrible incident in our shared past.

    With chilling details, humanity, and the narrative thrust of compelling fiction, The Burning will recreate the town of Greenwood at the height of its prosperity, explore the currents of hatred, racism, and mistrust between its black residents and neighboring Tulsa's white population, narrate events leading up to and including Greenwood's annihilation, and document the subsequent silence that surrounded the tragedy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 9, 2013
    ISBN9781466848849
    Author

    Tim Madigan

    TIM MADIGAN is an award-winning journalist and author of several books, including I'm Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers. He and his wife, Catherine live in Fort Worth, Texas.

    Read more from Tim Madigan

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Essential reading for every American. We must know our history.
    • 5/5
      This was so good. It was painful to read but I can not recommend this book enough. I support critical race theory because events like this can not be hidden.
    • 5/5
      The BurningThe Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921by Tim MadiganSt. Martin's PressI want to thank the publisher and NetGalley for letting me read this book. It's the 100 year anniversary of this carnage and I hope no one forgets this. Some didn't even know about this at all until 1970 when the book was first printed because the event was covered up so well.This book is a wealth of information about before, during, and after the massacre. It follows several people personally from before, during, and after. It describes the society at the time, what was leading up to this. The layout of the town, the daily routine of the people, what was changing. It also discussed the trigger that set everything off.It also discussed the rise of the KKK and how it came to be, how it morphed into what if it is now. How is changed the lives of everyone when it was shown as a savior to whites in the movie, 'Birth of a Nation'. The rise of hate, the lust for not just killing, but torture and killing.It was hard to read this book but I wanted to know the truth. That is something hard to come by these days. Even if it's not what I want to hear, I need the truth. Unfortunately I see a comparison of then and now. The rise of not just the hate but the lust of hate! Not just here in America but across the world. We were never a compassionate people but why can't we learn from our mistakes like this event in the book! A horrible massacre that killed hundreds of innocent people.I recommend this to all people that have a sliver of hope left for mankind. This book is packed with information and clarity as to the explosive, damaging rage and hate has in our communities. May we become better than this.

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    The Burning - Tim Madigan

    Prologue

    LIKE JUDGMENT DAY

    For the rest of her life, and she lived a very long time thereafter, Eldoris Ector McCondichie remembered the exact words of her mother.

    Eldoris, wake up! We have to go! Harriet Ector shrieked to her daughter on that beautiful spring morning of June 1, 1921. The white people are killing the colored folks!

    The cloudless sky outside was still pink from the dawn, but with those words, Eldoris’s drowsiness was gone in a blink, rendering her fully awake and trembling by the time she tossed aside the covers. The nine-year-old girl threw a dress over her head as her mother rushed her along, with scarcely time for shoes and socks, and followed her parents and older brother as they hurried toward the front door of their small home on Iroquois Avenue.

    White people? Killing the coloreds? Eldoris waited to shake free from the nightmare, but she couldn’t. She turned her mother’s words around in her young mind, trying to fit them together in a way that would make sense, but that didn’t happen, either. The days before had been so peaceful, boys and girls antsy because the end of the school year was just a few days away, but nothing else seemed amiss whatsoever.

    And white people? Eldoris never had reason to fear them before. Every morning since she could remember, her father had set out on foot, walking south through the Black quarter where her family lived, the place called Greenwood. Then he crossed the Frisco railroad tracks at the edge of the Black community, stepping into the dream world of tall buildings and streetcars and big new stores and huge schools and fancy homes where the white people of Tulsa, Oklahoma, lived. Every day Eldoris’s father clipped those white folks’ lawns and weeded their gardens, and the rich white people brought her father cold drinks on hot afternoons, and gave him a ham at Christmas, and otherwise treated her father fine, at least as far as his young daughter knew. But most important, they also paid her daddy a nice wage. Eldoris was old enough to know that the salary Howard Ector earned across the tracks was the reason his family had their little house on Iroquois. It paid for their food, and fifteen-cent movies at the Dreamland Theater on Greenwood Avenue, for her dresses, even for a doll or two.

    And Eldoris knew the story was the same in almost every Greenwood household—African Americans toiling for white folks across the tracks, thousands of men and women joining Howard Ector on that same trek south to work as maids, or as nannies who suckled the white infants, or as chauffeurs, elevator operators, ditch-diggers, landscapers, or shoeshine boys, taking the burden from white Tulsans who got rich from the oil wells gushing just south of the city.

    Many Black people disappeared into white Tulsa for days on end, swallowed up in the affluence like Jonah by the great whale, living in servants’ quarters on the south side. Greenwood didn’t see them until Thursday, the maids’ day off, when the servants rushed back home over the tracks and donned their fanciest clothes to stroll the two-block section of Greenwood Avenue where it ran into Archer Street—Deep Greenwood, as it was called. The maids and chauffeurs and gardeners and nannies ambled around for hours, past the sturdy brick drugstores, beauty parlors, newspaper offices, meat lockers, restaurants, jewelry stores, fine hotels, jazz joints, barbershops, skating rinks, and pool halls, all of them owned and run by the Black community—past the offices of the lawyers and doctors, all of whom were Black, too. The heavenly aromas of fried chicken, barbeque ribs, and collard greens filled the air, mixing with the notes of jazz and blues that poured into the street. Promenading. That’s what they called the activity of those wondrous Thursday nights—walking and flirting, pausing to spend some of their hard-earned money on an ice cream cone, or a glass of lemonade or a new hat, or on a snootful of bootleg liquor, then walking some more. Young men fought as the nights wore on and the moonshine flowed, and shot their guns into the air and sometimes at each other. But by and large, those nights were happy times, celebrations of what seemed possible for Black people in America less than sixty years after the Civil War.

    So on those Thursday nights in particular, the Black people could forget about the new brick skyscrapers, fancy cars, and big homes that belonged to the white people on the south side of the tracks. They could forget that Black people, whose sweat was certainly welcome there, couldn’t shop in white stores, or see movies at white theaters, or ride in white railroad cars. They could forget that new laws had caused even the telephone booths in Oklahoma to be segregated. They could forget that white people had larger, nicer, newer schools with all the latest textbooks for their children. They could overlook all these things because of the promise of those Thursday nights—because Greenwood Black people, probably more so than Black people in any other place in the nation, had everything they needed on the north side of the Frisco tracks. As far away as Chicago, Black people said the Greenwood community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the top of the mountain for people of their race, a remarkable little city within a city, remembered over the decades as the Negro Wall Street of America. And even a child knew the money that African Americans like Eldoris’s father earned from the white people made it all possible.

    But then, on that rosy dawn of June 1, 1921, it all disintegrated with her mother’s early morning words. The white people are killing the colored folks! And in the second that Eldoris poked her head out the front door, she knew it was true.

    She turned her head south as she stepped outside looking toward Deep Greenwood, the scene of all those festive Thursday nights. A massive black cloud of smoke billowed there now, nearly obliterating the rising sun.

    As her father pulled her from the house by the hand, she heard a terrible noise from the sky and looked up to see airplanes buzzing low. The little girl had seen the flying machines only a time or two before, and they were ominous creatures even then, but now as they roared above them, she heard the dull thuds of bullets hitting the ground around her feet like fat raindrops, and she realized that she and her family were being shot at from the air. She yanked free from her father then, racing in panic to a nearby chicken coop and pulling open the door. The terrified eyes of several Black adults already crowded inside stared back at her from the shadows. Chickens cackled nervously at the intrusion. Eldoris pushed her way through the grown-ups and crouched in a corner of the coop and would have stayed there forever if her father hadn’t appeared at the door, pulled her back outside, and dragged her off to the north to join all the others.

    For her family was certainly not alone in their flight. A great column of Black people was hurrying north with them along the Midland Valley railroad tracks that ran past her house, a sorry procession of thousands that stretched as far as Eldoris could see. Some were dressed only in bathrobes or nightclothes, having been flushed from their homes in the middle of the night by white mobs in the grip of the devil. Come out, niggers! members of the mob called to them in their Greenwood homes that night. Come out or die! So they rushed outside and headed north, many without shoes or socks. Women carrying wailing babies quietly wept to themselves. People hauled bundles of clothing on their heads. An old woman clutched a tattered Bible to her chest. A girl about Eldoris’s age carried a little white dog beneath one arm. Some of the men cried, too, or stared off to a place far away, as if looking for answers there. Parents dragged their older children along after them, just as Howard Ector now dragged his daughter. The old people shuffled along as best they could. Many of them were old enough to remember slavery, but nothing from those times compared to the horror of what was happening on this morning.

    The planes disappeared from the sky after a few minutes, so now and then someone in the procession took a moment to ponder the growing wall of smoke to the south. Beneath that cloud, their homes and all their other earthly possessions were being incinerated. Back there, they had seen their neighbors tortured in the most hideous ways, or shot down in cold blood, or burned alive.

    Why? The question hung over the procession like the smoke from the fires behind them. All anyone knew was that a few days before, a white girl had accused a Black boy of assault, which somehow caused Greenwood to be swallowed up by rage, as if every ounce of enmity that had been building up in the white people since the Civil War had exploded on their doorsteps. The white people are killing the colored folks! An angry white mob clamored at their heels. So Eldoris and her family and the rest of the Black people fled for their lives up the Midland Valley tracks toward the wooded hollows and rolling hills to the north of town, where they might finally be safe.

    Looking around at the others, at the horror etched on the refugees’ sunken faces, at the smoke behind her, Eldoris was reminded of something she had learned about in Sunday school. This was like Judgment Day! As she stumbled north with her family, she expected to see Jesus appear on his throne at any second, come to set everything right. But she never did.

    Each member of Eldoris’s family survived that day, but so did the horror—her mother’s chilling words in the morning, the smoke, the crowds, the planes, the death and grief and destruction her family saw when they were allowed to return home a few days later. Somehow, their little house on Iroquois had survived, but most of the other buildings for thirty-five square blocks—almost every business, church, hospital, school, and home in Greenwood—had been reduced by the mob to ash and rubble. A few days after the burning, Eldoris walked to Detroit Avenue on the shoulder of Standpipe Hill, where so many of the Black doctors and lawyers and businessmen and schoolteachers had their large, beautiful brick houses. Now only an occasional wall or chimney still stood. On one surviving wall, a wisp of white curtain dangled from a window, tossing in the breeze. Eldoris somehow took that as a sign of God’s love and hope.

    But the memories always stalked her, God’s love and hope or not. The memories stalked everyone. In the decades to come, few Tulsans on either side of the tracks spoke out loud of the great burning, as though the catastrophe was a secret that both Black and white people conspired to keep. Indeed, people who moved to the city only a few years later might never have known that it happened at all. But whether it was discussed or not, no one who witnessed the events of those historic days in Tulsa could ever forget. Seventy-nine years later, seventy-nine years later almost to the day, on a cloudy spring morning in the year 2000, Eldoris Ector McClondichie shuffled to a bookcase in the living room of her tidy Tulsa home, not far from the place on Iroquois where she grew up. She was an elderly widow now. She pulled two tissues from a box on the bookcase and sat down on her sofa, smiling

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