Hundred years of Tulsa Massacre: How cultural offerings like Watchmen and Lovecraft Country have depicted the historical event
Damen Lindelof’s 2019 adaptation of Watchmen (the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons) expanded the universe of the book, working both as a prequel and a sequel. Perhaps the most ambitious gambit was connecting some of the most disturbing moments in American history to the ‘covert’ history of superheroes/vigilantes — which is why the stunning opening sequence (the first thing they shot in the series as well) depicts the infamous Tulsa Massacre.
Hundred years ago this week, on 31 May and 1 June, 1921, white mobs aided and abetted by local authorities murdered hundreds (official estimates now place the toll at 300-odd) of Black residents and business owners in the neighbourhood of Greenwood, Tulsa. Greenwood was an oasis of Black prosperity amidst the racial inequality of World War I-era America and so, it was targeted by supremacist organisations like the Ku Klux Klan (in one shot in Watchmen, you can clearly see a hooded KKK member on a horse, directing the mob).
Where Watchmen succeeds spectacularly is giving the audience a ground-level view of the brutality as it unfolded in real time — a child’s point of view, no less. Young Will Williams, the son of a Black soldier who fought the Germans in World War I (this detail is crucial, as we discover later), watches as his neighbourhood is razed to the ground. Women and children are shot at point-blank range, their corpses tied to the backs of speeding vehicles. Their homes, salons, theatres and so on, are systematically destroyed.
Significantly, the episode is called “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice," a line from the song 'Pore Jud Is Daid' (poor Jude is dead) in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, one of the cornerstones of American musical theatre. The original song can be heard when Tulsa police chief Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) is seen hanging from a tree circa 2019 — we later discover that an elderly, wheelchair-bound Will is responsible for the hanging. Throughout the premier episode, a number of Oklahoma! references march by. Judd, we learn, had played Curly (the protagonist of Oklahoma!) in his high school production of Oklahoma! so he sings the feel-good number 'People Will Say We’re in Love' during a dinner party. But as we discover through the course of the show, Judd’s actions — he was a covert KKK member — were more in line with those of Jud, the antagonist of Oklahoma!. And so we have the hanging scene, scored to 'Pore Jud is Daid.'
Earlier this week, The New York Times released a startling new interactive story in their online edition: it collates the stories of the victims against a 3-D recreation of Greenwood. As you scroll down to read the stories, the POV ‘shifts’ to show you the precise area of the neighbourhood occupied by the deceased. It is a sobering, non-fiction counterpart to the more visceral impact of that Watchmen scene. Before shooting that sequence in Georgia, the Watchmen set was blessed by a priest. Understandable, I would say: when you are channelising such untrammeled, large-scale brutality, even lifelong atheists can feel the need for a higher power backing them up.
In recent years, the Tulsa Massacre has received a great deal of attention, both in general terms pop culture. Journalists, historians, and documentarians have covered the pogrom in great detail. Apart from Watchmen, the HBO series Lovecraft Country also used the massacre as a major plot point in one episode. Last year, Bob Dylan began ‘Murder Most Foul,’ a 17-minute track on his new album Rough and Rowdy Ways, with the line: “Take me back to Tulsa to the scene of the crime”. Earlier this week, Trinity University Press issued an all-new edition of Mary E Jones Parrish’s 1923 eyewitness account of the massacre: The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
Perhaps the clearest indicator of the zeitgeist yet: US President Joe Biden has confirmed that he will be in Tulsa for the 100th anniversary proceedings.
As cultural moments go, the current reassessment of the Tulsa Massacre’s true impact feels long overdue. Black artists and intellectuals have been telling these stories for a while now, but it feels like we have only just started listening.
In Rilla Askew’s 2001 novel Fire in Beulah, for example, there is a first-rate fictionalised version of the massacre in the final few chapters. At one point, we see TJ, one of the novel’s main characters, witnessing a fellow Black man being lynched by a white mob; he is shot and then hung from an elm tree — the hanging bit is intended to strike fear into Black people. Askew channels history’s crushing weight very effectively indeed, through the image of the elm tree.
“Inside his mind, TJ watched again as the three cars drove away in crimson dust; again he turned to the elm tree, to know again, in the same sinking blood-rush, why they’d hung Everett as well as shot him. Because the image of the hanging black man was part of the terror. Because Everett’s body had to hang there for black men to find, for a sign, for a warning.”
In the second episode of Watchmen, we see Will Williams’ father, OB in the middle of World War I. OB comes across a pamphlet air-dropped by the Germans, addressed to Black American soldiers like himself, urging them to switch sides on account of the fact that they are treated like second-class citizens by white people. OB is not entirely convinced by the argument, we can tell, but he pockets the pamphlet anyway. Fire in Beulah, too, has a similar moment of moral reckoning, when TJ and friends are planning their defense against the white mobs. Their service weapons remind them that they are being hunted by the same people they defended using these guns.
“I got a shotgun home and a couple of pistols, Luther Adair’s got some fine carbines—”
“A bunch of us got service revolvers, ain’t we?”
“Oh, yeah, we good enough to get killed in their goddamn war, but we not good enough to try on clothes in their goddamn stores—”
Much of the recent attention coming Tulsa’s way can, arguably, be traced to the 2014 publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ long essay ‘The Case for Reparations’ in The Atlantic. Coates’ signature brand of historical readings interspersed with memoir-ish segments and good ol’ fashioned reportage is at its strongest here. He is a polemicist who is quite aware of the limitations of the polemic approach — but powers through anyway, thanks to the strength and the versatility of his style.
In ‘The Case for Reparations,' Coates argues that the US government should provide Black people financial reparations for centuries of slavery, followed by systemic discrimination that persists to this day. Right-wing politicians, of course, feel that such a move would be ‘divisive’ (a convenient buzzword designed to protect the status quo). To them, Coates says that the wealth gap between white and Black people in the country “merely puts a number on something that we feel but cannot say”— namely, that as a country, the US’s prosperity has been built on a solid foundation of murder, looting, and slavery (Black people. Modern-day Americans, therefore, are enjoying the fruits of a poisoned tree. Coates, therefore, makes the case for a series of Congressional hearings to decide the extent and trajectory of financial reparations.
“A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.”
One of the major themes of the Watchmen series was the idea of masks empowering ordinary people to become vigilantes, without the fear of their family members suffering retribution. Young Will Williams, of course, grows up to become Hooded Justice, the first Black superhero in the Watchmen universe. But of course, the other, white superheroes/vigilantes are the public face of the superhero movement. In post-World War II America, they do not allow Will to reveal his identity to the public: they say that the public “is not ready” to accept a Black superhero. Will/Hooded Justice’s story is meant to be a critique of incremental reform, the idea that the pace of change must be slow and gradual, lest the oppressor majority rejects it wholesale.
Hundred years after the events of Tulsa, it’s doubtful whether America has learned its lesson. The state of Oklahoma’s ‘Centennial Commission,' which oversees Tulsa’s “Greenwood Rising” history center and has been involved in a number of awareness campaigns, raised over $30 million in recent years. And yet, they failed to involve the three remaining survivors of the massacres or the families of the victims who reside in Tulsa to this day. Indeed, one survivor, 106-year-old Lennie Benningfield Randle, has issued a cease-and-desist letter ordering the commission to stop using her name or likeness to promote the project. Randle and others feel that Greenwood Rising has appropriated their suffering to fill its coffers.
Even while deigning to honour the slain, America has fallen back upon old habits.
by Aditya Mani Jha
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