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Alberto B. Lopez
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Reparations Debate Beyond 1865 , 69 Tennessee Law Review 653-676,
659-664 (Spring, 2002)(96 Footnotes)Book Review: Reconstructing the
Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921. By Alfred L. Brophy. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002. xx 187 pages. $25.00.
Reflecting the modern scholarly interest with the relationship
between race and the law in general, Brophy locates the origin of the
riot within the conflicting racial interpretations of the meaning of
"law" as understood by the riot's combatants. For many of the
8,000 residents of Greenwood, an African-American neighborhood located
just north of the center of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and physically separated
from it by a set of railroad tracks, the experience of World War I
instructed them to equate law with equality (pp. 1-2). The veterans
returning from the Great War believed that the nation had fought the war
to protect and promote democracy on a global scale (p. 3). Moreover,
fighting for democracy during World War I, according to local
African-American newspapers that spread the message to Greenwood's
readers, meant that "spoilation and exploitation of black men's
property and labor shall cease, it means that segregation, Jim Crowism
and mob violence must die, and that in its stead there must rise
justice, equity, and fairness" (p. 3). Given the lofty aspirations
ascribed to the nation's war effort, Greenwood's war veterans expected
to find a "new reconstruction" upon their return, a notion
reinforced by the vitality of Greenwood as a community (pp. 1- 4). In
1921, Greenwood was a vibrant, economically self-contained section of
Tulsa containing a school, a hospital, a variety of stores, and a
theater called the Dreamland (p. 1). Moreover, Greenwood became so
prosperous as a community that its main street became known as "the
black Wall Street" (p. ix). In sum, the idealized promise of
democracy associated with World War I and the economic prosperity of
"Little Africa" (p. 1) both initiated and promoted the idea of
equality in the minds of Greenwood's residents.
In contrast to the egalitarian mindset percolating in Greenwood, the
white hegemony of Tulsa-and Oklahoma at large-stood ready to prevent the
equality dreamt about in "Little Africa" by using their
definition of "law." For Oklahoma's white citizens, "talk
of law too often meant black obedience to the white commands and
capricious and unequal treatment by the government" (p. 15). As a
result, white persons opposed to the increasing aspirations of African-
Americans defined the word "law" to mean the status accorded
to each race prior to the Civil War and were determined "to put the
negro back where he was before the War" (p. 6). To that end, both
the legislature and the courts in Oklahoma worked in concert with
prejudiced white citizens to suppress the egalitarian dreams of
African-Americans. Despite the existence of the Equal Protection Clause
in the Constitution, the Oklahoma legislature passed statutes that
served to promote racial discrimination, such as voter registration laws
designed to disenfranchise Oklahoma's African-American population (p.
15). By implementing the legislature's laws and doing their part to
suppress African-American dreams, both the Oklahoma Territory Supreme
Court and the state's lower courts commonly denied recovery to
African-Americans who suffered brutal violence at the hands of whites
(pp. 9, 14). Furthermore, the absence of legal protection even extended
to whites who dared to have any working affiliation with
African-Americans. For example, Brophy recalls that the Oklahoma Supreme
Court denied compensation to a white man who was attacked by a white mob
in Norman after merely bringing a young African-American into the town
to work on a construction project (p. 9). In sum, the practice of
Oklahoma's legislature and courts dissected the idea of "equal
protection" by gutting the "equal" half of the concept
while providing an abundant amount of "protection" for those
seeking to maintain white superiority.
The inequality facing African-American Oklahomans did not end within
the ivory halls of the legislature and courts, but instead trickled
downward to police enforcement of the law in the street. Oklahoma's law
enforcement officials frequently did little to protect African-American
citizens under the constant threat of white violence. With police
looking the other way as threat turned into reality, the white violence
perpetrated against African-Americans traversed a spectrum from "'negro
drives,'-the use of violence to drive out blacks from a town or
count" (pp. 8-9)-to lynchings (pp. 9-12). White mobs reserved the
severe penalty of lynching for African-Americans accused of raping or
attacking a white woman, which constituted the most egregious
transgression of the social order in the white world (pp. 10-11).
Indeed, attacking a white woman transgressed such a deep-seated social
norm that "whenever the Negro oversteps the white man's dead line
he knows, and he is so informed by the right-thinking members of his own
race, that he thereby takes his life in his own hands." Similarly,
an opponent of a federal anti-lynching bill defended harsh penalties for
transgressing white social boundaries and announced,
We are ofttimes forced to use extreme measures with the Negro. This
is caused by the Negro getting the wrong idea of his relation to the
white man. He gets this erroneous idea from improper propaganda
generally originating in sections other than the South. The man who does
not know the darkey and who would help him by persuading him that he is
the equal of the white man works the destruction of the Negro race.
In other words, extreme penalties, such as lynching, symbolically
preserved and reinforced the appropriate status of race relations in the
Southern white mind (p. 11). Thus, white violence represented the
physical manifestation of the clash between competing abstract
definitions of "law"-African-Americans pushed for greater
social and legal equality while whites fought their advance by using
outright racial intimidation.
Because imposing barriers obstructed the path to equality for
Oklahoma's African-Americans, Greenwood's Dreamland Theater served as an
apt metaphor for the disjunction between the egalitarian aspirations of,
and the reality for, African-Americans in Greenwood. Although equality
existed in the pristine world of ideas, sanitized platitudes failed to
describe the everyday experiences of African-Americans in Oklahoma (p.
15). Even residents of Greenwood, where African-Americans lived in
relative freedom from both an individual and economic perspective, could
not escape newspaper stories describing the horror of lynchings in
Oklahoma and beyond (p. 12). As a result, the threat of mob violence not
only functioned as a sanction for violating social boundaries, but it
had a far more subtle effect-it altered the meaning of
"equality" in the minds of Greenwood's residents. Greenwood's
inhabitants believed that there should be equal-"even if
separate"-railroad amenities, funding for education, voting rights,
and respect from police (pp. 2, 6). To that end, Brophy finds that the
residents of Greenwood did not believe that the formal law stamped them
as inferior, but simply that the law as written should be applied
impartially to all citizens (p. 2).
The remarkable aspect of the definition of "equality" in
Brophy's description of Greenwood is that, instead of demanding
full-blown equality in a modern sense, the meaning of
"equality" among those in Greenwood conformed to the Supreme
Court's requirements for equality defined in Plessy v. Ferguson. In
Plessy, the Court upheld a Louisiana statute that called for"equal
but separate accommodation for the white, and colored races"
against challenges based upon the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,
thereby giving birth to the now discredited "separate but
equal" doctrine. Given the similarity between the Greenwood and
Supreme Court interpretations of "equality," Brophy's
description not only exemplifies the ability of positive law to
infiltrate society, but also provides a single historical snapshot of
the incremental steps taken during the struggle for civil rights.
Assuming Brophy's assertion applies beyond Greenwood's residents, the
Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education is the
result of a series of smaller steps taken in conjunction with the
evolution of the meaning of "equality." In the area of civil
rights, then, progress has been made by taking baby steps rather than
leaps and bounds.
In addition to mutating the meaning of equality, threats and reports
of mob violence forced Greenwood's residents to recognize that the
"law," however conceived, had its limits and could not be
counted on for protection or justice. Although people in Greenwood
believed justice should be obtained by reference to the law, their
adherence to, and respect for, the law disintegrated as lynchings
continued (p. 12). For residents of Greenwood, the prevention of
lynching outweighed their reverence for the law because they realized
that the formal laws prohibiting such crimes would not be enforced so
long as social norms sanctioned such violent acts (p. 11). Frustrated
with the inability of law enforcement officials to protect
African-Americans, the local newspaper encouraged citizens to take a
more active role in the prevention of lynching, and that message found a
receptive audience in Greenwood (p. 17). If the government failed to
protect them, Greenwood residents believed that they had both a right
and a duty to act in defense of their lives (p. 19). Unless lynching
ceased, individuals in Greenwood foresaw that a racial conflict would
erupt if whites continued to diverge from the formal law.
The forecasts of violence made by Greenwood's residents proved to be
unusually prescient in light of events that began on May 30, 1921. On
that day, a nineteen-year-old African-American man allegedly attacked a
seventeen-year- old white elevator girl in downtown Tulsa (pp. 24-25).
After conducting a search for the alleged assailant, police captured the
young African-American male on the morning of the 31st and charged him
with an attempted assault of the white elevator girl (p. 25). Despite
the charge of attempted assault, the Tulsa Tribune sensationalized the
incident by running a story on its front page that referred to the
confrontation as an "attempted rape," moving the racial powder
keg closer to ignition (p. 24). The Tribune's front-page story created
an air of anticipated violence among white Tulsans as "800 men,
women, and children" gathered at the courthouse by 6 p.m. on the
evening of the 31st (p. 26). However, the Tribune's tale also affected
citizens of Greenwood, who were keenly aware of the risk of lynching
that faced the young African- American in light of other Oklahoma
lynchings in the recent past (p. 26). As a result, armed Greenwood men
traveled in shifts to and from the courthouse on the night of the 31st
to ensure the safety of the young man in police custody (p. 28). During
one of their missions to protect the imprisoned African- American male,
a Tulsa man attempted to disarm one of the Greenwood men, but the
Greenwood resident refused to relinquish his weapon (p. 33). A struggle
ensued for the weapon and a shot rang out into the crowd-the riot had
begun (p. 33). After the shot, the streets initially cleared and then
chaos broke out all over downtown Tulsa (pp. 33-34).
In response to the confusion in the streets, the Tulsa Police
Department decided to commission 250 "special officers" to
quell the "negro uprising" (p. 38-39). As a result, Tulsa's
Police Commissioner deputized a number of whites, who had armed
themselves after the initial outbreak of violence, without asking
questions of the men to be deputized (p. 39). In addition to deputizing
white volunteers, local police officials issued an order that anyone who
was not deputized was to be disarmed (p. 40). After hearing a wild-eyed
rumor that 500 men from Greenwood planned to attack downtown Tulsa,
Tulsa-based units of the National Guard arrived to preserve the peace
and soon began to work with local police authorities to implement the
disarmament order (pp. 38-39). Sensing the danger in downtown Tulsa,
African-Americans in the area fled over the railroad tracks and back to
Greenwood in order to defend it from any attempted attack by the growing
white mob (p. 41).
As dawn emerged on June 1, police officers, "special
officers," and other violence-hungry white citizens decided to take
an offensive strategy and gathered across the railroad tracks from
Greenwood in preparation for an invasion of the neighborhood (p. 44). At
5 a.m., a whistle sounded to signal the beginning of the attack after
which gunfire could be heard from many directions (p. 45). From the
start, Greenwood found itself at a disadvantage because the National
Guard had disarmed a number of its residents during the previous night
(p. 44). In addition to lacking firepower, the community lacked manpower
because the National Guard had sent African-Americans deemed non-
dangerous to internment camps whether or not they were involved in any
violence (pp. 50-51). Although the rationale for internment was to
protect the interned African-Americans from the mob, the internment, in
fact, facilitated the attack on Greenwood (p. 51). The white mob simply
followed the National Guard throughout Greenwood and, once an
African-American resident had been removed from his or her home to be
shipped to an internment camp, the white mob looted and then burned that
individual's home (pp. 51, 56). If the mob met armed resistance, it
responded with excessive brutality and actually murdered some Greenwood
citizens in cold blood (pp. 53-58).
Whether through murder or internment, with the accompanying arson,
the attack on Greenwood utterly devastated the once prosperous
African-American suburb of Tulsa. Although official estimates put the
death toll at "twenty-four blacks and ten whites," current
estimates place the loss of life at somewhere between 75 and 150 people
(pp. 59-60). Moreover, the mob torched thirty-five blocks of
Greenwood--including the Dreamland Theater, which symbolized the clash
of expectation with reality--and in the process, destroyed the homes of
over a thousand of its residents (pp. 55, 60, 88). In the end, the
citizens of Greenwood prevented the lynching of one young man, whom a
court later declared innocent of any crime, but they did so at the
expense of their own lives and property.
. Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Indiana University School of
Law, Indianapolis; J.S.D. Candidate, Stanford Law School; J.S.M.,
Stanford Law School; J.D, Indiana University School of Law,
Indianapolis; M.S. University of Notre Dame; B.S., Rose-Hulman Institute
of Technology. |
