The Rule Of Lawlessness

By Richard Lacayo

Sometimes the act of forgetting is accomplished through the simple passage of time. Sometimes you have to help it along with a pair of scissors. In the archives of the Tulsa Tribune, a now defunct Oklahoma newspaper, two pages from May 31, 1921, have been clipped away. Researchers believe they contained an inflammatory news story and an editorial--"To Lynch a Negro Tonight"--that egged on the men who set off that year's Tulsa riot, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history. When students of the event went looking for those pages, what they found was a blank space.

In the history of race relations in America, there are quite a few blank spaces. Here are two books determined to fill them in. Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy, by James S. Hirsch (Houghton Mifflin; 358 pages; $25), is a quietly devastating account of Tulsa's two-day convulsion of blood and of the struggle years later to return the riot to living memory through a commission of inquiry. Philip Dray's At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Random House; 528 pages; $35) is a powerful history of a practice so common by the turn of the 20th century that "spectacle lynchings" were announced in advance in Southern newspapers. You don't really know what lynching was until you read Dray's ghastly accounts of public butchery and official complicity. Before they died, often by being burned alive, victims were routinely castrated. Fingers and ears were regularly hacked off as souvenirs.

Dray, who has taught at the New School in New York City, provides what is essentially a history of racism in the 100 years after the Civil War, when blacks were set free into a society that instantly contrived new ways to confine, exploit and humiliate them. Lynching became the semiofficial machinery by which the racial caste system was held in place. "We will not endure it forever," W.E.B. DuBois, co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., warned after one grotesque burning. "If we are to die, in God's name let us perish like men and not like bales of hay."

It was a potential lynching that led to the Tulsa upheaval, in which Greenwood, the city's black neighborhood, was burned to the ground by whites. As author Hirsch points out, that murderous episode was not so much a riot as a racial pogrom--"the liquidation of virtually an entire black community and the institutions that held it together." It started with a white woman charging assault against a shoeshine man who had been alone with her in a department-store elevator. She later withdrew the charge, but not before a mob of whites had gathered outside the jailhouse where the man was being held. To their astonishment, an armed black crowd had also gone there to prevent him from being lynched.

Eventually there was a wild armed pursuit through the streets of Tulsa as the whites pushed the blacks back into Greenwood. The next morning thousands of whites, including Tulsa police and scores of newly deputized thugs, invaded the neighborhood, looted it house by house and set it afire. In all 1,256 houses burned, as well as churches, a junior high school, a hospital and most of the area's businesses. Estimates of the dead, both black and white, varied from 36 to 300. Black residents were marched at gunpoint out of Greenwood. Six thousand were penned up at a convention hall, a baseball field and a local fairground, where some lived in tents for a year.

Then the serious business of forgetting began. For decades Oklahoma history books made no mention of the riot. Police and state-militia documents disappeared. Tulsa went back to being a city so segregated that for years it used paychecks of different colors for its white and black teachers. In the 1990s a few determined Tulsans, both black and white, succeeded in creating a state-appointed "truth commission." Hirsch, a onetime reporter for the New York Times who interviewed more than 100 people for this book, tells that part of the story with quiet dispassion.

Last year the Oklahoma legislature passed a bill affirming that whites were responsible for the riot. But it did not provide reparations to a group of elderly black survivors, a redress that had set off years of controversy. (Each of them received instead a gold-plated medal with the state seal.) The archives of the Tulsa Tribune are still incomplete. But thanks to the commission--and Hirsch's book--the crimes that were covered up are now back in the collective memory.