What Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum Gets Wrong About The Race Massacre
Race reparations shouldn't be seen as a punishment of modern-day whites; rather as a city making things right
Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum has much to be applauded for in his approach to his city's dark, shameful — and for too long hidden — race massacre.
Where too many other white Republicans who are working to avoid any substantive reckoning with the nation's long history and legacy of racism — including the governor of his own state — Bynum has been surprisingly upfront and pro-active in helping Tulsa both uncover the secrets of the worst race massacre in US history and aid the city in healing from its consequences and repercussions even all of these decades later.
Even before the rest of the nation began turning its eyes towards Tulsa for last weekend's observance of the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Bynum began an initiative to excavate a local cemetery looking for unmarked, mass graves where many of the 300 or so Black Tulsans murdered in the massacre were rumored to have been buried.
“The only way to move forward in our work to bring about reconciliation in Tulsa is by seeking the truth honestly. As we open this investigation 99 years later, there are both unknowns and truths to uncover,” Bynum said last year. “But we are committed to exploring what happened in 1921 through a collective and transparent process — filling gaps in our city’s history, and providing healing and justice to our community."
Bynum went even further in remarks posted to Facebook in honor of for the centennial observance.
“While no municipal elected official in Tulsa today was alive in 1921, we are the stewards of the same government and an apology for those failures is ours to deliver,” Bynum wrote. “As the Mayor of Tulsa, I apologize for the city government’s failure to protect our community in 1921 and to do right by the victims of the Race Massacre in its aftermath.
“The victims — men, women, young children — deserved better from their city, and I am sorry they didn’t receive it.”
Bynum said that although there is much debate over how to end racial disparities, the community is united in its desire to do so.
“When you have people with such a diverse range of life experience and passion striving to address an issue they care about deeply, it can sometimes get heated and personal,” Bynum wrote. “But at its best, Tulsa is a community of neighbors who love one another — so we should expect this to be personal.
“And all of the most powerful improvements in American history were forged through a vigorous exchange of ideas.”
So it's surprising — and more than a bit disheartening — that when it comes to the crucial question of reparations for the victims of the massacre, Bynum falls back in line with other white Republicans in opposition to such tangible compensation for the atrocities done those three days in the late Spring of 1921 which burned the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood — an exceptionally prosperous area known as “Black Wall Street” — to the ground, killing hundreds and leaving thousands homeless and destitute.
The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, which was established and performed its work in the 1990s, endorsed reparations.
Reparations the commission agreed to were:
payments to living survivors;
payments to descendants of those who had property damage during the massacre;
a scholarship fund;
business tax incentives for the Greenwood District;
and a memorial
Even Oklahoma's Republican governor of the time, Frank Keating, supported reparations to direct survivors of the massacre — if not to the wider Greenwood community affected by the rampage.
But today, Bynum won't even go that far.
“I don’t have an issue with trying to find a way to make things right by the victims and their families. That is the whole reason we are doing the (Race Massacre) grave search, that’s the reason we are doing so many other things, is to close the racial gaps that exist in our city,” Bynum said. “Direct cash payments do not solve larger issues that have been allowed to fester in Tulsa for a century.”
Bynum's opposition to monetary reparations make no logical sense — especially if we use a different word for them: “restitution.”
Even former Gov Keating supported restitution for the survivors. And 20-something years on, there are so many fewer living survivors — and those who are alive are so much more elderly — I'm really not sure how or why these direct payments could be controversial. Except for racism, given these survivors are Black.
But I want to spend more time on the idea of the wider reparations, or restitution, to the broader indirect massacre survivor community — especially because Bynum also said he opposes them because “you’d be financially punishing this generation of Tulsans for something that criminals did a hundred years ago,” he said.
Bynum's got it all wrong.
Restitution ought not to be seen as punishment of modern-day whites.
Because, while the white Tulsans who torched Greenwood and murdered hundreds of Black residents were indeed criminals of the worst stripe, many of them were also duly deputized in the incident that sparked the massacre: a report of 19-year-old Black shoeshiner Dick Rowland assaulting the 17-year-old white elevator operator Sarah Page at the nearby Drexel Building. (The reality is closer to Rowland tripping as he stepped in the elevator and perhaps stepping on Page's foot, causing her to yelp.)
A city responsible for wealth denied
The fact that the massacre was carried out by deputized white Tulsans makes the city absolutely as responsible for the massacre as it would be for any other act of negligence — even a century later.
And, make no mistake, there is a wider community of Black Tulsans who have impacted by the massacre — and the razing of Black Wall Street.
White Americans are particularly fond of passing wealth and the opportunity it represents from one generation to the next.
The Tulsa Race Massacre is just one of the starkest examples of how Black wealth has been sapped, again and again, by racism and racist violence -- forcing generation after generation to start from scratch while shouldering the burdens of being Black in America.
“Greenwood proved that if you had assets, you could accumulate wealth,” said Jim Goodwin, publisher of the Oklahoma Eagle, a local Black newspaper established in Tulsa a year after the massacre. "It was not a matter of intelligence, that the Black man was inferior to white men. It disproved the whole idea that racial superiority was a fact of life.”
And it was white Tulsans who wiped all that out for the descendants of the folks living in Greenwood those days in 1921, depriving the survivors of the massacre of the ability to pass their wealth and businesses to their heirs — again done by those deputized to do so under the authority of the city of Tulsa.
Explain how if the affected community weren't Black, the city of Tulsa could possibly escape responsibility for this.
Of course it's responsible.
While GT Bynum's to be thanked for what he's done thus to help Tulsans come to terms with those horrific days a century ago, it's time for him to evolve, and embrace restitution for the descendants of Black Wall Street to help his city heal.