Editor’s note: The following may include first-person accounts of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that contain graphic depictions and antiquated racial terminology. We have chosen not to edit these survivor accounts to leave their stories unencumbered by interpretation or exclusion.
OKLAHOMA CITY – The story on the tape couldn’t be real.
That’s what Oklahoma state Sen. Kevin Matthews thought as he watched a VHS film, given to him by his great-uncle, depicting a white mob destroying Tulsa’s Greenwood District.
Matthews, 61, was in his 30s at the time. He had grown up in Tulsa and graduated from Tulsa Public Schools.
But, he had never heard this story before.
“I watched it, and I thought it was a fictional movie,” Matthews said. “I couldn’t stop looking at it. It was shocking to me. I couldn’t understand how I could get to be an adult and not know this story.”
That was the first time Matthews learned of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Thirty-five blocks of Black-owned businesses and homes in the affluent Greenwood District were reduced to ash in the two-day rampage. Estimates place the death toll between 100 and 300.
One of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history took place in his hometown, and Matthews, who now leads the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, never heard a word of it in school.
“That’s a very common experience of a lot of Oklahomans,” said Joy Hofmeister, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public schools.
Many, like Matthews and Hofmeister, were well into adulthood when they discovered a wealthy African American district — nicknamed Black Wall Street — existed in Tulsa and that it had been razed in a spree of white violence.
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The Oklahoman, part of the USA TODAY Network, surveyed 305 people, nearly all of them Oklahomans, and found 83% said they never received a full lesson on the Tulsa Race Massacre or Black Wall Street in their K-12 school.
Sixty-one percent said they first heard of it through news media. Others learned from family, a friend, or a movie or TV show.
Anywhere but the inside of a classroom.
“I call it a conspiracy of silence,” Matthews said. “It was purposely not talked about. It’s almost like things that happen in your family that you’re not proud of — people don’t talk about it. I think it’s something our city and state aren’t that proud of and didn’t want to talk about.”
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Massacre ignored for decades
Oklahoma public schools weren’t instructed to teach about the Tulsa Race Massacre until 2002.
Any education on the event before then was inconsistent, at best. In many schools, it was absent for generations.
The Oklahoma Education Department added the Tulsa Race Riot, as it was commonly called then, to the 2002 state academic standards, a list of Legislature-approved subjects that schools are mandated to teach.
But, the 2002 standards made only a vague mention of the massacre, Hofmeister said.
Schools were told to cover the “evolution of race relations in Oklahoma” and “rising racial tensions.” The Tulsa massacre was offered as an optional example of those topics, enabling schools to avoid it entirely.
Oklahoma updated its academic standards with more specific language in 2012, but some who graduated after that year said they still finished high school without hearing any mention of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Ellie Tabari, 24, said she didn’t learn of it until college. She graduated in 2015 from Southeast High School in Oklahoma City.
“I found it unsettling that such a profound event in Oklahoma was omitted from history textbooks used by all of the schools I attended,” Tabari said.
The Oklahoma City school district said its students now learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre in third, sixth and 11th grade, but education of it wasn’t so consistent in the past.
“While the Tulsa Race Massacre curriculum has been in state standards since the early 2000s, teachers were given discretion over how and if to cover it in their classrooms,” the district said in a statement.
Oklahoma City schools since have adopted a curriculum compiled by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission and the Oklahoma History Center.
The commission also helped expand academic standards on the massacre in 2019.
For the first time, Oklahoma history classes were required not only to teach the destruction of Greenwood but also its emergence as an epicenter of Black wealth.
Black history lost
Not everyone taught about the massacre in public schools say the lesson was adequate.
Tulsa teacher E.J. Green, 23, remembers learning about the Tulsa Race Massacre in a ninth-grade English course at Union Public Schools in Oklahoma.
Green said his class read a fictional book about the massacre. Descriptions of the incident were far more palatable for his majority-white classmates.
“This event was always presented to me as ahistorical, as it’s not a part of your Oklahoma identity, it’s just an event,” Green said. “It was never like, ‘This is us. This is our history.’”
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It wasn’t until he attended Morehouse College, a historically Black institution, that he gained a full understanding of Greenwood’s history, he said.
Morehouse’s American History course covered the success of Black Wall Street as a thriving center of commerce — a key piece of the story Green said was left out in his high school class. The Morehouse class also included a more nuanced discussion of the racial biases fueling the massacre.
Green now teaches ninth-grade Oklahoma history and a U.S. history seminar at KIPP Tulsa University Prep High School, a Tulsa school with mostly African American and Hispanic students.
He dedicated four days of class time to the development of Greenwood, the catalyst of the massacre and the ensuing damage.
Green found the prosperity of Black Wall Street is a particularly important lesson for students of color.
“My kids deserve to have a success story,” Green said. “They deserve to have a story where people made it, where their people were seen and powerful and allowed to express themselves.”
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Greenwood-based organizations have led efforts to ensure the next generation of Oklahoma schoolchildren is more aware of the district’s history.
Lesson plans are freely available to all schools on the centennial commission’s website.
Tulsa Public Schools and the commission have hosted a summer institute the past three years for educators nationwide to create lessons on Greenwood.
Tulsa Superintendent Deborah Gist said the training includes a component on teaching “hard history.”
“Students are going to have questions,” Gist said. “We need our educators to have a very deep level of knowledge, but it has an added element of complexity because of the emotion that comes with such a challenging and painful history.”
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Matthews said he thinks the public is more aware of the massacre than ever before. But, a bill Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law May 7 has Matthews worried complicated discussions on race will be prohibited in schools.
The Republican-backed bill bans public schools from teaching critical race theory, which examines systemic racism and the way issues of race influence major structures of American society.
“Just like we went 100 years and didn’t want to talk about the ’21 race massacre, today we do not want to talk about the sensitive issues of race in our state and across our country,” said Matthews, a Democrat in the state Senate.
Follow reporter Nuria Martinez-Keel on Twitter at @NuriaMKeel
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