“This is as close to a coup attempt as this country has ever seen,” former D.C. police chief Charles Ramsey told CNN as the Jan. 6 insurrection by a Trump mob unfolded. [Video here.] Ramsey had perhaps forgotten the murders and coup d’état perpetrated by white mobs in Wilmington, N.C. in 1898, or the massacre of Blacks in Tulsa, Okla. in 1921. Or perhaps he never heard of them.
Silence is just the way perpetrators like it.
Call it critical race television. “60 Minutes” Sunday night ran a segment on Tulsa’s 1921 Greenwood massacre. Between 150 and 300 Black children, women and men perished in a white riot against “Black Wall Street” that began with an attempted lynching. The white mob used small arms, machine guns, and fire bombs dropped from airplanes to level about 36 city blocks and displace 10,000 Black residents from what was at the time an oasis of Black prosperity.
In the aftermath, no one was arrested, charged or prosecuted. No insurance company would pay the claims of Black customers. The city paid one claim. The dead, it is suspected, disappeared into mass graves the city is just now trying to locate one hundred years later. A conspiracy of silence effectively and chillingly disappeared the history of what happened, too. In the aftermath, Tulsa became “a haven for the Ku Klux Klan.”
Scott Pelley spoke the congregation of Vernon AME Church:
Scott Pelley: this was not taught in the public schools?
Congregant: No.
Scott Pelley: You never heard about this in class?
Congregant: You never heard a word about it.
Damario Solomon-Simmons: When I went to OU in 1998, I was sitting in a class of African American history. And the professor was talking about this place where Black people had businesses and had money and had doctors and lawyers. And he said it was in Tulsa. And I raised my hand, I said, “No, I’m from Tulsa. That’s not accurate.” And he was talking about this massacre riot. I said, “Man, what are you talking about?” I said, “I went to school on Greenwood. I’ve never heard of this ever.”
Sometimes the victors don’t write the history. They bury it.
The Wilmington race riot of 1898 by a white mob in the predominantly Black city of Wilmington, North Carolina is better reported. Two decades before Tulsa, an editorial on the topic of lynchings in a Black-owned Wilmington newspaper suggested that “our experiences among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than the white men with the colored women.”
In response, “a mob numbering as many as 2,000 whites” burned the newspaper building to the ground, then organized a coup d’état to displace the Republican-Populist “Fusion” city government and replace it with all-white officials. “Citing ineffectual leadership, corrupt officials, and soaring crime, the men justified their actions as for the greater good of Wilmington society.” Researchers in 1997 found no support for those claims.
As many as 60 may have been murdered in the violence. All Black.
The Atlantic recounted in 2017:
For all the violent moments in United States history, the mob’s gruesome attack was unique: It was the only coup d’état ever to take place on American soil.
What happened that day was nearly lost to history. For decades, the perpetrators were cast as heroes in American history textbooks. The black victims were wrongly described as instigators. It took nearly a century for the truth of what had really happened to begin to creep back into public awareness. Today, the old site of The Daily Record is a nondescript church parking lot—an ordinary-looking square of matted grass on a tree-lined street in historic Wilmington. The Wilmington Journal, a successor of sorts to the old Daily Record, stands in a white clapboard house across the street. But there’s no evidence of what happened there in 1898.
More riots followed, including Tulsa’s. From North Carolina’s “1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report” of 2006:
The year 1898 marked a turning point in violent race relations across the country. At the same time Wilmington was dealing with its violence, Phoenix, South Carolina underwent a violent episode in which at least 13 men, including one white man, were killed by white mobs. After Wilmington’s riot, followed closely in the press throughout the country, other states experienced similar unrest within a short span of time. Within 25 years of Wilmington’s riot, at least six other major race riots occurred throughout the country in which blacks lost their lives, property, and experienced ever tightening controls on their rights. In all cases, the numbers of black dead were never fully tallied with estimates ranging from as few as seven dead in the Springfield, Illinois riot to as many as 500 injured in Chicago. Massive property damage and a mass exodus of blacks also followed.
The Atlanta Riot of 1906 closely resembled the building tensions and outbreak of violence in Wilmington. Atlanta had struggled to recover from the Civil War and re-invent itself as a “New South” city. Attempts to revitalize the city faltered until the turn of the twentieth century and the violence in 1906 reflected growing tension between whites and blacks regarding segregated public spaces. The white rioters focused their attention on destruction of the upwardly mobile, successful black businessmen of the city. Additional impetus for the violence was linked to reports of black-on-white sexual assault.
Same as it ever was. Acknowledging that history is what The People of the Lie oppose.
Even now, supporters of Donald J. Trump are attempting to bury the history of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and prevent a full congressional investigation. Americans cannot allow that to happen. Not again.