How America's Legacy Of Racial Terror Still Affects Black Wealth | Forbes

00:07 Speaker 2:
Each pin on this map marks the location of an attack on Black Americans and their communities from the Civil War into the 19 hundreds. It's no accident. You're unlikely to find many of these in American history textbooks. There's been a concerted effort to whitewash and cover many of them up. But while some of the stories may have been scrubbed from the records and textbooks throughout history, survivors and their descendants are speaking out, shedding light on the violent events that took place in their communities and exposing the lingering social and economic damage caused by some of the worst racial violence in American history.

00:52 Speaker 2:
After the American Civil War, the country entered a period known as Reconstruction, during which it's set about reintegrating the Confederate states and nearly 4 million newly freed enslaved people. But African Americans were hardly given a foundation on which to build their new lives a fter the war. N o reparations were paid to the formerly enslaved for what they and their families had endured for generations. Many had been told they'd be given a small plot of land to get started on, and while there were plans to allocate some land to the formerly enslaved after the war, such as special field order number 15, much of the land seized by union forces or promised to African Americans was later given back to white southern citizens, ex-slave owners, and to white northern entrepreneurs.

01:35 Speaker 2:
The following decades saw African Americans slowly gain more economic and political power. They bought land, started businesses and built schools, but in many places where African Americans succeeded, white Americans set out to destroy that success.

01:50 Speaker 3:
The Civil War was a revolution. It destroyed the most powerful slave owned class in the world. And now the question is what's going to replace it? The freed people had a clear understanding of what their freedom meant. They wanted self-determination. They wanted to reconstitute their families. They wanted to live as far away from white people as they could. They basically wanted to be left alone, but they also wanted to be citizens, and they wanted to exercise the rights that other citizens did.

02:20 Speaker 3:
And so on some level, reconstruction was designed to answer this question about the meaning of freedom. And so African Americans became citizens slavery's abolished for the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, nationalizes citizenship and creates due process. And so now black people have equal protection before the law, and they can now run for office, hold office and participate in society. Big succeeded for a brief time that it existed.

02:51 Speaker 3:
Black people were running for election, they were holding office. There were integrated schools. We were beginning to act and behave like a democracy. By 1877 is the North tires of reconstruction. We see the withdrawal of troops, and on some level, really the withdrawal of federal protection of black people's rights. Just because the federal government said reconstruction was over did mean that black people stopped living their lives like freed people. They continue to hold office. They continue to form these very important biracial political parties and movements.

03:24 Speaker 3:
They joined interracial unions. They began to own businesses, some cases owning land. Extraordinary success in the face of a lot of violence and not much federal protection. But what happens in the 1890s is that the southern elite decides for themselves what the meaning of freedom's going to be. They're going to strip black people of their citizenship. White supremacy is reconstituted in the 1890s, and you can't look the same as it did in slavery. And so what you end up with is disfranchisement and segregation and sharecropping and convict labor and debt, peonage, but underwriting that is extraordinary violence and terror.

04:05 Speaker 3:
Violence and terror.

04:11 Speaker 4:
I like this phrase that sociologists and historians often use to describe the country in terms of race relations, and that is that this was a period they described as the Nader of race relations in America, the low point of race relations in America. And they used that language because there was this proliferation of these events that were called race riots that were mainly assault on black communities. It was in New York and Philadelphia, Baltimore and Memphis, and Omaha and Chicago and DC. Summer and fall of 1919 was dubbed by James Weldon Johnson, who was with the NAACP as read summer, read as a metaphorical reference to blood that flowed through the streets from all this violence post World War I.

04:55 Speaker 4:
The other thing that's happening during this period is lynching. Lynching is is simply a form of domestic terrorism aimed more often than not at black folks. The real aim is to strike fear in the hearts and minds of a group, black folks in this case, to make sure that black folks knew and stayed in their place. And so lynching was running rampant during this period.

05:26 Speaker 5:
The Elaine that we see today is very different from the Elaine at the time of the massacre. At the time of the massacre, it was one of the fastest growing cities and local economies in the state. The bulk of this new revenue that was coming in was from cotton sales cotton's at the heart of understanding what happened during the Elaine Masson. First of all, there are sharecroppers. The official name for it is debt peonage. On its surface, it seems very, very fair.

05:59 Speaker 5:
Planters offer plots of their land to sharecroppers in exchange for their labor. The way the system is supposed to work is at the end of the growing season, the profits from the harvest are supposed to be split 50 50, half going to the planter, the other half going to the laborer. However, this isn't what normally happened. There's an inherent problem when you have a planter that has to go a whole growing season and he has no income.

06:30 Speaker 5:
You have to ask yourself, how does he survive? And he survives by borrowing from the planter. And this is where the plantation store comes into play. Every plantation had a plantation store. Its sharecroppers could go to that store and get items on credit. What most people don't know is that the credit offered at this store was at astronomical rates. Even when the sharecropper received his half of the shares. Quite often because of these doctored books and these inflated prices, he was never able to get out of debt, and therefore he really could not leave because he owed money.

07:11 Speaker 5:
What sharecropping or debt peonage did was enable planters to have a workforce that they virtually paid nothing for. The planters would sell the cotton and quite often come back and say, well, this is all I got for it. And pay the sharecropper only a fraction of the half that he was supposed to get.

07:31 Speaker 5:
This kept them in perpetual debt, and with the judicial system that was not going to allow them to leave the debt hanging, the sharecroppers were, in essence, made slaves. African-Americans had just gone off to war. So many African-Americans who had participated in a war were given promises that if they went and fought this war, they return as full fledged citizen. So when they return to these cotton fields and they find themselves being cheated just as they had before, they believe that they have recourse.

08:03 Speaker 5:
And the recourse that they believe they have now is the courts. They band together form a union, hire an attorney, and this will be their undoing. Once the planters find out the last evening of September of 1919, there is a meeting called for the Progressive Farmers and Household Union. This was the union that the sharecroppers had formed to sue the plantation owners for their rights.

08:35 Speaker 5:
Plantation owners got wind that these meetings were happening. They sent out bans of people who are also sheriffs and law enforcement, but also individuals who work on those plantations as sort of overseers. There's a shooting that occurs right outside of one of the meetings,

08:57 Speaker 5:
Two of the individuals who have been sent there by the planters, two of the law law enforcement agents. One is injured and one is killed. And when the report gets out of the shooting, those individuals that had gone there, the Raz, the meeting will begin passing on messages that are totally unfounded at that point, that there was an insurrection going to take place, and that this insurrection was intended to overthrow the county and displace a white rule there.

09:28 Speaker 5:
The response to that report will be that hundreds of individuals will pour in from neighboring counties. The white American legion that had just been establishments before would be deputized. These men are sent out to arrest the union members, and there's a shootout when they return and try to arrest them from DC. Orders will come to the governor and to military bases there, that 500 troops would be mobilized and sent in by the federal government.

09:58 Speaker 5:
Even though the sharecroppers are arrested, this isn't enough to stop the mobs that are have already been called in. They begin shooting at any black person that they saw. Many blacks will begin hiding in the swamps or hiding in thickets. These men in small groups will begin hunting them out. They saw the, the military trains arrive, and when the, the troops came looking for blacks, they assumed that they were there to help them.

10:29 Speaker 5:
So blacks began coming out of the woods and going toward the soldiers and were shot down, some of them by machine gunners. The governor himself raced over in a car to try to be there for the photo ops and to participate.

10:44 Speaker 7:
My grandpa said they was surrounding people and they was, you know, shooting first and asking questions later. Even with women and children, they lost friends in the massacre because all them stayed in the area. And when people came, they were just shooting everybody. They wasn't. You got seen, you got shot.

11:01 Speaker 8:
Everything was just shoot to kill, shoot to kill. And then I was told that when they had killed the black, a ditch was dug and they all were thrown into that ditch as one big lump sum. Not a grave, not a burial, but all were thrown in a ditch.

11:20 Speaker 5:
Their homes were formally slave cabins that are on the property or or shanties that had been largely established by the planters and weren't owned by them. What we see is looting of these cabins, the taking of the, the little livestock they have and the taking of property that belonged to them. We do not know how many people were killed. There has never been a single grave that has been discovered or recovered. People had to make a conscious decision whether you stayed and you continued to work or whether you fled. And a great number of people fled after this event.

11:59 Speaker 2:
According to some descendants, as residents fled the town and surrounding Phillips County, they were forced to leave behind land they owned, which was then stolen by white residents, some of whom perpetrated the massacre. While evidence of black land ownership in and around a lane from the time period has been difficult to find some black descendants claim, that's because a lot of the documents were likely destroyed. What is clear is that a consistent oral history of land theft has been passed down through generations of black residents of Phillips County.

12:29 Speaker 7:
We ain't got no proof, but we do have the oil stories, and if you listen to the ol’ stories, all of 'em assisted. You know, people can't make this stuff up. You know, if you listen to these stories, you cannot make this up.

12:42 Speaker 5:
The families of plantation owners have made themselves considerably wealthy from the cotton boom that took place there. And the generations that were able to either exploit slavery or exploit black labor through debt pian it, but there was no profit. There was no gain for these. The individuals who actually were out there doing the work, and now like the old hedge clippers, they've all been discarded, forgotten, left behind, and that's where Elaine is today.

13:18 Speaker 5:
It has some of the highest poverty rates in the country, high unemployment rates. It's riddled with health issues, poor drinking water. There is no school in the town. They have to bust their children out.

13:32 Speaker 7:
It's a lot of money here, but there's no generation wealth for black people. When the killing was over, all the wealth for black people just went away.

13:42 Speaker 8:
Going to Elaine, it is like going to the end of the world. There's only one way in and one way out.

14:02 Speaker 4:
One of the ironies about Oklahoma is that it comes late into statehood 1907, and it had been promoted even by black folks as kind of a promised land, a bah land, a land of opportunity, because it had not come into statehood. And there were diverse folks here, including natives. There were calls for black folks to come to Oklahoma to get away from the deep south and the rigid segregation that existed there. Tulsa really transitioned from sort of a dusty western outpost to a much more cosmopolitan city at the turn of the 20th century, primarily attributable to the discovery of oil.

14:42 Speaker 4:
Tulsa was a segregated city, as were many cities. During this period, the black community sat just north of the Frisco tracks. Black folks were segregated into this geographic area, but they actually leveraged segregation to create an economic enclave that was very successful because folks were based on the constraint of segregation, forced to, to trade with and do business with one another.

15:10 Speaker 4:
It became an enclave of not just entrepreneurs and business folks, but a bunch of professionals, doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, et cetera. And there were economic successes throughout the country in these segregated black neighborhoods and, and some beyond. The confines of segregation. Oklahoma in the run up to statehood becomes really a bastion of the same kind of, of of white supremacist notions that existed in the deep south.

15:41 Speaker 4:
The MAs Corps was caused by a number of things. The Greenwood District, the black community in Tulsa, sat on land that was desired by industrialists, including railroad executives. We also have to think about white supremacy and, and the psychological dynamics that were operative, not just in Tulsa, but throughout the United States. In Tulsa, you have kind of an extreme example because you have black wealth in this segregated community that abuts downtown Tulsa, white Tulsa. If you're a white person, you could literally stand on the Frisco tracks and look over into North Tulsa and see black folks who were driving nice cars, owning their own homes, having their own businesses.

16:22 Speaker 4:
And that was, in my estimation, the cause for cognitive dissonance. Black folks were faring much better economically in Tulsa than many white folks thought they should be. Another factor was the KKK,

16:40 Speaker 4:
The Ku Klux Klan and iconic domestic terrorist organization, which had a foothold in Oklahoma throughout the 1920s. Tulsa was no exception. Add to that, the media, one particular media outlet called the Tulsa Tribute, a daily afternoon newspaper, published a series of incendiary articles and editorials that really fomented hostility in the white community against the black community during the runup to the massacre. And that's the context. Those are the atmospherics of Tulsa.

17:12 Speaker 4:
As we talk about May 31st and June 1st, the days of the massacre,

17:20 Speaker 4:
The incident began with an elevator incident. There was a black boy whose name was Dick Rowland, 19 years old, who shined shoes for a living. He needed to use the restroom one morning. This is May 30th. Facilities available for his use were were limited because of segregation. He knew that there was such a facility on the third floor of the downtown. Drexel Building has to take the elevator up to the third floor. Elevators back then are manually operated. A young white girl named Sarah Page is manually operating this elevator. Something happened on the elevator. We don't know exactly what it was. We'll never know likely, but it likely was that he bumped into or brushed up against Sarah Page.

17:55 Speaker 4:
Some say he stepped on her foot. In any event, she overreacted. She began screaming. The elevator landed back in the lobby. Dick Rowland frightened as well. He probably should be given the circumstances frightened ran from the elevator.

18:09 Speaker 4:
Sarah Page is distraught. She ex, ex exits the elevator. She's comforted by a clerk from Rehberg, which is locally owned store. He's concerned about her. She talks about being assaulted on the elevator. He calls the police. She ultimately recants. The original story, refuses to cooperate with prosecutors after Dick Roland has been arrested. Unfortunately, by the time the recantation occurs, it's too late and it's too late. In part because the Tulsa Tribune published an article the next day.

18:40 Speaker 4:
It's entitled Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator, painting it as an Attempted Rape in broad Daylight. There's language in that article that clearly is intended to make Sarah Page look more virtuous. The the corollary effect of which is to make Dick Rowan look more villainous, and it has its desired effect. A large model white man began to gather. Dick Roland had been arrested by this time, by the sheriff, put in jail would set atop the courthouse, white man gathered on the lawn of the courthouse.

19:13 Speaker 4:
Ultimately, the white mob numbered in the thousands. The sheriff was so concerned that he actually called down to the offices of the Tulsa star, the black newspaper. He knew that there would be black men gathered there and told him what had transpired, that Dick Rowland was arrested, that he was being held in jail, that he was safe, he was being protected. But he was concerned because he was hearing this Lynch talk among this large and growing white mob. A number of black men, several dozen in number, some of them World War I, veterans with weapons who knew how to use them, marched down to the courthouse intent on protecting dick roll from what they thought would be a certain lynching.

19:51 Speaker 4:
They were confronted by the larger white mob. As you might imagine, words were exchanged. A white man tried to take a black man's gun, a gun discharged, and in the words of some of the massacre survivors, all hell broke this after that. The so-called riot was on, and it resulted in the devastation of the Greenwood community. Many people in the white mob, many of these men were actually deputized by local law enforcement.

20:23 Speaker 4:
They affirmatively prevented the fire department from putting out the fires that raged planes flew over the Greenwood community, privately owned planes, and according to eyewitness, dropped incendiary devices, bombs on the community that caused the flames to burn more brilliantly and spread more rapidly. The National Guard was ultimately called in to quell the violence, which they did on the afternoon of June 1st, 1921. The next day,

21:06 Speaker 4:
The official death toll is 37. Nobody who's studied these events believes that that to be true, it's more likely within a range of 100 to 300, at least 1,250 homes in the black community were destroyed, as well as were a number of churches, schools, business places, and other commercial establishments. The Red Cross provided relief immediately. Post massacre food, shelter, clothing, by all accounts, did a wonderful job. Black folks, particularly black men, were rounded up and taken to internment centers throughout the city for a temporary period.

21:40 Speaker 4:
It was ostensibly for their own protection, but according to survivors, it left the community essentially defenseless and unprotected. So looters came in and pillaged homes of, of finery like jewelry and expensive items that some of the more wealthy residents of the community had owned.

22:06 Speaker 2:
The Tulsa and Elaine Massacres were not isolated incidents. They were just two of many. And they were representative of a broad backlash to the social status of black people in the United States. The goal of attacks, like these historians say, was to maintain white supremacy by any means necessary. And the effects of these attacks on black communities can still be seen and felt today.

22:28 Speaker 9:
You know, some people will say, well, slavery ended years ago, or even, you know, segregation ended years ago. You know, that's in the past. Why are you dredging up the past? Well, the past isn't the past, and I think my whole body of research that I've done looking at different events all across the world, you find this over and over and over that the effects of the past linger and they have consequences. And in general, if, if these events are historically important enough, they'll, that they shape the way the world is today. After learning about the Tulsa massacre and reading a bit about it and realizing we don't have a lot of hard statistical evidence about what the consequences were, that's basically where I came in, is just wanting to know what were the consequences of the Tulsa massacre.

23:13 Speaker 9:
So immediately after the massacre, we find that black household heads who owned homes fell by 4.5 percentage points.

23:22 Speaker 9:
And then if you think of another measure of that is are you an individual that's living in a home that's owned by someone in your family? That measure of home ownership fell by 6.3 percentage points. And the other thing that we find is decline in occupational status. And one measure of occupational status is to look at is an individual working in a white collar occupation? There's a 3.1% chance that you're in a white collar occupation. Then after the massacre, that figure falls by 2.3 percentage points.

23:55 Speaker 9:
So that's a huge, huge effect. It's, you know, 66% decline in white collar occupations. That result is controlling for taking into account everything else that's going on in the economy and also between different racial groups. But it's not just in Tulsa, but we see these effects in other parts of the country as well. So we look at newspapers all across the US and basically look and see are they covering the massacre in the days right after? And what we find is where there is more intensity of coverage about the massacre, the effects that we find in Tulsa, we also find in those communities as well,

24:33 Speaker 10:
Just like we know that there's a thing such as generational wealth, there's also generational poverty. What we found in working through the Justice Greenwood Foundation and our work with our survivors and descendants is that this generational poverty or generational lack of opportunity started with the massacre. And let's talk about Viola Fletcher after the massacre, and Mother Fletcher had to flee for her life with her family to Claire Moore to live in an impoverished state. She was not able to go back and finish school, and it caused her lots of problems in life.

25:05 Speaker 10:
Well, most of her life, she was a domestic worker working for pennies, working for white families that treated her less than they treated their dogs. You know, Les Benfield Randall, also a little girl at the time, only six years old, but she was in town with her, her grandmother, Molly Benfield, and obviously during the massacre, she's a young lady, she says she can't remember a lot, but she does remember running.

25:29 Speaker 10:
She does remember them coming to the door saying, get the blacks need to get out. The white people are killing all the black, particularly the black men. She remembers being taken to the fairgrounds, which was one of the places they put our, our people in those, what they called at the time concentration camps. Hughe was Van Ellis. We call him Uncle Red. And obviously he was a baby. He was an infant at the time of the mask. I think he was six months old. Hughe Van Ellis and Viola Fletcher are brother and sister. They live a lot of his childhood outside.

26:02 Speaker 10:
I mean, they basically lived in like a tent. They, they basically had to survive off, off the land and it was very traumatizing for him and something that shaped his life.

26:14 Speaker 2:
A 2018 study from the American Journal of Economics and Sociology estimated that if 1,200 median priced houses in Tulsa were destroyed today, the loss would be around $150 million. The additional loss of other assets, including cash, personal belongings, and commercial property, might bring the total to over $200 million.

26:37 Speaker 4:
So the Graham community, as a business community was destroyed as a testament to the, to the resilience and the endowment human spirit that was endemic in the community. The community was fully rebuilt, began to really boom peaking in the early to mid 1940s. That continued throughout the fifties, began to decline in the sixties and seventies for a couple of reasons that are really important to the story. If you wanna connect 1921 to the present at the macro level, one of the major things that happened was integration found its way to Tulsa the Greenwood community as a business community was successful, largely because it was a closed market, which was attributed to the Jim Crow laws that existed.

27:20 Speaker 4:
So because of segregation, there was a need for a Greenwood community. Black folks couldn't get what they needed or couldn't apply their trades in the larger dominant white community.

27:31 Speaker 4:
So they created their own economic space. Even the black folks that work outside the community bring their dollars ultimately back in the community. That begins to change when the world begins to change because of integration. So black dollars then have another outlet. It's hard for a sole proprietor, a mom and pop type small business in the Greenwood community to compete with Walmart. That opening up, ironically has the economic effect of undermining the success of the black community when the black community begins to, to decline because of integration and other systemic factors.

28:07 Speaker 4:
There's a movement in the sixties and seventies designed ostensibly to address blighted communities called urban renewal. So you see a blighted community, you come in with urban renewal, and you buy up the land and you take away the properties. So what then you get is black folks losing their businesses, losing the land, and really struggling. So today what we have in the Greenwood community is a community that is actually bustling, but it's not a, a community in which black folks own the most of the land.

28:49 Speaker 2:
The pins on this map, mark, just some of the more well-documented attacks on black communities from the Civil War into the 19 hundreds. But it doesn't include the countless other assaults on black communities during this time period. From countless lynchings to entire black communities being expelled from their towns by white mobs. The scale of damage here is in many ways, incalculable families torn apart, communities destroyed and generational wealth erased like many other communities impacted by these type of racist attacks. Throughout history, black residents of Tulsa and Elaine are still looking for justice and some semblance of closure.

29:26 Speaker 8:
I would love to know what happened to my people or my family, and if I can figure out what happened to them, if I could get information, that would be great, but I know that they're not gonna give it to us.

29:39 Speaker 4:
Who owes the people?

29:40 Speaker 5:
That argument could be had on a lot of different levels. You know, the governor himself participated in massacre. So is the state responsible? The governor asks for federal troops to be sent in. Is the federal government responsible? Is the local government responsible? Are individuals responsible? So there's a lot of blame to throw around in this one. One of the things that makes this difficult is this lack of bodies. But if we're able to find mass graves and then connect those bodies to living individuals, we have people who have been harmed and people that you can pay reparations to.

30:19 Speaker 5:
When

30:19 Speaker 4:
I think about reparations, I, I think of the denotation of the term. What does the term actually mean? It means to make amends or to repair damage. The fundamental question is, is there damage in this community that is in need of repair that we can trace back to 1921? I don't know anybody who had an, who could answer no to that question. The hard part is really talking through the nature of the damage and in terms of remediation, what things work best.

30:51 Speaker 10:
But that's the only way we can get back to where we were. If we get that reparations, restitution, remedy, whatever words you wanted to use, a comprehensive plan that provides a remedy and benefit to those who suffered the harm,

31:11 Speaker 4:
There could be targeted economic investments in the black community, the community most harmed by the massacre curriculum reform. The whole point of curriculum reform is to include this history as an integral part of the curriculum, such that the errors of the past are not made again, and such that people, specifically black people, see themselves reflected in ways that that embolden them and give them the psychological power to be creators and entrepreneurs in the present.

31:46 Speaker 5:
Without history, we, we don't have a true understanding of our nation, particularly our nation's most marginalized communities.

31:55 Speaker 3:
Somehow we need to be able to present this history as our history and to help people understand that you're not responsible for the past. I'm not responsible for what my ancestors did, but I'm obligated to the present to do what I can to make things better.