‘Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?’
June 1, 2016 7:21 AM Subscribe
That article is gut wrenching. Hopefully white americans will someday understand why reparations are a moral imperative in order to move forward. But then I read the comments and realized we have a long damn way to go to before people will understand how their whiteness today owes the suffering of the past.
*PSA: if you love yourself please stay away from the comments on that page*
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:38 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
*PSA: if you love yourself please stay away from the comments on that page*
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:38 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
I read this bit:
The National Guard was called out...
And thought, good plan.
And then:
... after the governor declared martial law...
And thought, yup. Reasonable response.
And then that sentence ended:
... and imprisoned all blacks that were not already in jail.
And holy wtf seriously? (But yeah, of course I should have seen that coming. I guess being set on fire was illegal if you were black.)
posted by lollusc at 7:49 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
The National Guard was called out...
And thought, good plan.
And then:
... after the governor declared martial law...
And thought, yup. Reasonable response.
And then that sentence ended:
... and imprisoned all blacks that were not already in jail.
And holy wtf seriously? (But yeah, of course I should have seen that coming. I guess being set on fire was illegal if you were black.)
posted by lollusc at 7:49 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
I grew up in Tulsa, and didn't know about this until I was 20 years old. At the time (early '80's), most of the people who lived through it were afraid of talking about it. An acquaintance at the time wanted to write a play about it, and people would insist on meeting at out of the way places and odd times, as if the Klan was still enforcing silence.
But times do change. The pogrom has been added to the statewide curriculum for Oklahoma history. So while, yes -- per the Guardian -- we are doing our best to be the least progressive state in the Union, there are tiny, positive glints of light in all that backward, goat-roping darkness...
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 7:53 AM on June 1, 2016 [6 favorites]
But times do change. The pogrom has been added to the statewide curriculum for Oklahoma history. So while, yes -- per the Guardian -- we are doing our best to be the least progressive state in the Union, there are tiny, positive glints of light in all that backward, goat-roping darkness...
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 7:53 AM on June 1, 2016 [6 favorites]
I read this bit:
The National Guard was called out...
And thought, good plan.
The National Guard was explictly set up as state militias, which were no more... I'll say "enlightened" than their states would be for most of American history. The professionalization and standardization of the Guard was a post-WWII innovation (that has not entirely percolated all the way down).
posted by Etrigan at 7:53 AM on June 1, 2016
The National Guard was called out...
And thought, good plan.
The National Guard was explictly set up as state militias, which were no more... I'll say "enlightened" than their states would be for most of American history. The professionalization and standardization of the Guard was a post-WWII innovation (that has not entirely percolated all the way down).
posted by Etrigan at 7:53 AM on June 1, 2016
By coincidence, I read a tiny bit about this topic the other day after following up on one book referenced in the recent Goldman Sachs reading list FPP that led me to stuff about the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa. And incidental to that, I ran across the Solomon Sir Jones Films documenting African-American communities in Oklahoma, 1924-1928, which are close in time/place.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:17 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:17 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
In Missouri, we never denied the lynchings of innocent blacks, they were just written off as hillbillies and miners getting out of hand as they are wont to do. For a long time it required digging to find out the 1901 lynching in Pierce City was a white riot that chased 30 some families out of the township.
Then in '02 or '03 there was another lynching/riot in Joplin. In reaction, many blacks moved to Springfield, where in 1906 more blacks were lynched. They didn't need a riot because the lynching was fucking medievally brutal and started the exodus of blacks from the Ozarks.
(The reason we could pass this off as nothing out of the ordinary was people like Nat Kenny hung so many hillbillies that one woman showed up to his funeral with a handful of matches to throw on his grave. "So the Devil wouldn't run out of fire for the son of a bitch. ")
posted by ridgerunner at 8:31 AM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
Then in '02 or '03 there was another lynching/riot in Joplin. In reaction, many blacks moved to Springfield, where in 1906 more blacks were lynched. They didn't need a riot because the lynching was fucking medievally brutal and started the exodus of blacks from the Ozarks.
(The reason we could pass this off as nothing out of the ordinary was people like Nat Kenny hung so many hillbillies that one woman showed up to his funeral with a handful of matches to throw on his grave. "So the Devil wouldn't run out of fire for the son of a bitch. ")
posted by ridgerunner at 8:31 AM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
This is why I believe in widespread civilian firearms ownership, especially by people of color.
posted by wuwei at 9:13 AM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by wuwei at 9:13 AM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
Yep, because a few rifles totally would have stopped those airplanes dropping firebombs on black homes and businesses.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:15 AM on June 1, 2016 [8 favorites]
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:15 AM on June 1, 2016 [8 favorites]
Mod note: Boy howdy let's not pivot this into a general argument about gun ownership.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:53 AM on June 1, 2016 [16 favorites]
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:53 AM on June 1, 2016 [16 favorites]
We're supposed to "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps" and leave white people alone, according to some of them, but if we in a community make "too much" money for their liking and pay white people absolutely no mind (so much so that we don't give them any bowing or scraping either), we inspire envy, cause anger, and provoke murder from said white people? And if we stand up for ourselves, that enrages them more?
Got it.
I'm too angry that there are people out there today who'd be more than happy to do this to us again to write anything further in a non-ranty manner.
posted by droplet at 10:11 AM on June 1, 2016 [17 favorites]
Got it.
I'm too angry that there are people out there today who'd be more than happy to do this to us again to write anything further in a non-ranty manner.
posted by droplet at 10:11 AM on June 1, 2016 [17 favorites]
In Missouri, we never denied the lynchings of innocent blacks, they were just written off as hillbillies and miners getting out of hand as they are wont to do. For a long time it required digging to find out the 1901 lynching in Pierce City was a white riot that chased 30 some families out of the township.
Then in '02 or '03 there was another lynching/riot in Joplin. In reaction, many blacks moved to Springfield, where in 1906 more blacks were lynched. They didn't need a riot because the lynching was fucking medievally brutal and started the exodus of blacks from the Ozarks.
There was also a near lynching in Monett (same county as Pierce City) in 1894, and a brother of the victim in Pierce City was lynched in Pittsburg, Kansas (not far across the state line from Joplin) sometime afterward. After observing the research and writing my wife did on the subject (Her awesome book is White Man's Heaven, which covers the above), there's this tragic escalation of murder and rioting that simply grows and grows until it comes to an end (regionally) in the Tulsa riots. Even more depressing, and I'm not sure if it's true for Tulsa, but for the other communites, there were some African-Americans who fled to one town only to end up being forced to flee to another.
posted by Atreides at 11:18 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
Then in '02 or '03 there was another lynching/riot in Joplin. In reaction, many blacks moved to Springfield, where in 1906 more blacks were lynched. They didn't need a riot because the lynching was fucking medievally brutal and started the exodus of blacks from the Ozarks.
There was also a near lynching in Monett (same county as Pierce City) in 1894, and a brother of the victim in Pierce City was lynched in Pittsburg, Kansas (not far across the state line from Joplin) sometime afterward. After observing the research and writing my wife did on the subject (Her awesome book is White Man's Heaven, which covers the above), there's this tragic escalation of murder and rioting that simply grows and grows until it comes to an end (regionally) in the Tulsa riots. Even more depressing, and I'm not sure if it's true for Tulsa, but for the other communites, there were some African-Americans who fled to one town only to end up being forced to flee to another.
posted by Atreides at 11:18 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
The comments actually linked me to the Wilmington Coup D'Etat. But yeah, there's two racists in there, fighting with everyone else.
posted by halifix at 2:35 PM on June 1, 2016
posted by halifix at 2:35 PM on June 1, 2016
Oh man I totally understand the Smithsonian is trying to drive traffic to itself but nyeeeaaaaargh I want to read the whole thing not an excerpt and am 3000 miles away! What is the word for this feeling, like boo+yay?
posted by corb at 2:39 PM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by corb at 2:39 PM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
For a long time it required digging to find out the 1901 lynching in Pierce City was a white riot that chased 30 some families out of the township.
Then in '02 or '03 there was another lynching/riot in Joplin. In reaction, many blacks moved to Springfield, where in 1906 more blacks were lynched. They didn't need a riot because the lynching was fucking medievally brutal and started the exodus of blacks from the Ozarks.
It wasn't until my mid-20s when I learned about Tulsa and the Red Summer of 1919, and I found out that prior to around 1950 or so "race riot" pretty much exclusively described White mobs destroying the communities of POC. The Wikipedia articles on those events brought me to these lists, which got me investigating the history of White mob attacks on POC neighborhoods in general, which resulted in a spreadsheet with a hell of a lot more rows in addition to what's on Wikipedia.
I'm White and I'd thought of myself as an informed liberal who was well-versed in the history of White-perpetuated racial violence in the USA. And still I had no conception that this kind of broad-ranging, totally unchecked, all-out war on entire towns not only happened, but was widespread, regular, and incurred no legal or social repercussions against the perpetrators. My ignorance both sums up White liberalism and is emblematic of the utter failure of the US educational system and White citizenship in particular to own up to the full scope of suffering perpetuated on the Black and Brown citizenship of this country. We imagine the KKK and we imagine people who maintain anonymity both to inspire terror and to protect themselves from censure. Maintain that fig leaf of civility, play into the pretense that there might be legal blowback should their identities become known.
But in many of the above attacks, Average Joes and Janes Whitepersons in a modern constitutional democracy were coming to the mutual agreement that their Black/Latino@/Native/Chinese/etc neighbors had gotten a bit too economically and socially advantaged, and decided to rectify the situation by putting together a fucking medieval raiding party. And law enforcement? The bulk of the time local law enforcement was informed of what was going on beforehand and turned a blind eye, if they weren't active participants themselves.
A ton of scholarship has been done to trace the current economic disadvantages that many Black and Brown populations face back to the USA's history of racial discrimination. But there is a whole tome waiting to be written about the specific aftereffects that come when an oppressed community manages to pull itself out of impoverishment only to have the gains it's made razed to the ground, and then to see this same situation repeated in similar communities across an entire country for over a century. And this in addition to the daily racist bullshit and the random, senseless violence delivered on random individuals.
posted by Anonymous at 1:22 AM on June 2, 2016
Then in '02 or '03 there was another lynching/riot in Joplin. In reaction, many blacks moved to Springfield, where in 1906 more blacks were lynched. They didn't need a riot because the lynching was fucking medievally brutal and started the exodus of blacks from the Ozarks.
It wasn't until my mid-20s when I learned about Tulsa and the Red Summer of 1919, and I found out that prior to around 1950 or so "race riot" pretty much exclusively described White mobs destroying the communities of POC. The Wikipedia articles on those events brought me to these lists, which got me investigating the history of White mob attacks on POC neighborhoods in general, which resulted in a spreadsheet with a hell of a lot more rows in addition to what's on Wikipedia.
I'm White and I'd thought of myself as an informed liberal who was well-versed in the history of White-perpetuated racial violence in the USA. And still I had no conception that this kind of broad-ranging, totally unchecked, all-out war on entire towns not only happened, but was widespread, regular, and incurred no legal or social repercussions against the perpetrators. My ignorance both sums up White liberalism and is emblematic of the utter failure of the US educational system and White citizenship in particular to own up to the full scope of suffering perpetuated on the Black and Brown citizenship of this country. We imagine the KKK and we imagine people who maintain anonymity both to inspire terror and to protect themselves from censure. Maintain that fig leaf of civility, play into the pretense that there might be legal blowback should their identities become known.
But in many of the above attacks, Average Joes and Janes Whitepersons in a modern constitutional democracy were coming to the mutual agreement that their Black/Latino@/Native/Chinese/etc neighbors had gotten a bit too economically and socially advantaged, and decided to rectify the situation by putting together a fucking medieval raiding party. And law enforcement? The bulk of the time local law enforcement was informed of what was going on beforehand and turned a blind eye, if they weren't active participants themselves.
A ton of scholarship has been done to trace the current economic disadvantages that many Black and Brown populations face back to the USA's history of racial discrimination. But there is a whole tome waiting to be written about the specific aftereffects that come when an oppressed community manages to pull itself out of impoverishment only to have the gains it's made razed to the ground, and then to see this same situation repeated in similar communities across an entire country for over a century. And this in addition to the daily racist bullshit and the random, senseless violence delivered on random individuals.
posted by Anonymous at 1:22 AM on June 2, 2016
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Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer: Yeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssss.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:34 AM on June 1, 2016 [10 favorites]