Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 25: More on the Tulsa race massacre of 1921

It will be interesting to see how much attention the 100th anniversary year of the gruesome Tulsa race massacre of 1921 gets in the press. I assume it will be quite a bit.

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).

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 16: White racism and Oklahoma statehood

Victor Luckerson writes about racial politics in Oklahoma during the early 20th century in The Promise of Oklahoma Smithsonian Magazine Apr 2021.

Next month will be the 100-year anniversary of one of the most violent white racist atrocities in American history in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An official commission issued this report on the incident in 2001, Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 02/28/2001.

One chapter of the commission report, "History Knows No Fences: An Overview" by John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth, gives this description:

For those hearing about the 1921 Tulsa race riot for the first time, the event seems almost impossible to believe. During the course of eighteen terrible hours, more than one thousand homes were burned to the ground. Practically overnight, entire neighborhoods where families had raised their children, visited with their neighbors, and hung their wash out on the line to dry, had been suddenly reduced to ashes. And as the homes burned, so did their contents, including furniture and family Bibles, rag dolls and hand-me-down quilts, cribs and photograph albums. In less than twenty-four hours, nearly all of Tulsa’s African American residential district — some forty-square-blocks in all — had been laid to waste, leaving nearly nine-thousand people homeless. [my emphasis]

And they describe the cost in human life this way:

All told, considerable evidence exists to suggest that at least seventy-five to one-hundred people, both black and white, were killed during the riot. It should be added, however, that at least one credible source from the period — Maurice Willows, who directed the relief operations of the American Red Cross in Tulsa following the riot — indicated in his official report that the total number of riot fatalities may have ran as high as three-hundred.

Luckerson's article focuses on efforts by African-American and Indian activists to influence the course of events that led up to Oklahoma's statehood. He reminds us that history is complicated:

Black people arrived in Oklahoma long before the prospect of statehood. The first to settle in the area were enslaved by Native American tribes in the Deep South, and they made the journey in the 1830s as hunters, nurses and cooks during the brutal forced exodus known as the Trail of Tears. In Indian Territory (much of today’s eastern Oklahoma) slavery as practiced by the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Seminole tribes sometimes resembled the vicious plantation systems of the South. During the Civil War, the Five Tribes sided with the Confederacy, but after the war most of the tribes, bound by new treaties with the federal government, granted formerly enslaved people citizenship, autonomy and a level of respect unheard of in the post-Reconstruction South. In the Creek and Seminole tribes, black tribal members farmed alongside Native Americans on communally owned land, served as justices in tribal governments, and acted as interpreters for tribal leaders in negotiations with the growing American empire.

And he reports, "In pre-statehood Oklahoma, it was common for white and black children to attend the same schools as late as 1900. Black politicians held public office not only in tribal governments but also in Oklahoma Territory, the modern-day western half of the state. In the early days of Tulsa, black residents owned businesses in the predominantly white downtown district and even had white employees."

Indian leaders also knew their people had some to lose if Oklahoma were to become a state, since the Five Tribes had considerable autonomy in the pre-statehood situation. Luckerson argues, "Oklahoma was evolving into an unusually egalitarian place."

But he notes that the egalitarianism wasn't universal::

Black communities in the Twin Territories also wrestled with deep internal tensions. At first, black tribal members clashed with the African Americans who immigrated later. The freedmen viewed the black interlopers as participants in the white man’s plunder and called them “state Negroes” (or sometimes a Creek word for “white man’s Negro”). The new black migrants called the black tribal members “natives.” In Boley, an all-black town populated by migrants, freedmen would gallop through the streets at night shooting out residents’ windows. In the pages of the black press, businessmen admonished freedmen for betraying the race by selling their land allotments to white men instead of black entrepreneurs. Black migrants and freedmen, in other words, did not see themselves as sharing a racial identity.

But many of the the white advocates for statehood advocated Jim Crow type segregation lawswhich would be allowed under their proposed state constitution. Minority leaders appealed to President Theodore Roosevelt - the Republican who was a trust-busting hero of the Progressive movement of the time - to block the admission of Oklahoma with its bad state consitution. Roosevelt accepted Oklahoma as a state.

On November 16, 1907, the president signed the proclamation turning Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory into the 46th U.S. state, Oklahoma. Despite Roosevelt’s professed misgivings about admitting a state that discriminated against a portion of its citizens, the [new state's] constitution itself enshrined the segregation of schools. With the president’s signature secured, state leaders moved aggressively to enact the rest of their Jim Crow agenda.The very first law passed by the state legislature segregated train cars. Next, the legislature passed the so-called “grandfather clause,” which circumvented federal voter rights protections by instituting a literacy test on any person whose ancestors had not been allowed to vote before 1866. Naturally, that included all descendants of slaves. Ultimately, the legislature would segregate nearly every aspect of public life—hospitals, cemeteries, even phone booths. Oklahoma’s formal and fully legalized racism was actually more rigid than that in much of the Deep South, where Jim Crow was sometimes upheld by custom and violence rather than legal mandate. In the South, segregation emerged from the vestiges of slavery and failed Reconstruction; in Oklahoma, it was erected statute by statute. [my emphasis]

More reports on McGirt v. Oklahoma

The PBS Newshour has a good report on the McGirt v. Oklahoma Supreme Court decision just handed down, The Supreme Court's 'landmark decision' on tribal sovereignty 07/11/2020:

Laurel Amsley also reports for NPR, Supreme Court Rules That About Half Of Oklahoma Is Native American Land 07/09/2020. The headline leaves something to be desired, because it leaves the impression that the ruling was somehow about land rights. It wasn't. It was about the sovereignty of reservations in criminal law. As Neil Gosuch's majority opinion states in the second paragraph, "Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word."

Amsley notes that the Creek reservation includes the City of Tulsa:

The ruling will have significant legal implications for eastern Oklahoma. Much of Tulsa, the state's second-largest city, is located on Muscogee (Creek) land. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation cheered the court's decision.

"The Supreme Court today kept the United States' sacred promise to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of a protected reservation," the tribe said in a statement. "Today's decision will allow the Nation to honor our ancestors by maintaining our established sovereignty and territorial boundaries." ...

The ruling has a number of significant consequences for criminal law in the relevant portion of Oklahoma.

The first is that going forward, certain major crimes committed within the boundaries of reservations must be prosecuted in federal court rather than state court, if a Native American is involved. So if a Native American is accused of a major crime in downtown Tulsa, the federal government rather than the state government will prosecute it. Less serious crimes involving Native Americans on American Indian land will be handled in tribal courts. This arrangement is already common in Western states like Arizona, New Mexico and Montana, said [Kevin] Washburn. ...

It's important to note that the case concerned jurisdiction, not land ownership.

Ruling that these lands are in fact reservations "doesn't mean the tribe owns all the land within the reservation, just like the county doesn't own all the land within the county. In fact, it probably doesn't own very much of that land," Washburn explained. "That's not what a reservation is these days." [my emphasis]

The case certainly has historical significance because it's based on laws and treaties going back to the Indian Removal Act, as I described in an earlier post. And it's always possible that the decision will set a precedent that could affect other questions relating to Indian treaties. But it's not as though it upended previously established laws. It clarifies a question on criminal law.

The more things change ... (Republican radicalization version)

Joan Walsh did a book back in 2012 during the Obama-Biden Administration called What's the Matter with White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America.

Reading the title today, you can almost hear the Trumpistas gasping, "Critical race theory! Critical race theory!"

Chill out, folks. I'm willing to guess that no public grade schools in the US is teaching this book.

She relates how the GOP reacted against Obama during his first term as President:

Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, tried to defend the president in August 2011 with bizarre and condescending racial stereotyping. "His intent isn't to destroy," Coburn told a constituent at a Tulsa town hall meeting. "It's to create dependency because it worked so well for him. I don't say that critically .... As an African American male, coming through the progress of everything he experienced, he got tremendous benefit through a lot of these programs." The racism and the racial idiocy were dizzying.

It was also well organized. Hillary Clinton exaggerated a little when she talked about "a vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband in 1998. Yet ten years later, an intimidating nationwide apparatus of overt and covert right-wing character assassins, fearmongers, and race-baiters made the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project look like a friendly fund -raising group for his presidential library.

Rush Limbaugh had the loudest single voice within the anti-Obama media movement. He set the tone for the leaderless Republican Party when he announced on the eve of Obama's inauguration, "I hope he fails." Limbaugh went on, "We are being told that we ... have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president," a glimpse of right-wing psychosexual anxiety I'd rather not have seen.

The Republican Party has been on their current trajectory for a while. Less than a decade after the situation Joan described in her book the Grand Old Party was storming the Capitol on January 6.

The US left, the January 6 Capitol riot, and the threat from far-right terrorists (1 of 2)

I find myself often tempted to use the walking-and-talking-at-the-same-time metaphor a lot, especially when talking about quarrels of the moment between liberals and progressives and the ever-popular hair-splitting on the progressive side of the dial.

Not to pick on the left, though. Splits and arguments among groups that are closely aligned on policy preferences is part of politics. The slaveowner and classical liberal theorist James Madison discussed that very phenomenon in Federalist #10. Groups and parties with little or no effective political power are also very prone to factionalism, because they have limited resources or rewards to hand out, like actual political offices or paid staffing opportunities that are available to larger parties.

That's certainly true on the radical right, most of which at the moment seems to be enthusiastically pro-Trump. Tina Nguyen and Mark Scott's report, Right-wing extremist chatter spreads on new platforms as threat of political violence ramps up Politico 01/12/2021, gives a sense of the fractious nature of the multiple groups trying to organize protests in support of Trump's ludicrous but deadly clown coup.

David Neiwert also remarks:

One the factors ameliorating the ability of the radical right to gain traction in the USA is the reality that, as a movement, it is almost entirely comprised of paranoid, volatile, egotistical people who eventually all hate each others' guts.https://t.co/FevDtnayRO

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) January 15, 2021

One of the post-January 6 controversies on the progressive left is over the required response to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Part of what conscientious civil libertarians and people on the left do in the political conversation is try to step back from the moment to ask how different actors will exploit it.

Security agencies will always use a crisis to ask for more money. And they will always use a crisis to ask for greater leeway in how they go about their jobs. So, yes, it's part of the job of Members of Congress and responsible citizens to scrutinize such proposals carefully to the extent they can. That's basic to democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law.

So we have discussions going on right now like this one on the Left Reckoning podcast featuring Matt Lech, David Griscomb, and Daniel Bessner, The War On Division? 01/16/2021, in which they raise legitimate concerns about how the "security state" will exploit this. Justice in the US and in many other countries is far too often "blind int he right eye" in that police and security agencies attract people with an authoritarian bent of mind. In the US, police agencies are often less alert to threats from white protesters or activists than they are toward those of color.

So we need to listen to the people who are raising these concerns.

Where I have a different perspective than the three participants on that podcast and some others on the left is that I think they may not fully appreciate the very real problem represented by the violent radical right and how badly law-enforcement in the US has neglected (and sometimes encouraged) it. And part of the problem is that violent far right groups like the Oath Keepers have been actively recruiting among police agencies and infiltrating law enforcement.

So this is an issue where people on the left should be able to walk and talk at the same time. The democratic framework for responding to the January 6 insurrection is one that can be elaborated in a similar way from a liberal perspective or a Marxist one or as something in between. For that matter, a conservative argument could be made in much the same way, although as the political theorist Corey Robin has been reminding us for years, what American Republicans call "conservatism" is very often reactionary ideology which is more interested in wrecking major elements of democracy and the rule of law rather than actually conserving it.

That case is this. The US has a liberal-democratic government with regular free elections based on the principle of universal suffrage. (A bourgeois-democratic government, if one prefers a more classical term,) The courts operate with real independence. It's a system based on a monopoly capitalist economy, which includes extreme social inequality that itself drastically limits the formal equality of citizens as political actors and serious de facto (and de jure!) corruption in the political system due to the role of big money political donors. And the rule of law is severely mitigated by a drastic carceral orientation that gives the US more ordinary prisoners than any other country in the world. In absolute numbers, not just proportional. And there are some serious democratic deficits in the current Constitution, including: the manner of electing the President through an Electoral College; the strongly undemocratic current structure of the US Senate; the lack of a Constitutional provision for the equality of women. And there is real though un-Constitutional voter suppression in many states largely based on race and ethnicity.

But there are regular, competitive elections with broad access to the vote, illustrated in 2020 by the highest turnout of eligible voters in the US since 1908. And even taking 1860 into account, until 2021 we have always had a peaceful transfer of power at the Presidential level. And despite the lynch mob invading the Capitol building at Trump's immediate incitement, the transfer of power to Joe Biden is still happening day after tomorrow.

There is no remotely feasible way that a successful coup by Trump would lead to a desirable outcome from any kind of serious left or center-left perspective. The closest hopeful analogy in that scenario would be a political general strike like the one that successfully blocked the Kapp Putsch in Germany in 1920. But even that scenario - which would require a general strike in a country with a relatively weak organized labor movement on a scale not seen since the work stoppages by freed slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War - would wind up in the best case with a restoration of the 2020 election results with a Democratic Administration in the White House.

The Capitol riot and Trump's clown coup attempt more generally has plenty of relevant predecessors in US history: the Aaron Burr conspiracy; the pro-British secessionist movement among Northeastern Federalists during the War of 1812-15; the slaveowners' invasion of Kansas Territory; the Confederate treason that caused the Civil War; the overthrow of democratic governments in the South by force and violence that ended Reconstruction; mass lynching incidents like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921; and, the Liberty League plot against FDR's Administration.

In all those cases, the "left" position at the time, and endorsed by most left historical interpretations, was to side against the rightwing insurrectionists and for the Constitutional government. One might argue that Bleeding Kansas was an exception, because the national government then dominated by very proslavery administrations supported and encouraged the violent proslavery groups in Kansas. The antislavery movement sympathized with and some directly engaged in the guerrilla war between the pro- and antislavery forces, the most famous participant in the latter being Captain John Brown. But the goal of the antislavery side was to incorporate Kansas Territory as a state under the American Constitution but without slavery.

In the case of the Union rejecting the secession of the Southern slave states, there were a couple of German writers who were very pro-Union and wrote articles for the American press sympathetic to the Union, and later became important figures in the European left, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

In none of those cases did it mean that liberals and leftists were indifferent to the fact of repression against labor and the left, or because they thought the existing government agreed with them on all major issues of the day. It was that they were looking at who was fighting for what, and what realistic consequences could be expected from a rightwing victory.

So siding with the elected Biden-Harris Administration against Trump's malicious clown coup seems painfully obvious to me. It doesn't mean that we should ignore misuses of the threat, especially by people who want to undermine civil liberties. We definitely should be opposed to that. But in terms of the substance of the violent threat from the far right, the problem the last 15 years has been more that the left, the center, and law enforcement were underestimating that threat rather than overestimating it.

No liberals welcome in a Popular Front against ... a violent rightwing coup attempt against the US govt that featured a white supremacist lynch mob hunting down Members of Congress in the halls of the Capitol?!? https://t.co/P0Ykc1R9I4

— brucemillerca (@brucemillerca) January 18, 2021

The day after the Capitol riot, Chris Hayes and Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed the incident in this podcast (the YouTube version is dated 01/17/2021), in which they discuss some of the broad political, Consitutional, and even class questions it raised: Why Is This Happening? - Ep 144.