The Tulsa massacre of June 1, 1921, has gone from virtually
unknown to emblematic with impressive speed, propelled by the national
reckoning in the US with racism and specifically with sanctioned violence
against Black Americans. That awareness is reflected in the spate of new TV
documentaries on the occasion of the massacre’s 100th anniversary.
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“
Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre” (which aired Sunday
on History), “Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street” (Monday on CNN), and
“Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten” (Monday on PBS) tell overlapping stories of
the horrific day when a white mob stormed through the prosperous Greenwood
District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Triggered by a confrontation between white men
planning a lynching and Black men intent on stopping it, the 16-hour spasm of
violence left 100 to 300 people dead and most of Greenwood, including more than
1,250 houses, burned to the ground.
All three sketch the history of Black settlement in
Oklahoma, where more than 40 Black towns existed in the early 20th century, and
the singular success of Greenwood. Each carries the story into the present,
covering the excavations carried out in 2020 looking for mass graves of
massacre victims.
But each has its own style and emphasis, its own approach to
the unthinkable material. The PBS film is journalistic, built around the
reporting of The Washington Post’s DeNeen L. Brown, who appears on-screen, and
narrated by NPR’s Michel Martin. It spends a little less time on the past and
more on the continuing issues of race in Tulsa, including educational
disparities and the protests following the police killing of Terence Crutcher,
an unarmed Black man, in 2016. In the nature of the contemporary newspaper
feature, it’s a touch sanctimonious. It ends with Johnson, looking
uncomfortable, delivering a nominally hopeful sound bite: “We’re not there yet,
we’re working on it.”
The CNN and History films both give fuller accounts of the
history, and of the timeline of June 1. “Tulsa Burning,” directed by veteran
documentarians Stanley Nelson and Marco Williams, is the most polished and
evocative piece of filmmaking, and the most focused thematically, using footage
of the excavations as a narrative line and making the strongest link between
the massacre and contemporary police shootings.
“Dreamland,” directed by Salima Koroma (and with
LeBron James as an executive producer), gives the most thorough presentation of the
history. It’s more forthright, for instance, on the way that Native American
enslavement of Black people paradoxically led to their owning more land in the
Indian Territory of Oklahoma.
That uncomfortable connection is just one of the ironies
that echo through the Tulsa history. All three films note that segregation —
and the economic self-reliance it produced — made the relative prosperity of
Greenwood possible, in turn making the neighborhood and its residents the
inevitable targets of white jealousy and rage. And a half-century later, after
the neighborhood had been rebuilt, its economy was ravaged again, this time by
the effects of integration.
Perhaps the saddest paradox, in the life of Tulsa and in the
structures of the films, is that the only real “up” in the story — its closest
thing to a happy ending — is the discovery of a mass grave in a cemetery in
Greenwood last October. (The remains have not been definitely identified as
those of massacre victims, and the PBS film makes the point that people who
died in the influenza pandemic of 1918 were sometimes buried in mass graves.)
One thing that none of the films is able to provide, except
in clips from a living-history project, is testimony from survivors. For that,
it is worth seeking out the 1993 PBS documentary “Goin’ Back to T-Town,” which
was told entirely in the voices of massacre survivors and their contemporaries
and descendants; it’s available at
pbs.org.
Typically, this is where I would answer the “If you were to
watch one of these films” question, but not this time. If you want to know
about Tulsa, and everything it represents, watch all three. We can all afford
the 4 1/2 hours.
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