African civilizations have been annihilated countless times by European colonizers. Indigenous populations have suffered the fate of annihilation all around the world. In every instance in our collective world history when invaders have made contact with indigenous people, the result has always been annihilation.
In America, we are only now realizing how many former prospering black towns have been erased from memory because of racial violence—towns like Rosewood, Elaine, Wilmington, Colfax, Ocoee, and many more have suffered the fate of annihilation.
Annihilation is a constant specter that stalks black bodies in America. When we leave the confines of our homes in order to perform the basic tasks of existence, we are under sustained threat of annihilation. The harbingers of our obliteration can come in the form of law enforcement, racist white folk or groups trying to obtain whiteness, the government’s use of zoning laws to make us live where the air is polluted and the water is poisoned, and even black folk who been trapped in areas of little to no opportunity who have devalued the cost of life.
Breonna Taylor and others have taught us that our front doors are powerless when annihilation comes knocking.
Our culture, religion, food, customs, language, fashion, stories, and more were all eradicated when we were brought to America in bondage. Even our very humanity fell to the unyielding blade of annihilation. Each generation brought us farther and farther away from what we were and closer to what we would become.
Black Americans, who are the descendants of enslaved people in America, are the only group that has seen its lineage face annihilation twice: when we were brought here and now.
I do not know if annihilation is the greatest expression of regard for a race or a civilization. I am constantly reminded of how precarious my position is here in America. Black people have been targeted for annihilation out of jealousy and envy. The annihilation of Black Wall Street is the physical manifestation of these twin sins.
Black Wall Street was annihilated, and that is why I went to bear witness to a racial massacre.
My 10-year-old daughter wanted to say goodbye to her great aunt, my mother’s older sister. She hugged her tightly when we visited her pristine home sequestered within a gated community. I think my aunt understands that each visit might be her last. Ninety years old is firmly in her grasp. Each moment she spends with my daughter, I see her implanting herself in my daughter’s fertile memory. Each story she shares is another chance at immortality.
Today’s tale was about Aunt Bessie. My grandmother’s oldest sister. She was born around 1893 in Oklahoma. She used to tell my aunt about the beauty of Black Wall Street, located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The level of prosperity she described to my aunt was unfathomable. My grandparents did well for black folk but lived on the edge of poverty. The stories of black-owned hotels equipped with grand pianos were incomprehensible. A great job back then was working for the Post Office. Aunt Bessie told of a place that was populated with black doctors, dentists, and landowners.
Industrious black folk flocked to Oklahoma, possessed by the spirit of competition. Oklahoma was wide open, and anyone could claim what they wanted. Black folk arrived in droves and started competing against white folk and Native Americans to see who could amass the most wealth. Black people had exceeded everyone's expectations. They created small, thriving black towns that adorned Oklahoma. The crown jewel of black Oklahoma was reserved for Tulsa. It was here they created Black Wall Street.
Aunt Bessie's stories of Black Wall Street were fairytales, folklore, or black myths. I prefer the latter term. Black Wall Street is a jewel that still glitters in the imagination of every black American. A mythical place that was our Nirvana. A testimony of what we can achieve. A case study of what we can accomplish when we keep black dollars in black-owned businesses within the black community. Black Wall Street was our grail.
Appropriately, in the spirit of Western mythology Black Wall Street was inevitably inflicted with Negcarus.
Whenever non-white folk achieve too much success, there will be a whitelash. I have coined this specific type of whitelash Negcarus. A combination of Negro and the tragic mythical character Icarus who flew too close to the sun and came crashing down.
Even today, white folk arbitrarily and shrouded with malicious intentions determine the secret metrics that might summon Negcarus. Once Negcarus protocols have been invoked, racial violence is green-lit. See Black Wall Street, Rosewood, and Obama (Donald Trump was the whitelash that came after Obama. The failed coup/mass lynching/insurrection on January 6th was the violent crescendo of that whitelash).
Black Wall Street’s existence was perceived as an affront to white people, and they enacted the Negcarus protocols.
My great-aunt Bessie knew of the massacre, but some things are too terrible to give words to. Some horrors must remain unspoken. This is one of the unwritten rules of the black community. Only after enough time has passed from tragedy do black folk start sharing how they have been aggrieved. Those of us who are the descendants of formerly enslaved people here in America are the only demographic who have been refugees in our own country. We have had to flee our ancestorial lands for want of protection of the law. For centuries black people have had to rely on moonless or starless nights to escape with only our most valued possessions. Namely, our lives and a family Bible.
My great aunt Bessie passed three decades before I even heard the first whispers of Black Wall Street. An apocalypse of end-times proportions that took place on American soil, and we never learned about it in school? It seemed preposterous, but as sit in the hotel lobby drinking a vesper less than a half-mile from the epicenter of this race massacre where hundreds of blacks were slaughtered, thousands more were rounded up and forced by the threat of violence into internment camps, and over ten thousand more were left destitute. It was real.
The bronze plaques affixed in cement at the front of various buildings on the wrong side of Archer Street, denoting if a building was destroyed in this race-inspired cataclysm, are omnipresent in this part of Tulsa. The city and the community have been intentional about memorializing the unspeakable. Weak white men invaded Black Wall Street. They created snipers’ nests where they felled black women, men, and children from the safety of rooftops. Some dropped bombs from airplanes as they strafed elderly black people and children. After all of the destruction they wrought, they erased their evil deeds from the annuals of history.
I was in my 40s when I heard of the first of the three times the United States of America was ever bombed from the air. I trusted my public school, college, and law school education to inform me that thousands of white men flooded a peaceful black neighborhood and butchered the inhabitants out of jealousy. I refused to believe an unimaginable event like this could have occurred in this country, free of consequences or retribution.
Yet, it happened. The lives, fortunes, and dreams were all vaporized by bullets, incendiary devices and denied insurance claims. This is the story of Black Wall Street.
This is why I was compelled to bear witness to this race massacre and offer my condolences to all who perished because they were independent, successful, and black. The urge for justice for those hundreds of souls buried in unmarked mass graves consumes me. Not one white person was ever arrested for this massacre. Not the pilots or the bombardiers who cast fire down on black families. Not the snipers concealed in their nests who indiscriminately hurled bullets at black bodies, never spent a second in handcuffs. The unconsecrated ground surrounding the area with its unmarked and undiscovered graves thirst for justice.
I came to bear witness to Black Wall Street.
I was only outside of my vehicle for a few moments before the sorrow and despair washed over my body. I cried. My grief was fast. It was like a pairing knife was slid between my rib cage and pierced my lung. I grasped for air as I acclimated to being in a garden of sorrow. My tears came fast, and I could not wipe my face enough to hide the fact that I was crying. I was crying, but I felt safe. I was mourning, but I was at ease.
My car was parked near where the onslaught had been the most intense. The air had no scent. The sun berated my black body with its oppressive rays. The air was stifling. The frailties of the flesh were inconsequential and de minimis compared to the enormity of the task. I was there to bear witness to an unspeakable act that had been denied and dismissed from our collective memory. It is the obligation of the living to preserve the accounts of the departed so that wrongdoers might be held to account for their treachery, even if it is one hundred years in the future.
Every one of us is endowed with the capacity to remember. The remembrance of the dead and their suffering is one of our responsibilities that we have shirked. It is through the living that immortality can be achieved. Through each successive generation, we might gather the courage to condemn evil that existed earlier.
I came because I was angry. I have been in a perpetual state of rage since I learned about this Biblical-level act of destruction. I was upset about what happened to the residents of Black Wall Street. I was furious because what happened to them was hidden from us. I never learned of hatred so potent that it could not be spoken. For decades the story of this event was concealed from the prying eyes of the present. The white-owned newspapers blamed shiftless niggers who needed to be put down like the rabid animals they were.
I lack the words to explain what Tulsa was. It was indeed a massacre. White men destroyed black bodies. It was annihilation.
Unlike my experience in Duluth, Minnesota, Black Wall Street was created by black folk. It has been infused with centuries of trauma, but not in a garish and self-importance manner. The monuments that have been erected to honor the dead and the survivors put them first. They tell the story of Black Wall Street—nothing more and nothing less. You will not find gratuitous remarks about other parts of the nation. You will not be subjected to the benefits of the massacre. False equivalency is not found or tolerated here. The villains are identified, described, and condemned for their vile deeds.
Equally important, there is no false silver lining or fake rays of hope. I did not find any resiliency story spawned by this apocalypse. The memorials provide a stark reminder that many prosperous and hard-working black folk were unable to rebuild or recover their wealth after the decimation of Black Wall Street. Annihilation.
Many memorials decorate this portion of Tulsa. I felt that I was walking through a well-manicured graveyard. Every few steps, you would see a different marker explaining what had happened here. I must say this is the gold standard for designing a dignified memorial.
Two buildings house memorials to the massacre. The first one is the oldest of the two: the Greenwood Cultural Center. It smelled like the storefront black church my mother would drag my brother and me to while my dad stayed home and watched football. Inside, it was adorned in the same no-frills way of those storefront churches that populated many black cities. I expected my mother to magically appear and hand me a piece of hard candy contaminated with the metallic taste of spare coins, inexpensive perfume, and whatever else could be found at the bottom of her Sunday purse.
This monument had a movie on display that allowed the survivors to tell their stories in their own words with their own voices. There is a photo gallery of people who survived and what they remember about this day. I will insert the photo of the one that gutted me so you can read it for yourself.
I did not see any white people at this memorial.
I eventually went to the main attraction: Greenwood Rising. It is high-tech and beautiful. It has holograms that make you feel like you were living in Tulsa on the eve of the massacre. This impressive shrine takes great care to use the actual voices of the survivors so that those who attend can hear the fear and despair in their voices. The heartbreak that you hear is devastating. The accounts that you read go beyond tragedy. One son was begging and pleading to know where his dad’s body was so that they could give him a proper burial (he never found his dad’s body).
I would say about 30 percent of the people who came to bear witness at this memorial were white. It was white families with their little kids. This brought me a strange solace.
I know that mass graves still exist around Tulsa from the annihilation that was carried out over those days in 1921. I still seethe with rage because this act of obliteration was concealed from the American public. I still grapple with the amount of hate that had to be present to destroy a whole part of a United States city, to even get in airplanes and drop bombs on innocent Americans because you were jealous of their prosperity and despised the hue of their skin. I burn with anger because I never had an opportunity to ask my grandmother, who was born in 1910 and lived long enough with a sound mind, to cast her vote to elect the first black President of the United States of America about Black Wall Street. I had many conversations with my Big Momma. She told me about how our ancestors had decided to kill their slave masters if they forced them to burn alive a slave who had escaped. This was the tenor of our conversations.
If I had known about Black Wall Street, my grandmother could have imparted her first-hand accounts of what she had heard or known of Black Wall Street to me. She would have been 11 when the massacre took place. I know she knew what happened, and because they never taught us about this atrocity, the knowledge continues to die off.
Fortunately, people have been bold in preserving the history of Black Wall Street. I went to bear witness to an unspeakable act of hatred, but what I found was a stunning masterpiece of remembrance for those who perished and reverence for those who survived. Black Wall Street honored the dead and survivors correctly and presented a model of how to inform the living of the sins of the past.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is republished with author's permission. Read more of Garrick McFadden's work on Medium.