Walter White reports on the Tulsa massacre

One hundred years ago today … Walter White, future director of the NAACP, published “The Eruption of Tulsa,” about the  May 31-June 1 massacre of Black people in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for The Nation.

An excerpt from the essay: 

What is America going to do after such a horrible carnage–one that for sheer brutality and murderous anarchy cannot be surpassed by any of the crimes now being charged to the Bolsheviki in Russia? How much longer will America allow these pogroms to continue unchecked? There is a lesson in the Tulsa affair for every American who fatuously believes that Negroes will always be the meek and submissive creatures that circumstances have forced them to be during the past three hundred years. Dick Rowland was only an ordinary bootblack with no standing in the community. But when his life was threatened by a mob of whites, every one of the 15,000 Negroes of Tulsa, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, was willing to die to protect Dick Rowland. Perhaps America is waiting for a nationwide Tulsa to wake her. Who knows?

(Walter White, “The Eruption of Tulsa,” The Nation. 29 June, 1921. Reprinted in “Tulsa, 1921,” TheNation.com, 28 June, 2021.)

White, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, had moved to NYC in 1918 and became chief NAACP investigator. White was multiracial and light-skinned enough to pass for white; he became adept at infiltrating white spaces and reporting on tham (Douglas 99). When White arrived in Tulsa to report on the massacre, he was deputized by the police and invited to shoot Black people with impunity (Halliburton 333). 

The Nation was published out of 210 Broadway, off Fulton Street. Started as a literary magazine, it had, by 1921, evolved into a journal of leftist politics and culture. Strange bedfellows: it shared a publisher and headquarters with the Evening Post, which would eventually become Rupert Murdoch’s arch-conservative tabloid The New York Post.

References/ Further reading:

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: The Noonday Press, 1995.

Halliburton, Rudia. (1972). "The Tulsa Race War of 1921". Journal of Black Studies. 2 (3): 333–357.

– Jonathan Goldman, June 29, 1921

TAGS: racial violence, Harlem Renaissance, African American history, Black writers, journalism,