The Tragedy of the Tulsa Greenwood Massacre

Floor Speech

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Mr. TORRES of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Johnson for his deep insight and kind words earlier.

Some background on Tulsa, Oklahoma: The district of Greenwood in its time was famously described by Booker T. Washington as ``Black Wall Street.'' It was so named because it was the most vibrant and affluent African-American community in the United States. It was an oasis of opportunity in a desert of du jour discrimination.

For many African Americans in search of a better life, it was a promised land amid the broken promise of Reconstruction. It was home to 10,000 residents. There were 30 vibrant restaurants, 45 vibrant grocers and meat markets. There was a 54-room hotel. There was a theater and a hospital.

Black Wall Street was a self-contained, self-sufficient community of Black wealth, a community of Black entrepreneurship and Black ownership.

And Black Wall Street, at the hands of racial terrorism, at the hands of racial violence, the wealthiest Black community in the United States became a scene of mass murder, looting, and arson. It became a scene of death, destruction, and displacement. Nothing was spared in the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Churches, schools, and hospitals were burned down. Twelve thousand homes were burned down. Thirty-five blocks burned down. The Tulsa burning had a death toll of 300 and a displacement toll of 10,000. Ten thousand people lost their homes, their businesses, and their livelihoods. And 6,000 of those people were relegated to internment camps.

Then, after the internment camps, Black professionals, Black business owners who lost everything, were forced to live in tents and shacks. It was the worst act of racial terrorism and one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in the history of the United States.

Now, I see a parallel between the Tulsa Race Massacre and January 6. The insurrection against the United States Congress on January 6 was not simply an attack on a physical structure, it was an expression of racial rage and resentment against multiracial democracy. And the same is true of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

We have to recognize that the domestic terrorism that we saw unfold on January 6 did not happen in a vacuum. It has a history, and that history includes the KKK; it includes Jim Crow, and, yes, it includes the Tulsa Race Massacre. And it is a scandal in America that most Americans have never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Madam Speaker, as Congressman Johnson noted earlier, it has been referred to as a race riot, which is an attempt to whitewash the white supremacist, domestic terrorism at the heart of the massacre. And so we are here to tell the truth about the Tulsa Greenwood Massacre because we see a proper revision of history away from whitewashing as part of our national reckoning with race in America.

It is worth noting that in 2021, Black homeownership is at historic lows. The rate of Black homeownership is lower today than it was before the Fair Housing Act in the 1960s. The gap between Black and White homeownership has never been greater. According to the Federal Reserve, White households on average have eight times more wealth than Black households. And part of the reason is the Tulsa massacre, and the systemic racism that it represents.

There is a racial income gap between White households and Black households, but there is an even greater wealth gap. And the wealth gap is not an accident, it is a product of public policy. It is a consequence of systemic racism.

During the post-war era, we saw Black Americans systematically excluded from programs providing homeownership and higher education, which are the pillars of wealth-building. And if you have no home to own, then you have no home equity to build. And if you have no home equity to build, then you have no wealth to pass down from one generation to the next.

And so, instead of realizing the dream of intergenerational wealth, too many Black Americans were condemned by public policy, condemned by systemic racism to the nightmare of intergenerational poverty. The Tulsa Race Massacre should be understood as a microcosm of what white supremacy has done to Black people and Black property, to Black business and Black community. And the ghosts of Jim Crow, the ghosts of the Tulsa and Greenwood massacre hunts us till this day.

I represent a neighborhood named Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, and many of the businesses on Arthur Avenue have been owned by the same family for more than 100 years, but those businesses--all of them are white.

And I thought to myself, what if Black Wall Street had been left alone, had been left to survive and thrive. It may very well be the case that some of those businesses would have endured until 2021. We could have had businesses owned by Black families for more than a century had it not been for the racial terrorism that took hold in 1921. And we know that when it comes to business, longevity is often the basis for resilience. Established businesses which tend to be wealthier and whiter had greater resilience in the face of COVID-19; whereas, newer businesses, which tend to be Black and Brown, were too fragile to survive the cataclysm of COVID-19.

In the first two months of the outbreak, 44 percent of Black businesses were wiped out, which raises the question, what if Black Wall Street were left to thrive, and what if we could have had businesses that would have endured for more than a century and could have had the resilience, the longevity, to overcome even a cataclysmic event like COVID-19.

Madam Speaker, I want to provide some more historic background, on May 31-June 1, 1921, a White mob attacked America's Black Wall Street, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and what is known as the Tulsa-Greenwood Race Massacre. The White mob of thousands of people shot and murdered Black residents, looted their homes and businesses, and burned more than 1,000 homes, churches, schools, and businesses. Not only did local authorities and law enforcement fail to maintain civil order and protect Tulsa's Black residents, some government agents aided the White mob in carrying out the massacre.

Many of the residents who fled the massacre were detained in internment camps immediately following the massacre. And local officials later made, and ultimately failed, an attempt to block the ability of the Black community to rebuild the Greenwood commercial district by enacting a restrictive building ordinance.

Less than a month after the massacre, a grand jury placed the blame entirely on the Black community and indicted 85 people--mostly African- Americans--with massacre-related offenses. No White person was ever held individually accountable for crimes committed during the massacre, and the vast majority of survivors and their descendants were never directly compensated for these harms.

So not only did a White lynch mob set the most vibrant, Black community on fire, but then the United States proceeded to whitewash the history of the Tulsa massacre, claiming that it was a race riot rather than the act of domestic terrorism that it was and should always be seen as. No White person was held to account, and no Black person was made whole.

Despite the acute challenges of racism in the late 19th and early 20th century, Black residents have been able to create thriving community in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. However, this community was literally burned to the ground in one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history. And to this day, no one has been truly held responsible. And it is worth noting, even though Greenwood has rebuilt itself, Greenwood does have among the highest rates of poverty and unemployment in the city of Tulsa, which demonstrates the legacy of systemic racism, how hard it can be to overcome that legacy.

The Tulsa Massacre resulted in property damage valued anywhere from $25 million to $100 million when adjusted in today's dollars. As the descendants of the white mob that looted Tulsa businesses have had the opportunity to benefit from the wealth of their ancestors, many Black survivors of the Tulsa Massacre and their descendants have not been able to recoup the wealth that had been lost or destroyed during the massacre.

Despite the Oklahoma Commission to study the race massacre of 1921 stating, ``Reparations to the historic Greenwood community in real and tangible form would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional and physical scars of this terrible incident in our shared past.'' Despite that finding, neither the State of Oklahoma nor the city of Tulsa has provided direct compensation to survivors or their descendants.

Discrimination against Black Tulsans did not end following the massacre. Over the local decades, local ordinances to prevent rebuilding, redlining, urban renewal, and slum clearance, gentrification, highway construction, tearing apart communities.

I will offer a note of personal reflection. I represent the South Bronx, which has been ravaged by a racist highway known as the Cross Bronx Expressway. It was built by Robert Moses and largely funded by Federal dollars. And the Cross Bronx Expressway has left behind decades of displacement and environmental degradation.

There are children who are born in the Bronx who live near the Cross Bronx Expressway, who breathe in pollutants every day that cause respiratory disease and cardiovascular disease. And we saw those diseases become lethal during COVID-19.

As a son of the Bronx, I was often in three places. I was at home, I was at school, and I was in the emergency room, because I was repeatedly hospitalized for asthma. And the asthma epidemic in the Bronx, again, is not an accident. It is a consequence of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which is both literally and metaphorically a structure of racism. The South Bronx has a childhood asthma hospitalization rate that is double to three times the national average.

So like the South Bronx, the neighborhood of Greenwood has its own racist highway. And one of the most exciting features of the American Jobs Plan is a proposed $20 billion fund that would rebuild neighborhoods that have been divided and devastated by the structural racism of highways. And I hope neighborhoods like Greenwood and the South Bronx will benefit from our national reckoning with race.

The impact of the massacre and the ongoing systemic discrimination is clear when you compare North Tulsa, where many Black residents of Tulsa now live, to other areas. North Tulsan residents are significantly poorer than residents in other parts of the city. There are fewer businesses and large-scale employers in North Tulsa than in other cities.

According to a 2018 city study, North Tulsa had the fewest jobs of any region of Tulsa. The unemployment rate is 2.37 percent times higher for Black Tulsans than for White Tulsans. The lowest life expectancy in Tulsa occurs in the poorest regions with the greatest concentration of Black residents.

The United States has a responsibility to both acknowledge the harm caused by the Tulsa Massacre and to enact legal remedies and policy proposals to compensate survivors and their descendants. And as many of you know, there is no greater champion of making the victims of systemic racism whole, no greater champion of reparations than the chair of our Special Order hour, Congress Member Jackson Lee.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

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