Thread by @one0nine

One aspect of the #TulsaMassacre that seems to get overlooked in the orgy of violence is that there were aircraft literally firebombing the black neighborhoods. And a bit of digging turned up names- the pilots were Air Service veterans flying surplus Curtiss JN-4 "Jennies". 1/

The Feb 1, 1920 edition of the Tulsa Tribune had a brief blurb about a "local oilman" who purchased 447 aircraft (!!!) at a cost of $2,500,000... that's 33.3 MILLION dollars in today's money. What was he going to do with them? Well, fast forward to May 1. 2/

It's May Day, and the nation appeared to be in the grip of the first "Red Panic", with national strikes proposed by the I.W.W. Recall, the Communist Revolution in Russia had completely upset the balance of power in 1917/18, and postwar Germany was in immense turmoil 2/

Capitalists were scared shitless about the working class suddenly realizing their own power and standing up for themselves (ahem), and used every tool available to push back against "unrest". That included creating the "Air Police" in Tulsa. 3/

Remember those 447 aircraft? It seems a bunch of them were at the Curtiss Southwest field in Tulsa, and flown by former Air Service pilots including W.T. Campbell, William Wellborn, D.A. McIntyre, and Byron Good. 4/

So that's how #Tulsa came to have it's own air force on hand to attack #Greenwood. Contemporary reports mention the aircraft dropping flaming tarballs on the roofs of Black homes and businesses- the tar would stick and immediately ignite any flammable material. 5/

We would refine that technique into the napalm-filled M69 incendiary bomb, used in WW2 to burn entire Japanese cities to the ground. 6/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M69_incen…

It's worth remembering that we didn't always wear the "white hat", and that the pages of our history are frequently soaked with the blood of innocents. The atrocities in #Tulsa are finally receiving the attention they should have 100 years ago. 7/end