Two years ago I read The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead’s novel about a notorious school for African-American boys. It was inspired – if that’s the right word – by the true-life story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, a place where alleged Black miscreants were tortured and buried in an unmarked graveyard. Little of this was known until archeologists unearthed the crimes in 2014.
Not even Whitehead, a Black author well attuned to America’s systemic racism, had heard of the Dozier School until the story broke. In his novel of the fictionalized Nickel School, he writes: “The country was big, and its appetite for prejudice and depredation limitless, how could they keep up with the host of injustices, big and small. (Nickel) was just one place. A lunch counter in New Orleans, a public pool in Baltimore that they filled with concrete rather than allow black kids to dip a toe in it. This was one place, but if there was one, there were hundreds, hundreds of (others) scattered across the land like pain factories.”
I remember discussing Whitehead’s book with a friend. He then said to me, “Yeah, like Tulsa.”
And I said, “What’s Tulsa?”
And that was the first I’d ever heard of the Tulsa Massacre. Because the evisceration of an affluent Black community, 35 urban blocks reduced to ash, and the deaths of as many as 300 citizens had never warranted a single word in any history book I’d ever read – or a single word from the lips of any history teacher I’d ever had. And to think that in college I was a history major.
It’s tempting to say that the erasure of so much Black history – the erasure so complete that not even someone like Whitehead knew about Dozier – is the result of a white supremacist conspiracy. Maybe so. There’s an old saying, sometimes attributed to Nazi Hermann Goering, that history is written by the victors. Or maybe the silence about Tulsa is simply the manifestation of an age-old human impulse to render invisible what is too horrific to acknowledge – and to render invisible those who suffered and died.
The erasure of the Tulsa Massacre was so thorough for so long that even Blacks in Oklahoma knew nothing about it. One state senator, Kevin Matthews, now 61 years old, didn’t learn about it until he was in his 30s – and only because he saw a cinematic depiction that he assumed was fictional. As he recently remarked, “It was shocking to me. I couldn’t understand how I could get to be an adult and not know this story.” Indeed, the Oklahoman newspaper conducted a statewide poll and found that 83 percent had never received a full lesson about Tulsa in their K-to-12 schooling.
I can relate. What I basically learned, as a kid growing up in a white New England town, was three things: Christopher Columbus discovered America (in class we sang a song, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue / In fourteen hundred ninety two; Thanksgiving was founded by white settlers having a friendly meal with “Indians”; and that Abraham Lincoln “freed the slaves,” end of story. I heard nothing about the Reconstruction era, when Black aspirations of equal citizenship were ultimately snuffed out by a white backlash. I knew nothing about the Red Summer of 1919, when white mob attacks on urban Black communities were rampant. I knew next to nothing about the ’60s civil rights marches, until, on my own, I read the contemporary accounts in Newsweek. And I never heard about the 1898 racist massacres in Wilmington, North Carolina until my friend David Zucchino wrote about it in his 2020 book Wilmington’s Lie.
How was all that possible? Because the travails of non-whites don’t fit the dominant narrative taught in most schools.
LaGarrett King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri, has pointed out that traditional American history curricula are meant to tell a story – namely, the “progressive history of the country. The overarching theme is, ‘Yes, we made mistakes, but we overcame because we are the United States of America.’ What that has done is it has erased tons of (minority) history that would combat that progressive narrative…Black people have been (talking about their oppression) for the past 400 years, this is not a new movement. Each generation has had their point in time where they’re trying to say through protest, through rebellion, ‘Listen to us, listen to us.’ In many ways we wouldn’t have a Black Lives Matter movement if Black lives mattered in the classroom.”
But it’s never too late to have a reckoning with reality. As President Biden said in Tulsa yesterday, to mark the 100th anniversary of the massacre, “Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try…Just because history is silent, it does not mean that it did not take place. Hell was unleashed, literal hell was unleashed. We can’t just choose what we want to know, and not what we should know. I come here to help fill the silence, because in silence wounds deepen.”
In his words, “Only with truth can come healing.” Hopefully, it’s not too late for that.