Century-Old Massacre Illuminates Current Dangers
Weaponized abuse of marginalized and voiceless damages all of us
January 30, 2025
It is routinely noted that the cannon fodder of lies, hate, and conspiracy, combined with corporate media bootlicking and a lack of government responsibility, that got a convicted felon, sexual predator, and serial liar back into the White House hearkens back to Jim Crow’s America. The 1950s are often the time period pinpointed.
I would offer May 31, 1921 as the date that best defines Make America Ghastly Again. This dreadful day in U.S. history was never introduced to me in public school or at state college. Earlier this month, the federal government decided to finally address the barbarity, long after nearly all of the survivors had died.
One hundred and four years ago this spring a racist white mob destroyed a thriving neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., then known as Black Wall Street. The violence robbed generations of a future their forebears had built. MAGAs, then and now, despise people of color, especially those who achieve success outside the entertainment industry (see Obama, Barack). Just shut up and dribble, and don’t you dare kneel during the national anthem.
Churches, businesses, and homes were burned to the ground, some 300 people were killed, and about 800 were injured during the Tulsa Race Massacre. Money and personal property were stolen. Gone in a flash of hate was a bustling community that boasted banks, restaurants, clothiers, hotels, contemporary homes with indoor plumbing, and a strong school system.
The violence and destruction spilled over into the next day. The alleged defense of white female virtue was the motivation for the mob’s violence. It was the go-to excuse used during the Jim Crow era to lynch innocent Black people. Five-plus decades later, diversity is blamed for today’s deadly collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines jet.
Nine thousand people were left homeless in Tulsa. Survivors were locked in internment camps, and left without resources or recourse. In the bloody aftermath, the city resisted offers of meaningful help and “utterly failed to provide necessary aid or assistance, and efforts to seek justice through the courts foundered,” according to the recently conducted Department of Justice report.
Decades after the racist mob burned the thriving Greenwood District to the ground, the massacre was still referred to as a “race riot” — in the 21st century, it would be called “very fine people on both sides.”
Survivors were long afraid to talk about what really happened, scared of violent retribution, so they continued to live in fear. The white lies became the truth. This white-perpetrated crime spree is rarely taught in schools, like so much other white-led brutality that takes place in our nation whenever people of color, especially Black people, succeed politically or economically.
“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about this race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said in the Jan. 10 press release that announced the 126-page report. “This report lays bare new information and shows that the massacre was the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack. Now, more than 100 years later, there is no living perpetrator for the Justice Department to prosecute.”
Our multi-tiered justice system worked as intended.
But that still isn’t enough for the hate-filled insurrectionists, including the 1,500 or so who were recently pardoned, taking over the country. The new D.C. regime recently ordered the Civil Rights Division to halt most of its functions, including a freeze on pursuing new cases, indictments, or settlements.
I know readers will ask what this century-old atrocity and the return of a megalomaniac to the land’s highest office has to do with the environment? The answer is everything. As I have written before:
Environmental issues and social justice issues are interconnected on multiple levels. Society can’t solve the problems of one without addressing the problems of the other. Their lanes cross, merge, and run parallel. They both typically slam into dead ends. We aren’t close to solving any of the problems intertwined among these two broad issues.
We’ve been plundering people and the environment since this country was born. Sadly, it’s the bedrock upon which the United States of America was built. We’ll never stop damaging the environment if we don’t stop inflicting pain on those we purposefully discriminate against, scapegoat, terrorize, and kill. We’ll never stop the human suffering if we don’t respect the water we drink, the air we breathe, the land we sow, and the other creatures living among us. Our demise will come because we continue to put power and profit over all else.
If you need proof, just take a look at the industry I’ve worked in for 34 years: the media. The industry reports alternative facts. Bothsidesism is embraced, even if the other side is all conspiracy, lies, and threats. Habitual liars are repeatedly given time on cable outlets and Sunday news shows; their worthless claims seldom slapped down, except for the occasional incredulous “Wow” or “Really.”
The media long gave climate change deniers a stage to spout their fossil fuel-crafted talking points. For decades, the aforementioned shows invited unscrupulous politicians to speak about a problem they knew nothing about, except that their masters wanted us to remain addicted to their dangerous products. Their white lies became the truth. Many have and many more will suffer because of it.
Today, media controlled by billionaires, capitalists, and gluttonous executives make sure the terms climate change, climate crisis, or global heating are seldom uttered when covering the death and destruction being caused by more intense wildfires, heat waves, flooding, melting ice sheets, and severe weather.
The media establishment covers politics like it’s the Super Bowl or Golden Globes. Democracy, and the natural world, dies in darkness.
Today’s propagandists learned from the insidious coverage of the Tulsa Race Massacre about how to protect the powerful and blame the powerless.
The 1992 book Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Scott Ellsworth examined the role the media played in the tragedy. (Interestingly, race riot was even used in the title then, 70 years later and in a book that explores what really happened.)
One of the troublesome aspects pointed out by Ellsworth relates to how the media inflamed the situation. He noted “it is clear that the single most important precipitating ingredient” was the manner in which the Tulsa Tribune covered the violence.
The newspaper’s specific coverage and not what actually transpired is the incident and the single most important force in the creation of the lynch mob, according to Ellsworth.
“The trigger for the violence of the Tulsa Race Massacre was the kind of unfounded condemnation that, at the time, commonly justified unspeakable treatment of Black men,” according to the DOJ’s century-late report. “The allegations of a white man led police to arrest 19-year-old Dick Rowland for allegedly assaulting a white woman who operated an elevator he used. A local newspaper then sensationalized the story, and soon a mob of white Tulsans gathered outside the courthouse, demanding a lynching.”
The allegation against Rowland was eventually dismissed, but not before Tulsa Police engaged in bloodthirsty hatred.
Again, you are probably wondering what this past wickedness has to do with the natural world and current affairs. Plenty. It’s the continuation of depravity being perpetrated against the marginalized and voiceless.
Among the torrent of punishing directives by the nation’s top criminal are these:
Repealed a 1994 executive order that protected low-income families and communities of color from adverse health and environmental impacts of industrial pollution. The D.C. diva also disbanded the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, intended to focus on environmental justice issues.
Issued an executive order to end birthright citizenship, in direct violation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment and Section 1401 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Challenged in court the birthright citizenship of Indigenous people.
Withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. U.S. health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have also been told to stop working with WHO, effective immediately. The crook who ripped off his own charity, doesn’t pay contractors, and stole classified documents whined that “World Health ripped us off, everybody rips off the United States.”
Canceled a pending Biden administration plan that would have protected public health by setting discharge limits on toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS or forever chemicals.
History shows that the corrupt system we live under considers the vast majority of us nothing more than a commodity or a consumer. It was built to lift the few at the expense of the many. If this system — further corrupted by an individual who is unfit for any public office and who should have been impeached and convicted at least twice — doesn’t care about you, what makes you think it cares about the natural world or addressing the climate crisis?
The system uses the environment like it uses us, for profit and fun. Unfortunately, many of us don’t bother to vote, or continue to vote against our better interests. This apathy and ignorance allows gleeful cruelty to fester.
Fixing this depraved system won’t be easy. It starts with activism and advocacy and supporting and electing, at all levels, trustworthy, ethical, intelligent, and compassionate people no matter what capital letter follows their name.
No more authoritarian Republicans. No more mealymouthed Democrats.
Note: Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws — which existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until the late 1960s — were meant to marginalize Black people by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education, or explore other opportunities. Those who attempted to defy these racist laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence, and death. Toward the end of this terrible time, at least one journalist compared the violence to Nazi Germany.
Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.
Thanks for being frank and connecting the dots. It’s hard to look at the whole picture, so damning, so shameful, but look we must.
Nailed it, and the criminal gang that runs the country again today. Thanks.
you re not alone frank, everybody is shaking their heads
Clearly, everyone is not shaking their heads. At least half the people are nodding in affirmative, urging on the new king.
Lace up the boots. Many small steps can lead to great journeys.
I share your anger Frank.
I believe our environmental community needs to have honest conversations about what has gone wrong and how we might do better
Thank you, Frank! Perfect timing to remind us of these issues!
The atrocities continue and escalate.
Thank you for this.
“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”
– Albert Einstein