Why is Tulsa’s history so allegorically powerful? Because it showed the debased lengths to which white Americans, well into the 20th century, would go to destroy black lives and crush the hopes of black people for a better life, literally into dust.
Trump campaign officials knew, according to the Associated Press, that planning a rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Juneteenth, a celebration of African-American emancipation, was offensive. They just didn’t know how offensive. They didn’t realize that some people would put it nearly on par with scheduling a Nazi rally at the gates of Auschwitz on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.
Instead they will gather there the following day, June 20. But for black Americans, the location will still evoke memories of an epic episode of mob violence and racial cleansing. Angry words were exchanged, shots were fired and people lay dead in the street. The mob became an avenging army intent on destroying the Greenwood District, the most prosperous black community in America. The mob was joined by National Guardsmen and police. There were reports of police-commandeered planes dropping nitroglycerin bombs as Tulsa’s whites contained what they described as a “negro uprising.
The black-owned Philadelphia Tribune had a different view: “Once again has the attention of the world ... been called to the inhuman and brutal side of the American white man in his dealing with the colored people of this country.” Whites inevitably blamed the violent outbreaks on blacks. The Chicago Tribune slammed the black press for spreading “propaganda” about racial equality. Such nonsense, concluded the Tribune, “is most generally ascribed to two causes: The presence of negro soldiers in France, where French women of the lower classes accepted them as equals, and the presence of an increasing number of agitators among negroes.
But there is an even deeper question. Why have we embraced an approach to policing that results in the deaths of so many civilians, white as well as black? European police typically kill a fraction of the number of people per capita as American cops do. World Population Review calculated that American cops kill at a rate of 28.4 per 10 million people annually, compared to a rate of 3.8 in France, 1.3 in Germany, and 0.5 in the United Kingdom.
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