Burned at the Stake

This message fell on deaf ears.  Attempts to get Congress to pass a federal law against lynching failed.  Racial violence took the form of organized riots in many Northern cities as World War I ended, and African-American soldiers returned home.   There were major riots with large loss of life in East St. Louis , Chicago , Washington , DC, Knoxville , Omaha and other cities.

Sometimes entire African-American communities were destroyed.  This happened in Rosewood, Florida .  It also happened in 1921 in Tulsa , Oklahoma .  A mob of 10,000 whites used machine guns and airplanes to attack a prosperous neighborhood known as “Little Africa.”  They destroyed 18,000 homes.  They also ran into strong Black resistance.  At least 5o whites and 200 African Americans were killed – some estimates are far higher.

The catalyst for the destruction in Tulsa was the rumor of an assault on a white woman by a Black man.  But the underlying reason was white envy at Black economic advances in the area referred to as “ Black Wall Street .”  Of particular concern was the fact that about 500 African Americans owned parcels of land containing oil.

The Black historian John Hope Franklin, who came to Tulsa as a child four years after the attack, maintained that by fighting back, African Americans had broken through the fear which had been used to keep them in “their place.”  He wrote that “the self-confidence of Tulsa ’s Negroes soared, their businesses prospered, their institutions flourished, and they simply had no fear of whites.”

(Quoted in Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: from Reconstruction to Montgomery, University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, p. 185.)