Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre by Randy Krehbiel (review)

On the eve of the one hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre of May 31–June 1, 1921, Randy Krehbiel (a Tulsa World reporter) presents a journalistic narrative of the conflagration. Krehbiel recounts the destruction of Tulsa's black district, Greenwood, and its "'Black Wall Street of America,'" which symbolized black wealth even though it "had no formal financial institutions, no banks or brokerage houses" (p. 5). Black Tulsans spent much of their income within their community of over ten thousand souls in a segregated city. Krehbiel investigates the inconsistencies in the stories of the Tulsa race war. Details remain unclear about the office elevator incident between Dick Rowland, a young black man, and Sarah Page, a young white woman. Conflicting explanations abound, for instance, about the white civilians who gathered at the county courthouse angrily demanding that the authorities punish Rowland, the armed contingent of black men who arrived to protect Rowland from the possibility of being lynched, the unknown person who fired the first shot, and the one or more airplanes that supposedly bombed or strafed Greenwood. White fears were heightened upon hearing unsubstantiated stories of armed black men, including members of the African Blood Brotherhood, rushing to the city to rescue black Tulsans. The number of people killed remains disputed: officially there were thirty-six (mostly black) deaths, but anecdotally there were up to three hundred (if not more) mainly black deaths.

Krehbiel also documents black Tulsans' armed self-defense in the face of overwhelming white firepower, and he reports Tulsans' shock upon seeing the widespread arson of black homes and businesses, the mass killing, and the detainment and displacement of thousands of black men, women, and children. Tulsa became part of "more than 250 episodes of collective white violence against black communities" in American history (p. xi). Krehbiel notes that the level of violence and death in Tulsa came close to or matched that of America's worst antiblack massacre, in Phillips County, Arkansas, in 1919. He writes a thoughtful investigatory account of the disagreements among the authorities and black and white civilians about the causes and outcomes of the massacre, the relief efforts for black survivors, and the police and the National Guard's attempts to prevent a worse massacre. The author also discusses the efforts to commemorate the massacre, the debates on reparations, and the need for reconciliation.

In terms of significant contributions, Krehbiel fills the "dearth of case studies … that examine how specific newspapers reported outbreaks of white terrorist violence"; the Tulsa World and the Tulsa Tribune shaped "white opinion that the violence and destruction unleashed upon Tulsa's black community was a justified response to a 'negro uprising'" (p. xiii). Krehbiel asserts white supremacist sentiments among white Tulsans as a common explanation for the riot and places the Tulsa massacre in the context of the immediate post–World War I years, when white supremacists opposed what they thought were black Americans' provocations against white honor and militant New Negro actions to achieve social equality and interracial democracy with support from sympathetic white "do-gooders" (p. 124).

Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre takes its place alongside other notable books on the destruction of black Tulsa, including Alfred L. Brophy's Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921, Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation (New York, 2002) and Scott Ellsworth's Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge, 1982). Krehbiel could write a sequel that analyzes and explains a multifaceted white supremacy in Tulsa, in which some white supremacists opposed antiblack violence while others engaged in such violence. The book has an extensive index, a lengthy bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and two helpful sections on key figures and chronology. Tulsa 1921 is a worthy study, especially for an interested general audience and scholars of the African American experience.