Trump's Tulsa rally evokes a tragic 1921 example of the systemic racism he won't face

Ellis Cose, Opinion columnist, USA TODAY Opinion•June 16, 2020


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It’s possible President Donald Trump’s reason for scheduling his let’s-forget-COVID-19 rally in Tulsa had nothing to do with stirring up racial mischief. It’s possible that the event, as Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt suggested, was conceived simply to celebrate the (certainly premature) reopening of the state. It’s even possible that the originally announced date (June 19, or Juneteenth — a day commemorating the emancipation of America’s formerly enslaved) was chosen for some reason other than insulting African Americans.

But even approaching this matter with a mind as open as humanly possible, it’s difficult to see how any sane person ever thought the Tulsa rally was a good idea. Indeed, in changing the date (supposedly at the suggestion of Black allies who worried a Juneteenth rally might be seen as tactless), Trump essentially admitted the scheme was half-baked and tone-deaf from the beginning.

At a time when a racially diverse coalition is demanding a new approach to both policing and race, one would think the last thing on Trump’s to-do list would be a rally evoking one of the worst pogroms in American history. That only would make sense if Trump had decided to add his voice to the millions protesting the justice system’s treatment of African Americans — if Trump, in other words, was on the side demanding an end to racism.

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Tulsa riot illustrates systemic racism

Yes, I can hear you laughing. This is the same Donald Trump who, since the death of George Floyd, has devoted his time to justifying the status quo — or worse. He has ranted about “domestic terror” (which seems to be his definition of lawful protest) while threatening to unleash “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers” on American citizens. When not tweeting such nonsense, he and his team crusade against the term “systemic racism,” claiming it does not exist in American law enforcement — or presumably in American life.

There is a certain irony in the Trump administration making that argument at the very moment we are focused on the 1921 riot that serves as a textbook example of how systemic racism works.

An African American church burns in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The state commission appointed to study the riot in Tulsa issued a report in 2001 noting that beginning the evening of May 31, 1921, a “mob destroyed 35-square-blocks of the African American Community.” It was “a tragic, infamous moment in Oklahoma and the nation’s history” and the worst "civil disturbance since the Civil War.” A precise death toll was impossible to come by, but the commission put the number at somewhere between 38 and “well into the hundreds.”

Like so much racial craziness in America, the Tulsa riot was ignited by an interaction between a young African American man and a young white woman. Dick Rowland worked as a shoeshine boy near the building where Sarah Page was an elevator girl. Rowland apparently came into the building to use its “coloreds only” bathroom. He may have tripped as he entered the elevator and grabbed Page’s arm to steady himself. For whatever reason, Page screamed.

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The next morning, Rowland was arrested. The Tulsa Tribune ran a front-page story headlined, “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” and might have run an additional article headlined, “To Lynch Negro Tonight.” Details on the second article are unclear, as all copies mysteriously vanished from the Tribune’s archives. What is clear is that white mobs gathered at the courthouse. Armed African Americans showed up to observe them. A shot was fired and chaos ensued. When the smoke cleared, a vibrant community reputed to be the most prosperous in Black America was no more.

The Associated Press blamed “agitation by a few irresponsible negroes” goaded on by “negro radicals.” 

Mobs targeted successful Blacks

That summer, the American Civil Liberties Union reprinted a pamphlet, "Lynching and Debt Slavery," authored by William Pickens, field secretary of the NAACP. Pickens argued that white Southerners were determined to keep African Americans in economic bondage. Mob violence erupted, he wrote, when whites suspected Blacks of trying to escape that system. Consequently, said Pickens, “when race riots break out, especially in the South, the prosperous and well-to-do colored men … are the ones most likely to be forced to leave the community. They may be compelled to abandon all their property posthaste to get away with their lives.”

As a well-to-do African American community, Tulsa’s so-called Black Wall Street was a glittering affront to white Southerners. It was a quiet repudiation of the revered Ku Klux Klan.

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In 2018, New York Times reporters looked into the origins of Trump’s wealth. They concluded that his father gave him $413 million in today's dollars, which enabled the son to screw up in business, cheat on his taxes and end up a rich man: a bonafide American success story.

No Black American of Trump's generation has such a story. The mobs made sure no one would. If you wish to understand institutional racism, read the story of Tulsa, then read the story of Trump. It is not that difficult a concept to grasp, unless you have no intention of getting it. Unless you have no regard for history and no appetite for facts.

Trump, of course, is famously intolerant of facts. He seems to view them the way he once viewed the coronavirus — something troublesome that one day “like a miracle … will disappear."

Ellis Cose, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is the author of "Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU’s 100-Year Fight for Rights in America" and "The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America," both due out this year. Follow him on Twitter: @EllisCose

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump Tulsa rally evokes one of the worst pogroms in American history