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50 Chapter 2 When Law Fails History, Genius, and Unhealed Wounds after Tulsa’s Race Riot Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. On January 25, 2007, the esteemed American historian John Hope Franklin turned 92. Dr. Franklin has led a rich and storied life and continues to win great acclaim and success in the academy and as a tireless public servant. Even as he celebrates the astonishing accomplishments of his 92 years, though, he cannot help but be haunted by events of May 31, 1921, when he was just six years old and living with his family in Oklahoma. That year, a virulent racism triggered what might now best be defined as one of the twentieth century’s clearest examples of a miscarriage of justice . The white-led race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, changed the course of the Franklin family’s life and thus is one of the defining moments in Dr. Franklin’s personal history. For the most serious students of America’s racial history, Tulsa 1921 also represents a defining moment and spot of shame for the nation. It is what happened—or more precisely what did not happen—after Tulsa that provides one of our clearest and most compelling narratives about a miscarriage of justice and wounds left unhealed. It is a story best told through the lives of real survivors and their descendants. It is a miscarriage that many times the mechanisms of American law had the power to make right, but chose not to. No one in John Hope Franklin’s family was physically injured in the race riot, but the course of their lives was altered forever. What his father saw and what he dedicated himself to after the Tulsa riots stand as a potent symbol of both gross injustice and a remarkable triumph of the human spirit. Ogletree-Sarat_pp023-112.indd 50 Ogletree-Sarat_pp023-112.indd 50 9/12/08 1:23:06 PM 9/12/08 1:23:06 PM When Law Fails 51 John Hope Franklin was born in 1915 in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, and spent his earliest years there with his older sister, Anne, born in 1913; his mother, Mollie; and his father, Buck Colbert Franklin. In the early twentieth century, Buck Franklin was one of the most successful and well-known African American lawyers in the nation. He had launched his practice in Rentiesville but soon set up a law office 70 miles away in Tulsa. His family remained in Rentiesville while Buck rented an apartment in a segregated and highly prosperous, culturally exciting section of Tulsa called Greenwood . He planned to move his family there in June 1921.1 Let us now fast forward from the image of young John Hope Franklin, about to reunite with his father, to the newer picture of the distinguished, vastly accomplished 80 plus-year-old Franklin in 1997. That was the year President Bill Clinton appointed Franklin chairman of “One America,” an ambitious effort to discuss and illuminate matters related to race and justice in the United States of America. Franklin’s committee developed plans of action and made recommendations to the president for the achievement of broader understanding, equality, and justice in America.2 In 2005, John Hope Franklin published his memoir, Mirror to America : The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. This best-selling book tells the life story of an American treasure. A reader can easily see the straight line of connection between the events of Tulsa 1921 and the recommendations of Franklin’s “One America” committee seven and a half decades later. The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot On May 31, 1921, Franklin, Anne, and Mollie were in Rentiesville, eagerly awaiting the day when they would officially move to Tulsa. Buck’s law practice was flourishing, and the time had come for the family to be reunited . However, as Franklin writes in his autobiography, “news of the violence [in Tulsa] reached us [in Rentiesville] well before news of [Buck Colbert Franklin].”3 He and his family read of the destruction, violence, and unknown number of deaths in a local African American paper, the Muskogee News. Days passed without any word from Franklin’s father. Finally, the Franklin family received a letter in the mail from Buck that verified his safety, told the story of what happened in Tulsa, and informed them that their departure from Rentiesville was delayed indefinitely. Ogletree-Sarat_pp023-112.indd 51 Ogletree-Sarat_pp023-112.indd 51 9/12/08 1:23:06 PM 9/12/08 1:23:06 PM...

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