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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 1/11/25: The Tulsa Race 'Riot' is revisited [1]
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Date: 2025-01-11
Just got back from seeing “A Complete Unknown.” Timothee Chalomet really nails Dylan’s appearance, singing and mannerisms without overreaching much at all, although his Dylan is a little more brooding and a lot less humorous than I would have liked. Ed Norton plays Pete Seeger just about perfectly. The acting is stellar throughout.
I left feeling a little sad, though not because of the film’s content, but because for me it portrays a world that for all intents and purposes no longer really exists, even though it’s the world that pretty much inspired the people many of us ultimately became. I suppose it’s impossible to convey the staggering influence Dylan had on all things musical that followed and this film doesn’t really even try to approach that, probably wisely. As a parenthetical aside, I’m not sure if Dylan ever uttered the words, “Picasso is overrated,” but if there was anyone in a position to feel that way, it was certainly Dylan (For the record, Dylan apparently reviewed the script and “didn’t reject” that line).
The New York Times published a story today about what’s now known as the 1921 Tulsa Race massacre, an episode that is will probably remain largely unheard of in our public schools except in certain AP History classes, assuming there are any of those still around after the coming planned destruction of our public educational system.
As reported by Audra D.S. Birch, what had been generally known about this event was long and popularly described as a “spontaneous” riot by white citizens of Tulsa Oklahoma against Blacks in that city, following the wrongful arrest of a Black man who, it was (falsely) alleged, had assaulted a white woman. A new analysis by the soon-to-be “re-oriented” Civil Rights Division of the
Tulsa, 1921.
Department of Justice, commissioned in September 2024, reveals that the massacre was far more coordinated and sanctified by the imprimatur of law enforcement than previously believed.
The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma was destroyed and up to 300 people were killed, was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report released Friday.
As Burch reports, the 1921 “investigation” of the incident concluded the massacre was “ not the result of ‘racial feeling,’ and suggested that Black men were responsible for the massacre.
Apparently it took this country over a hundred years to re-evaluate that assessment. I suppose we should be gratified it was prepared and released before the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is completely mothballed, because we sure won’t be seeing any more reports like this from the DOJ or FBI for the next four years (under Project 2025, the Department’s focus will apparently shift towards upholding the “civil rights” of white people):
According to the report, after a local newspaper sensationalized the story, an angry crowd gathered at the courthouse demanding that Mr. Rowland be lynched. The local sheriff asked Black men from Greenwood, including some who had recently returned from military service, to come to the courthouse to try to prevent the lynching. Other reports suggest the Black neighbors offered to help but were turned away by the sheriff.
The mood in the summoned crowd apparently transformed rather quickly. Burch notes that the new report determined that “Hundreds of residents (some of whom had been drinking) were deputized by the Tulsa Police. Law enforcement officers helped organize these special deputies who, along with other residents, eventually descended on Greenwood, a neighborhood whose success inspired the name Black Wall Street.”
In other words, everything that was perpetrated that day was done with the sanction of legal authority.
As Burch reports:
The report described the initial attack as “opportunistic,” but by daybreak on June 1, “a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic.” According to the report, up to 10,000 white Tulsans participated in the attack, burning or looting 35 city blocks. It was so “systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence,” the report said. In the aftermath, the survivors were left to rebuild their lives with little or no help from the city. The massacre’s impact, historians say, is still felt generations later.
In ten days Americans will be subjected to a regime that plans to co-opt law enforcement and local, “citizen militia” just as systematically for the purpose of forcibly deporting undocumented immigrants. It seems highly likely that a lot of people will be terrorized, hurt and even killed as a result of this effort. But it will all be done under the aegis of what may be loosely characterized as “the law.”
History does not “repeat itself,” we are admonished. Instead, as we are told by Samuel Clemens, (under his pen name of Mark Twain), it merely often “rhymes.” I wonder if Clemens would have been so forbearing in that judgment if he’d lived until the 21st Century.
I’m out with friends tonight but will be back later.
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