June 2020 has been a fascinating month for many reasons but a particularly curious thing is the revelation for myself that two very important historical events happened in the month of June and yet, for fifty five years, I have been completely unaware that these two events happened. One happened 155 years ago and the other 99 years ago.
I genuinely enjoy reading and learning about history, specifically American history. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to study our nation’s civil war for an entire year when I was a freshman in public high school. I was then able to take Advanced Placement United States History when I was a senior at that same high school. I had another year of American history as an undergraduate in college and then a few more classes in graduate school. My point here, I was exposed to our Nation’s history at more than a cursory level. So when I learned that these two important events had taken place in our nation and yet I had no recollection of ever hearing anything about them, I became very inquisitive and learned a good deal about each and at the same time I was very disturbed about not ever being introduced to these events until now. The two historical events I am referring too are, Juneteenth and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. In my effort to learn about these two cases, I quickly determined that first, I was not alone, and second, there was a legitimate reason why I had not been exposed to this portion of our country’s past.
Juneteenth dates back to 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, TX, were officially told that they were no longer slaves and were legally free. This happened over two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. June 19th was not the actual date that legally ended slavery in all states, that didn’t happen until the 13th Amendment was ratified in December 1865. But, June 19, 1865 is the day that the news made it to the last of the Confederate states. For this reason, June 19th is the anniversary date on which many choose to celebrate legal freedom in the United States of America.
I have learned that the holiday and its relevance in history is seldom taught in most schools. In 2019, a Hampton University student from Baltimore had a “tweet” go viral when she asked America, who had learned about Juneteenth in school? Her tweet was retweeted hundreds of thousands of times and had thousands of comments from people who stated that their first exposure to the term Juneteenth was learning about it by seeing it in their iPhone calendar or from the original tweet itself.
The School Library Journal (SLJ) recently did a quick Twitter poll that revealed that more than 90 percent of the respondents work in schools that do not teach about Juneteenth. I was also fascinated to learn that only three states have yet to legally recognize Juneteenth as either a state or ceremonial holiday. Those states are Hawaii, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
Being a California native and spending the majority of my life in this state, the fact that California did not recognize Juneteenth until 2003 gives me some comfort that I didn’t miss the obvious while I was in high school. Juneteenth was not being taught in California in the early 1980’s and most probably hasn’t been taught up until this year and certainly should and will be added to the American history curriculum in all states moving forward.
The second event is the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 which has a historical significance and complexity that is much more concerning.
The Tulsa race massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when a black 19-year-old named Dick Rowland, was accused of assaulting a 17-year-old white elevator operator by the name of Sarah Page. Rowland was taken into custody and rumors quickly spread through the city that Rowland was to be lynched. A large group of over a hundred white men had mobilized around the jail and a group of nearly a hundred black men, some of them armed, arrived to try and prevent Rowland from being lynched. The sheriff was able to convince the group of black men to leave the jail but, as the black men were leaving, one of the white men attempted to disarm one of the black men and a shot was fired. This started a firefight between the two sides and when the shooting ended, twelve people were killed: 10 white and 2 black.
At that time, the Greenwood district in Tulsa was the wealthiest black community in America and was known as “Black Wall Street“. However, once the news of the firefight and white deaths spread, the Greenwood district exploded with mob violence. Whites stormed the district killing men and burning stores and homes. The attack destroyed more than 35 square blocks of Greenwood and was carried out on the ground and from private airplanes. The violence didn’t stop until the next day when the Oklahoma National Guard was able to control the situation by declaring martial law. The event left about 10,000 black people homeless, and the property damage was devastating.
There are two things that are genuinely concerning about this incident. First, it is generally accepted that the police determined that what happened between a 19-year-old black teenager named Dick Rowland, and a 17-year-old white teenager by the name of Sarah Page was something less than an assault and Sarah Page told the police that she would not press charges. What is even more shocking and concerning than this is, that what has been called the worst incident of racial violence in American history, was historically sanitized. A large number of survivors left the area but black and white citizens who did stay in Tulsa were silent about the horrific and violent incident. The Tulsa race massacre was largely omitted from all local, state, and national histories for seventy-five years. In 1996, an Oklahoma bipartisan group in the state legislature authorized the creation of a commission to study the “Tulsa Race Riot of 1921”.
In today’s difficult times, we are truly fortunate to have these historical events, though traumatic and hurtful, to remind us of our past. The concern is that our current attempt to sanitize events around the people and experiences associated with our war to abolish slavery, significantly compromises our ability to reflect and comprehend how far we have come as a nation.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who is black and grew up in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at a time when the South was racially segregated, has criticized efforts to tear down southern monuments to Confederate leaders. Secretary Rice has said, “The long road to freedom has indeed been long, it’s been sometimes violent, it’s had many martyrs but ultimately has been Americans claiming those institutions for themselves and expanding the definition of we the people…. I want us to have to look at those names and recognize what they did and to be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history. When you start wiping out your history, sanitizing your history to make you feel better it’s a bad thing.”
My fear is that today’s simplistic view of history as disposable is extremely dangerous to future generations. The statues, flags, names and monuments point to the complex past of America but it is not the statues, flags, names and monuments that makes America such a complex and remarkable nation. It is our founding principles, documents and laws which allow America to be a growing and ever improving nation that is a complex and vibrant society. It is our intricate, sometimes violent and fascinating past that irritates those who invite the belief that the complicated realities of our great Nation today can be tackled and overcome by the destruction of all traces to a much more difficult time in our Nation’s past. What is truly tragic, is that through this miserable destruction of statues, flags, names and monuments, American society will lose the critical foundation to our multifaceted inter-connected past that will help guide our nation through the next set of growing pains, which a nation committed to continual improvement will certainly experience.
“I am not indifferent to the claims of a generous forgetfulness, but whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery; between those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.” Frederick Douglass, “Decoration Day” (Now Memorial Day), 1894.
A crowd of some 25,000 listened.