Reckoning with State-Sanctioned Racial Violence: Lessons from the Tulsa Race Massacre

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Just Security
@just_security
Leading scholar — @monicacbell (@yale) — outlines five "features of what a capacious commitment to democratic repair in the wake of state violence might mean" in response to #TulsaRaceMassacre.

Part of our new series on #Tulsa100.

#BlackWallStreet

Reckoning with State-Sanctioned Racial Violence: Lessons from the Tulsa Race Massacre
Top legal scholar outlines five "features of what a capacious commitment to democratic repair in the wake of state violence might mean" for Tulsa.
justsecurity.org
6:33 AM · May 29, 2021

https://www.justsecurity.org/76699/reckoning-with-state-sanctioned-racial-violence-lessons-from-the-tulsa-race-massacre/

Just over one year ago, Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, in the context of a system of policing that continues to treat much of his and other officers’ violence as legal and blameless. This intersection of state power and racial violence is neither a unique nor a contemporary development. One hundred years ago, a mob of white Tulsans murdered hundreds of Black Tulsans, in the context of a system of policing that helped to create the conditions resulting in the Massacre and exacerbated those conditions in the Massacre’s immediate aftermath.

At a time when “racial reckoning” and “police accountability” are terminologies de rigueur, what do those terms require in response to state participation in such tragedies? In the case of Tulsa, monetary reparations are one necessary ingredient of any meaningful racial reckoning. Yet, the Massacre not only involved property loss and human devastation; it was also an assault on Black democratic agency. It was a form of estrangement of the Black community that was physical, economic, legal, and epistemic.

Alongside necessary monetary reparations, a democratic reckoning and commitments to repair are also necessary. Governments that have actively silenced and diminished the political voices of marginalized people have an obligation to correct that injustice by taking a multifaceted approach to restoring that lost political voice. Restoring political voice has implications for voting and electoral practices, school curricula (including education on histories and theories of racism and political violence), municipal governance and investments in the development of marginalized neighborhoods and small towns, and more.

State-Sanctioned Racial Violence

On Tuesday evening, May 31 and Wednesday, June 1, 1921, an angry mob of white Tulsans firebombed the city’s Black district, then known as “Greenwood,” the “East End,” or “Little Africa,” but now more frequently called “Black Wall Street,” in broad public discourse. The mob burned Greenwood to the ground, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses. It slaughtered hundreds of Black Tulsans, burying some in unmarked graves and slaying many more whose bodies have never been recovered. Beyond the killings, the white mob effectively exiled thousands more Black Tulsans who left the city for destinations north and west, traumatized, destitute, and humiliated. Those who remained in the city rebuilt Greenwood and restored the area, to some degree. Yet, despite the efforts to rebuild, the community never fully recovered.

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