I first learned about the Tulsa massacre in college when I read an old short story, "Oklahoma Race Riot," by Frances W. Prentice. Originally published in Scribners, August 1931. It's . . . not an easy read.
You can find it online but the list of trigger warnings required dissuades me from linking. It is somewhat educational, for a white reader, as it purports to give the perspective of a white Tulsa resident during the massacre. The narrator is not sympathetic, nor intended to be.
Its publication in 1931 also gives the lie to the claim that "no one knew" about Tulsa at the time. People knew. As the narrator in Prentice's story says repeatedly, "No one really knew what to do."
I originally read Prentice's story in a hardbound collection (edited by W. Somerset Maugham, LOL), before the internet was a thing. But I went to the library and looked up the race riot in Oklahoma and found out it really happened.
And then I started wondering how many other race riots I hadn't known about.
Well, all of them, basically.
Well, all of them, basically.
Here's the one that sticks with me the most: the #MillicanMassacre. Or as the white folks called it, the "Negro Riot at Millican" July 25, 1868. Millican, TX is about 5 miles from the house where I grew up, on the old Wellborn Rd. millican.omeka.net/items/show/171
According to the Dallas Herald, "The number of negroes killed during the rioting was about 25." The story was picked up by the New York Times (which also quoted an article from the Houston Kuklux Vidette Extra): millican.omeka.net/items/show/9
Amy Earhart, an English professor at Texas A&M, has led an effort to collect primary sources related to the incident: millican.omeka.net/items/browse
When you put all the pieces together, you can see the rapid post-war power shifts that were at the heart of the violence. Whites in Millican were threatened by newly freed black people, and specifically by black soliders who had fought for the Union. drive.google.com/file/d/1orMhkR…
The Klan had been active in Millican. The Halliday family, who made the original accusations that sparked the violence against black residents, had been the largest slave-owning family in the area prior to the war. Whites killed at least 5, maybe 150 black residents over 3 days.
The Rev. George Brooks, a Methodist Minister who helped organize black voter registration, was chased for 5 or 6 miles to the Brazos River bottom, where he was captured, tortured, and murdered.
This was the probably the largest race riot that ever took place in Texas after the Civil War, and no one I knew had ever heard of it. My friends and I grew up playing & riding horses on the very ground where people were murdered. We never knew.
Our house is ~5 miles from Millican, a mile from the Brazos River. My dad, an amateur historian (and member of the Brazos Valley Historical Society until his death) discovered that our driveway was once the old Booneville Ferry Rd. This massacre probably crossed our doorstep.
And we never knew.
I think about this every time I go back there. Rev. Brooks hid in these woods. He died here. A lot of other innocent people did too. I'm tempted to say, like Prentice's narrator, "I don't really know what to do about these things."
I think about this every time I go back there. Rev. Brooks hid in these woods. He died here. A lot of other innocent people did too. I'm tempted to say, like Prentice's narrator, "I don't really know what to do about these things."
But just because you don't know exactly what to do doesn't mean you can do nothing. For one thing, we should be paying reparations to the survivors of America's endless violence toward black people.
Property is power. We stole black people's labor for centuries, then we stole whatever they owned that we could get our hands on. I don't care what metric we use to decide the payout. Other countries have done it; we did it for Japanese internees. Restore some balance.
Another thing we could immediately do is start recognizing, and doing more research into, the history of racial violence in our own communities. Pay some black students, historians, community members, to pull together the threads and tell the stories we've been hiding.
These are old wounds and uncovering them is not pleasant but they won't heal otherwise.
So, if you only learned about the Tulsa Massacre recently, here's a challenge for you: Start asking about the history of racial violence in the place where you live now, and in the place you grew up. You'll find it. It's there. It's everywhere.
That's why we're still surrounded with such violence now. Go educate yourself on how all the white people in your town before you wrung their hands, and did nothing. And then make the choice to do something.
