WASHINGTON (CN) — Tying discriminatory law and policy endured by generations of Black Americans to a 100-year-old explosion of white mob violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma, President Joe Biden spoke Tuesday about his administration's commitment to closing the country's racial wealth gap.
Biden unveiled his plans at an event in Tulsa this afternoon marking not only 100 years since angry whites pillaged the city but the first time a U.S. president has visited Tulsa on the anniversary. One hundred years gone, Biden called it time to “acknowledge the truth and history” of what happened.
“Just because history is silent doesn’t mean that it did not take place. And while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing. Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they can’t be buried no matter how hard people try,” the president said. “So it is here, only with truth can come healing, justice and repair — only with truth — facing it.”
The Tulsa Race Massacre occurred in 1921 across 35 square blocks of a predominantly Black section of the city called Greenwood. Surrounded by mostly white communities with a fierce appetite for segregation, a Jim Crow approach to all matters of law and order, and a lust for land, Greenwood was the peaceful and prosperous home to some 10,000 people. The districted earned its nickname as Black Wall Street for giving a people already segregated and shunned by white society not only safe haven but a place to thrive, with schools, churches, medical facilities, banks, theaters, newspapers and more.
Though its origins are murky, some historians say the massacre erupted with the scream of a young white woman who had been riding in an elevator alone with a black man. Sarah Page would later admit that Dick Rowland had merely stepped on her toe, but her shriek brought charges of sexual assault against Rowland, who had fled the scene as soon as the elevator doors opened.
After Rowland's arrest, an armed group of Black military veterans staked out the courthouse where he was being held, vowing to prevent a possible lynching.
When a white mob descended on the building, a single shot, unclear from which side, brought eight days of violence, ending with the mass imprisonment and internment of all Black Tulsans by the National Guard. Historians suggest that Oklahoma law enforcement chartered planes to “quell the Negro uprising” by dropping flaming jars of turpentine. The Tulsa Historical Society and Museum also notes that, after the melee, more than 6,000 people were detained for up to eight days at the local convention hall and fairgrounds.
Viola Ford Fletcher is 107 today but just a girl during the attack that killed about 300 fellow Black residents of Greenwood.
During a recent appearance before Congress, Fletcher put a finer point on the razing of her community left more than buildings in ashes. When the white mob destroyed Fletcher's home, her family’s wealth was destroyed along with it. Like so many others, Fletcher's family had to flee. And though Fletcher did survive, she also had to forsake an education to make ends meet, ultimately spending most of her life employed as a domestic worker for white people.
The burning, looting, rioting and killing in Tulsa spurred economic consequences for Black Americans not just limited to Oklahoma’s borders or even a single generation. Though not the first time racial violence disrupted Black lives, the massacre is considered one of the worst and most violent episodes of racial violence to occur on U.S. soil.
President Biden minced few words Tuesday about the threat that white supremacy still poses to the United States.
“Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today, not al-Qaida, not ISIS,” he said, using a name for the Islamic State group.
