What led up to the burning/bombing of Tulsa and Rosewood in the 1920's, and what follow-up has there been?

by QuantumPolagnus

I've never heard of either of these events, and am only just now hearing about it from a video of Kimberly Jones on Youtube. What actually happened, and has there been any follow-up, or repercussions for any of this? I know this is a very broad question, but I would appreciate any info.

White_Mlungu_Capital

Sorry for the late response, reddit was not working for a few months for me.

These are different communities in different states, but during roughly the same era known as the "Red Decade". The Red Decade period reflected a period in America marked by extreme White Supremacist violence and terrorism particularly from several prominent White Supremacist domestic terrorism organizations, the KKK, White Camelia, Redeemers, Red Shirts (the Nazis copied the idea of brown shirts from this American organization), and the 4 Horse Gang.

They along with many other whites, basically sought to overturn the economic advancement made by African Americans leading up to and during this period. You can get a good sense of what that looked like by googling pictures of the Harlem Renaissance.

The US military decided to heavily restrict the enrollment of blacks during WW1. Some could join but they did not think it was a good idea to arm people they had enslaved who they suspected had an axe to grind against them to fight for freedom because they might come back to the US with the weapons and continue the fighting. This was also during the height of Eugenics movement in America where the predominantly Northern European descendant white population came up with theories on race, sub-race and intelligence and basically claimed that people from southern, eastern and central Europe were stupider than North Europe and blacks even worse. They also did not want to arm those other groups from Europe either under the pretense that they were "low iq". As the IQ test are largely culturally biased, and reflect bias of the writer, and since the academia was largely only open to West -Northern European descendant whites, they wrote the test and people who shared the same educational assumptions were shown as having the highest IQ scores then.

In essence, the "Segregationist system" (and I use quotes for a specific reason I explain later). Had an unintended consequence of allowing some African Americans to get relatively wealthy, upper middle class, etc. While many young whites were drafted off to war and blacks denied the right to fight in the war, there became a massive need back home to support the war effort and industries that required, young strong male labor. That meant just blacks could fill the gaps.

I use Segregation in quotes because it was not true Segregation of 'Separate but Equal'. It was Separate but only in a manner designed to advantage whites. Now, no design is perfect, so some blacks were able to find loopholes and do very well economically. In some states whites were given the best farm land like Oklahoma and blacks put on what was viewed as worthless farm land dry and full of rocks in a segregated area. It then turned out oil was under that land in Tulsa, and it became very valuable so the blacks got richer than the whites. Whites being outraged by this, coming home from the war and seeing blacks driving fancy cars when they did not have cars of their own decided to attack and loot and steal from black communities and burn them to the ground. They would use any false pretense to justify it.

Another example was the state governments often refused to fund black medical schools or black dentistry schools or black law schools, etcetera. Blacks could not stay at white only hotels. Blacks were also heavily discriminated against by the white run banks who were funded by the white majority government. So when a black person could actually slip through the cracks and get the degree or raise the money, or build the hotel, they were often times the only game in town or one of a handful of games in the segregated zone. Where a community of 10k whites might have 10 lawyers, 10k blacks might have just 1 or 2 lawyers, and despite charging lower fees, they'd make it up on volume and could do well for themselves.

The unintended consequences where that black professionals often did much better than the gov't had anticipated they would do financially. The government of course saw this as a threat to a white supremacist ideology of separate and unequal because if too many blacks got rich, eventually whites might demand to go to their institutions if they surpassed the quality of white ones. Something that began to occur in the 1920s especially with nightclubs dealing with Jazz music (which was called Jackass music back then). The whites would drive their cars to get as close as they could to listen outside of black establishments in segregated areas to try to hear Jazz music as it was not yet widely being played or performed in white segregationist entertainment venues.

Also many of these Jazz artist who were virtually all black, had performed all over Europe and had made lots of money (no segregation laws over there) and had come back to America.

You never having heard of these events is not unsurprising given the political history of America. America has tried to portray a certain image as a land of opportunity, freedom, fairness, and if you work hard you can be successful. The Red Decade shows that this is not true, especially for African Americans. They had worked hard, were denied freedom, opportunity, denied fairness, and America mistreated them in ways similar to how the oppression based regimes in Europe and Asia or Latin America mistreated their own people, who America sought and seeks to contrast itself to. As such they seek to historically repress the information or at least not actively promote it.

The two largest textbook markets are California and Texas, and school boards in Texas simply refuses to permit any accurate historical portrayal of the racism issues in the textbooks (they threaten to black list any publisher who tries to bring forward such information in the books). As such it won't be covered unless you basically research history for fun or take an African American studies course, typically at the university level.

African Americans couldn't speak out openly about these things back then for a long time because they risked being murdered and lynched like their other family members who died in these acts of ethnic cleansing and pogroms. Even if they did speak out, the prosecutors were usually white, would normally not bring cases where whites murdered blacks, even with multiple witnesses. Often times these were led by the police, and the government, so who exactly where they going to complain to? The whites who had done these murders had often bragged about the murders openly but no white jury would ever convict them, and the prosecutors would never bring such cases to justice.

By the 1970s most of the whites who had done those murders in things like Tulsa and Rosewood had died out (remember they were adults committing murders in the 1920s and 1910s, at a time when most people died by their 50s and 60s. Even the few who did survive, even if you brought the cases, many whites would sympathize even to this day more with the people who did the murders than the victims themselves and refuse to convict.

What we are really seeing politically play out is the question of will America ever punish the people who have been terrorizing a large segment of America and carrying out race based crimes for centuries, and the answer to this day still appears to be no for the most part, with few exception. In that regards America is incredibly unremarkable because most other countries are able to confront their racist past and demons, deal with them, convict them, punish them, pay restitution and move on, whether it be Yugoslavia, Rwanda, France, Germany, South Africa, etc.