The New York Amsterdam News, July 12 - July 18, 2001Religious group affirms call for reparations in Tulsa
By Karen Juanita Carrillo, Amsterdam News Staff
Last April 7 when the Tulsa Reparations Coalition met for the first time, the meeting was led by Rev. Gerald Davies, pastor of the Church of the Restoration, Unitarian Universalist, and by Mark Stodghill of the center for Racial Justice. The meetings participants spoke about issues relating to the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and about how Blacks are faring in Tulsa, Okla., today.
And then the participants got down to coming up with a list of recommended reparations for those who have suffered in the aftermath of that infamous race riot, which destroyed the Greenwood district of Tulsa - known, because of the wealth of area residents, as "BlackWall Street." The riot, and its disastrous results has only recently been acknowledged by the state of Oklahoma.
On May 3, 1921, 19 year-old Dick Rowland was arrested and accused of trying to rape a white female elevator operator, Sara Page, in Tulsa's Drexel Building. The Tulsa Tribune, the local newspaper which reported on the story, inflamed area residents by declaring that Rowland had attacked Page and torn her clothes. On the back page, the Tribune carried an editorial with the banner headline: "To Lynch Negro Tonight." The editorial talked about the fact that "mobs of whites were forming in order to lynch the Negro."
With such encouragement white men soon began showing up outside the courthouse carrying guns and drinking liquor and demanding that Rowland be handed over. But local African-American World War I veterans had weapons of their own, and they came to the courthouse ready to protect Rowland.
During the riot that ensued from May 31 through June 1, 1921, thousands of whites raided Greenwood, looting and destroyed over 1,200 homes, 35 grocery stores, eight doctors' offices and five hotels. "Black Wall Street" never recovered. Over 300 African-American residents were killed, and property damage was estimated at about $1.6 million in 1921, which would amount to over $16 millions today.
Recently in Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating signed a bill into law apportioning $750,000 for a Tulsa Race Riot Memorial. With that act, Keating helped accomplish one of the goals of the Tulsa Reparations Coalition. But there is still much work to be done, and the coalition has been meeting and working with various individuals and organizations across the country to carry that work through.
In its latest triumph, the coalition and its supporters are now getting backing from a national association that is also pressing to see reparations paid to Tulsa riot victims. This is an association that is pushing for reparations, even while acknowledging that one of its own members was a principal cause of the riot itself. The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA), the same religious group that recently elected Rev. William G. Sinkford to serve as the first Afro-American president of the traditionally white association, had officially made a call for reparations to survivors of the 1921 Tulsa riot. On June 25, 2001, during its general assembly meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, UUA delegates issued what is formally called "an action of immediate witness," or a resolution, calling for "direct payment of reparations to survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot."
The text of the UUA resolution states that:
"Because our Tulsan Unitarian Universalist forebears witnessed an atrocity of ethnic cleansing for which we are responsible to account, to reconcile and to repair, and
"Whereas the Tulsa Race Riot is consistent with a pattern of assaults and riots in many communities across America; and
"Whereas, following the Tulsa Tribune's editorial suggesting the probability of a lynching in Tulsa that night frenzy spread throughout Tulsa. That evening in the presence of 2,000 white Tulsans, 75,000 African-American World War I veterans met the sheriff at the court-house, offering to protect a young man jailed for assaulting a white elevator operator based on accusations that were later recanted; and
"Whereas after rioting began, the City of Tulsa Police Department deputized 500 members of the white mob, and the State of Oklahoma mobilized units of the National Guard armed with the city's machine gun mounted on a flatbed truck; and
"Whereas the community of Greenwood's citizens defended that community through the nighttime hours and faced at daylight an overwhelming assault by 6,000 to 10,000 white Tulsans, whom the Klu Klux Klan probably helped to mobilize; and
"Whereas the mob systematically emptied homes, detained residents, murdered those found to be armed, looted homes and businesses, and then burned them down, resulting in around 300 deaths, according to the official report of the Red Cross. Forty square blocks burned to the ground, including 1,265 homes as well as hospitals, schools, and churches; 150 businesses were leveled in the district known as Black Wall Street and six thousand Black Tulsans were detained; and
"Whereas the Tulsa Race Riot Commission ha snow submitted is report to the governor of Oklahoma on Feb 28, 2001, and the Tulsa Reparations Coalition has just launched a campaign to implement the commission's recommendations in the coming year, because the 118 survivors of the 1921 riot are dying;
"Therefore be it resolved that the 2001 general assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association endorses the recommendations of the commission."
The Unitarian Universalists are hoping their resolution will help put pressure on people in Tulsa to pay reparations for the 1921 race riot, John Hurley, the UUA's director of information said.
The UUA resolution also endorses the Tulsa Reparations Coalition's call for reparations to descendants of the victims and survivors of the riot, the establishment of a scholarship fund for students, the establishment of an economic development zone in the historic African-American Greenwood district of Tulsa, and for the reburial of any human remains found in the search or unmarked graves of riot victims.
Members of Rev. Gerald Davis's Church of the Restoration Unitarian Universalist introduced the resolution to UUA delegates. Davis was a leader of the first meeting of the Tulsa Reparations Coalition.
When calling for the resolution, Church of the e Restoration members pointed out to delegates that the owner and publisher of the Tulsa Tribune in 1921 - the man who sponsored the editorial calling for the lynching of Roland - was Richard Lloyd Jones Jr., one of the founders of the All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa.
"We have a lot to make up for," the UUA's Hurley said. "We can consider our history," he noted, pointing to how members of the Unitarian an Universalist churches were active abolitionists before the Civil War and how, once the Universalist church of America and the American Unitarian Association consolidated in 1961, members like James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister, became active in the Civil Rights Movement. Reeb was murdered in 1965 in Selma, Ala.; Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his eulogy.
"We can be proud of a lot of our history," Hurley continued, "But it's got to be admitted that during the course of our history we were complicit in racism, and that's a history we need to face alongside the good things that we want to face. "Many Unitarians Universalists have benefited from the structure of oppression. And there is nothing wrong in recognizing that. And rectifying that."