Day 2: Bad White Peoples & Big Steaks! 

 

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The Boys rose early on winters morn for another stop in Springfield1?! Yep, Springfield Missouri for a cup of coffee! With cups of java in hand, Mike drove through southern Missouri and into the Sooner state, where the Boys stopped in Tulsa and visited a very sad site for race relations, Greenwood.

 

A Black Mark on White America!

The Horrible Tulsa Greenwood Massacre of 1921

The Tulsa race riot was a two-day-long white supremacist terrorist massacre that took place in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, between May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been appointed as "deputies" and armed by city government officials, attacked black residents and destroyed homes and businesses. The event is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.

The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time, one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as "Black Wall Street."

 

The Iconic Greenwood Neighborhood

More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned in large facilities, many of them for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. The 2001 Tulsa Reparations Coalition examination of events identified 39 dead, 26 black and 13 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records. The commission reported estimates ranging from 36 up to around 300 dead.  Mike and been there before and brought Bone to check it out.

 

Greenwood Rising: The Tulsa Massacre Black Wall Street Museum

Mike and Bone checked the sordid story at the Greenwood Rising Museum, which gathered the shards of the story, showing what was lost in the eruption of racial violence—and what the Black community was able to retain. Using multi-media screens and projections, it presented the streets of Greenwood, both during its heyday, and then at its destruction. The final of the museum’s eight spaces, the “Journey to Reconciliation,” urges visitors to visualize how Greenwood, and the greater community, might heal as it moves forward.

 

Day-by-Day Storyboards of the Massacre

The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 21-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building. He was arrested and rumors that he was to be lynched were spread throughout the city, where a white man named Roy Belton had been lynched the previous year. Upon hearing reports that a mob of hundreds of white men had gathered around the jail where Rowland was being held, a group of 75 black men, some armed, arrived at the jail to protect Rowland. The sheriff persuaded the group to leave the jail, assuring them that he had the situation under control.

The most widely reported and corroborated inciting incident occurred as the group of black men left when an elderly white man approached O. B. Mann, a black man, and demanded that he hand over his pistol. Mann refused, and the old man attempted to disarm him. A gunshot went off, and then, according to the sheriff's reports, "all hell broke loose." The two groups shot at each other until midnight when the group of black men were greatly outnumbered and forced to retreat to Greenwood. At the end of the exchange of gunfire, 12 people were dead, 10 white and 2 black. Alternatively, another eyewitness account was that the shooting began "down the street from the Courthouse" when black business owners came to the defense of a lone black man being attacked by a group of around six white men. It is possible that the eyewitness did not recognize the fact that this incident was occurring as a part of a rolling gunfight that was already underway. As news of the violence spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded. White rioters invaded Greenwood that night and the next morning, killing men and burning and looting stores and homes. Around noon on June 1, the Oklahoma National Guard imposed martial law, ending the massacre, but not the many years of trama to come.

Mike and Bone learned that about 10,000 black people were left homeless, and the cost of the property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $39.66 million in 2024 terms). By the end of 1922, most of the residents' homes had been rebuilt, but the city and real estate companies refused to compensate them. Many survivors left Tulsa, while residents who chose to stay in the city, regardless of race, largely kept silent about the terror, violence, and resulting losses for decades. The massacre was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories for years.

Finally in 1996, 75 years after the massacre, a bipartisan group in the state legislature authorized the formation of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The commission's final report, published in 2001, was unable to establish that the city had conspired with the racist mob; however it recommended a program of reparations to survivors and their descendants. The state passed legislation to establish scholarships for the descendants of survivors, encourage the economic development of Greenwood, and develop a park in memory of the victims of the massacre in Tulsa. The park was dedicated in 2010. Schools in Oklahoma have been required to teach students about the massacre since 2002, and in 2020, the massacre officially became a part of the Oklahoma school curriculum.

Walking out reflective and sober from the Museum on man's inhumanity to man over something so stupid as skin color, they read through the part that the Vernon AME Central Church.

 

The Vernon AME Church, Central to the Massacre

Vernon AME Church is where many black's hid during the hideous events. Fairly disgusted, the Boys grabbed a local coffee from the re-invigorated neighborhood and headed west toward a big mistake for George Armstrong Custer, whose mistake made him famous as an Indian hunter.

 

Catching Custer's Karma: Battle of the Washita

The Battle of the Washita River occurred on November 27, 1868, when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's 7th U.S. Cavalry attacked Black Kettle's Southern Cheyenne camp on the Washita River.

The Cheyenne camp was the most isolated band of a major winter encampment along the river of numerous Native American tribal bands, totaling thousands of people. Custer's forces attacked the village because scouts had found it by tracking the trail of an Indian party that had raided white settlers. Black Kettle and his people had been at peace and were seeking peace. Custer's soldiers killed women and children in addition to warriors, although they also took many captives to serve as hostages and human shields. The number of Cheyenne killed in the attack has been disputed since the first reports.

 

Mike and Bone Battling at the Washita!

Ragged Celebration of the Victims

Messing with Texas, Again!