Rachel Maddow recently did a retrospective on the event, Rachel Maddow Remembering The Tulsa Race Massacre As The 100th Anniversary Approaches MSNBC 04/20/2021:
A very important source on the incident is the one I quoted in an earlier post, Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 02/28/2001. One of its sections is "Assessing State and City Culpability: The Riot and the Law" by law professor Alfred Brophy, which looks at the role of public officials whose purpose is to enforce the law in blatantly violating it instead:
The Tulsa riot represented the break down of the rule of law. As Bishop Mouzon told the congregation of the city’s Boston Avenue Methodist Church just after the riot, “Civilization broke down in Tulsa.” I do not attempt to place the blame, the mob spirit broke and hell was let loose. Then things happened that were on a footing with what the Germans did in Belgium, what the Turks did in Armenia, what the Bolshevists did in Russia. That break down of law is central to understanding the riot, the response afterwards, and the decision over what, if anything, should be done now.That opening paragraph shows both the strength and weakness of many of these official commission reports. Studies like this are good to have. Historical commissions can actually contribute to their purpose of describing and situating the history of the events in question. While official commissions on current issues are very often just stunts to substitute for actual action. (Although their reports can also be valuable for people who actually care about the issue in question.)
It's good to see Brophy defining this straightforwardly as an instance of "the breakdown of the rule of law." But why does he say he does "not attempt to place the blame," my question is, why not? That's actually part of what historical accounts should do. And he follows it in the ame sentence with "the mob spirit broke and hell was let loose." Which is true, but could also be taken as some kind of excuse for the guilty. I don't think that's what he is trying to do here. In the bulk of the chapter, he focuses on the question of ongoing legal liability of official bodies. So in that context, the "mob spirir" has to be distinguished in some way from official culpability.
And with the three historical examples he gave of "things ... on a footing" the Tulsa massacre of 1921, it's not clear what he takes the parallel to be. I assume he's referring to the atrocities committed by Imperial Germany in Belgium during World War I (which were also famously an example of exaggerated claims being used as war propaganda by the Allies) and the Armenian genocide (which is not especially familiar to a lot of a American readers). But "what the Bolshevists did in Russia" refers to as a parallel, I can't even make a guess just reading that paragraph.
But Brophy does make an argument that public entities have a continuing legal culpability for the events. And the bulk of his essay is devoted to looking at the legal precedents for that. He writes:
Tulsa failed to take action to protect against the riot. More important, city officials deputized men right after the riot broke out. Some of those deputies — probably in conjunction with some uniformed police — officers were responsible for some of the burning of Green wood. After the riot, the city took further action to prevent rebuilding by passing a zoning ordinance that required the use of fire proof material in rebuilding.He also cites contemporary accounts that provide damning details of the murderous incident. It's certainly not the case that white people across town in some other part of Tulsa had no idea what had happened. And it was not a matter of "rednecks from out in the country" doing the bad acts; that was a favorite line local officials used in the Jim Crow era.
Brophy is also the author of Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921, Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation (2002).
No comments:
Post a Comment