American History – June 2019

8 AMERICAN HISTORY

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In 1921, a clash between white and black Tulsans escalated

into a battle that ended after more than 100 deaths and dec-

laration of martial law. Estimates of the death toll reach 300,

mostly blacks; the true tally may never be known. Long

scrubbed from the Oklahoma city's history, the tragedy is to be commemorated with installations around Tulsa funded

by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The temporary works will recall the destruction of the “Black Wall Street” in Greenwood,

then the country’s most prosperous black community. The episode began with a claim that a black man assaulted a

white woman. The turnout to defend the accused from lynching escalated into a two-day white rampage, including

reports of private pilots flinging turpentine bombs. In an unpublished memoir, witness Buck Colbert Franklin, lawyer

and father of historian John Hope Franklin, recalls, “Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues

into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in num-

ber—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air. The side-walks were literally

covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every

burning building first caught from the top. I paused and waited for an opportune time to escape. ‘Where oh where is our

splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?’ I asked myself. ‘Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?’” Accord-

ing to a 2016 Smithsonian Magazine article, the destruction extended more than 35 blocks and included more than

1,200 homes. White authorities seized and held more than 6,000 black Tulsans.

Finding a framed newspaper dated December 28, 1774,

staff at a Goodwill in Woodbury, New Jersey, recognized

the memento as historic, and on January 19, 2019, Good-

will Industries transferred the item to the American Philo-

sophical Society in Philadelphia. The paper features a car-

toon designed by Benjamin Franklin showing the iconic

sliced snake and the motto “Unite or Die.” The newspaper

was printed two months after the First Continental

Congress, whose delegates signed a resolution to boycott

British goods starting in December 1774. The battle at

Lexington and Concord between British troops and Amer-

ican rebels occurred on April 19, 1775.

Goodwill Hunting

Tulsa Terror

Ugly Times

Said to store

ammunition, Mount

Zion Baptist Church

burns on June 1, 1921.