Music Corner World

My thanks to Ed Cone for saying what needs to be said about the TRC. Sadly, I believe that the point of the whole thing has been lost on many. Since moving to GSO five years ago, I have been curious about the tensions that the events of November 3, 1979 have created in this city that I have grown to love better than any city I've ever lived in, including my home town.

I moved here from Tulsa OK which had it's own 'nasty' secret. And what a secret it was. No one, white or black, would talk about the great Race Riot of 1921.

The magnitude of the riot was astounding:

The official death count in the days following the riot was around 35, but evidence has surfaced through an investigation to suggest that at least 300 people were killed. Rumors still persist that hundreds, not dozens, of people were killed and that bodies were crudely buried in mass graves, stuffed into coal mines and tossed into the Arkansas River. If so, the Tulsa race riot would go down as the worst single act of domestic violence on U. S. soil since the Civil War; worse than the 1965 Watts riot, the 1967 Detroit riot, the 1992 Los Angeles riot and the 1995 Oklahoma city bombing.

Those events left a total of 301 dead. Two days of violence and arson directed by whites against African American neighborhoods left hundreds dead, hundreds injured, and more than 1500 African American owned homes and 600 businesses destroyed. Also destroyed in the African American neighborhoods were 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 stores, 2 movie theaters, a hospital, a bank, the post office, libraries, and schools.

Perhaps worse, and the point of my bringing it up here, is that investigation of the riot was put off for 80 years. No mention of the riot was made in history books, even in Tulsa, until the 1990's. When I moved to the city in 1990, many native Tulsans had never heard of the riots, even though it had destroyed a major part of their city and still contributed to ongoing racial tensions.

The fight to hold a similar set of hearings to the TRC continued the entire time I was in Tulsa, led by incredibly dedicated African-American and white civic leaders who understood that no progress could ever be made in that city without healing the wounds from that awful event.

The parallels to Greensboro are easy to draw. The 1979 incident did not kill 300 people, did not destroy whole sections of town and did not get swept under the rug for 80 years. But the potential for all of that is there. That is what is scaring us and dividing us.

The elite of our city has understandably but wrongly denied as foreign to them the events which have permanently laid a scar across the social landscape of our town. Whether or not we, as white people, picked up the gun or the axe or the hammer or the knife, or we, as black people, raged at the whites and egged them on, we are all responsible for the hate that is among us and the division that is so blatantly obvious and made real by the murders of the Greensboro riot of 1979. The people of Tulsa are taking responsibility for the Riot of 1921 and the divisions in their community today. They are truly in the process of reconciling their hate. We need to take responsibility for ours.