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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Last week, much of the country took note of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. For many Americans, it was the first time they had heard about this atrocity that has not been taught in History class very much, but much of last week's coverage still tended to treat the Tulsa massacre as a discrete event. Today, right now, we want to try to go further and try to put it into a larger historical context.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie always writes with an eye on historical context. Writing last year about Tulsa's 99th anniversary, Jamelle noted that the historian Danny Goebel argued that the Tulsa massacre was best seen against the backdrop of at least 10 lesser-known pogroms in other Oklahoma towns that had drenched the decade leading up to Tulsa in 1921, in African-American blood, and yes, that quote used the word pogrom.

Jamelle also noted that the historian Goebel likened the Tulsa attack to the murderous pogroms that the Russian empire unleashed on Jewish communities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In both cases, the authorities hoped to drive out despised minorities by allowing marauders to kill and loot at will, wrote the historian Goebel.

These days, Jamelle Bouie is on parental leave from the Times, cradling a one-month-old, he tweeted recently, but did at least get to tweet about some of this during the massacre anniversary, and he is good enough to tip his work and life balance a little more toward work for these coming minutes. Jamelle, we always appreciate it when you come on and we really appreciate it when you're on leave, so welcome back to WNYC.

Jamelle Bouie: It's my pleasure.

Brian Lehrer: Would you talk more about the term that you have used several times to understand attacks like this racial pogrom? Why is pogrom an important word here?

Jamelle Bouie: I think it's an important word because you can help distinguish this collective racial violence from other forms of racial violence from the period. I think it is tempting and this isn't a bad thing. I think it reflects people becoming aware of this larger history of racial violence, but it's very tempting to flatten events like Tulsa, Elaine, Arkansas a few years earlier, the East St. Louis riot of 1917, to flatten that and put it in the same context that, say, the Colfax massacre in Louisiana in 1873 or the new Orleans riot in 1866. There are these episodes of collective anti-Black violence, and I think there's a real temptation to put them, smash them all together as a singular thing.

A word like a pogrom, what does it helps distinguish, emphasize what's different about these things. What makes them distinctive versus be anti reconstruction riots in the 1870s and 1860s, versus lynching in the 1890s and 19100s? Why this is a distinct kind of violence. I think this is a distinct kind of violence in that it's not only collective but it's essentially state-sanctioned and it's very much aimed at erasing a population, versus a lynching which isn't about, which typically weren't about removing Black Americans from an area, but reinforcing the race hierarchy under which they lived.

Brian Lehrer: One of the events that you just mentioned was Colfax Louisiana 1873. According to a Washington Post article that you tweeted out, it was a massacre of an estimated 62 to 81 African-Americans, and it says it was a direct attack on Black men getting the right to vote during reconstruction. It describes Black state militia holed up around the local courthouse to protect the local government after whites contested the results of the election of 1872, this is starting to sound familiar. Then on Easter Sunday, those protectors of the courthouse were surrounded by a white mob that set the courthouse on fire and shot anyone who emerged. 62 to 81 people killed.

My question is how central to the era of racial pogroms that we're talking about was the very fact of post-civil war constitutional changes giving Black men the right to vote?

Jamelle Bouie: For this period in the 1910s and 1920s, which is largely post-the First World War after 1917, by this point, as compared to Colfax or New Orleans or any of the 1870s episodes of collective racial violence, which were taking place during a time of serious and intense political contestation in the South. It was like how the South would be, whether it would be a biracial democracy with equal rights, whether it would be a white supremacist democracy, that was still a live question.

By the time you get to Tulsa, for example, that question's more or less been settled in the South. Jim Crow has been passed into law by 1910 and the last laws fall into the place. There's already been constitutional change away from the reconstruction constitutions beginning in 1890 with the Mississippi constitution which is the first Jim Crow constitution and continuing over the next two decades.

The political landscape and the larger social landscape has already been set. Things might be a little different in Oklahoma on account of it still being very much frontier land, and in some senses, unsettled, not like as far as people but in terms of its political status quo, but Jim Crow was in place at this point. I think that's part of why it should be considered and could have a different kind of category than what you saw in the 19th century because it's not as the race hierarchy has been seriously challenged at this point. I think this violence is as much about competition for land and resources, as much as it is just plain racism or hatred.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, about Colfax, as I was reading through that description, I read echoes of January 6th when you talk about whites contesting an election of 1872 and then attacking the people who were protecting the courthouse where I guess those records were being kept. Should I read that into it or is that a stretch?

Jamelle Bouie: No, I don't think that's a stretch. I think that the January 6 violence, the incursion on the Capitol ought to very much be put in conversation with Colfax, with other violence in Louisiana. Colfax is like the most famous instance but the next year, there's a similar attempt to basically remove the Republican governor of the state, and this ends up succeeding. If they fail then, the White League as it's called, but two years later, they succeed-

Brian Lehrer: That was explicit.

Jamelle Bouie: -through a combination of violence and fraud by putting "redeeming Louisiana" and putting a Democrat in office. I think that violence, which is very much against the idea that Black Americans are the legitimate members of the polity, that they can exercise power, that they can make claims from a state, that their representatives are defacto illegitimate, I think that should be put in conversation with January 6th, and a movement that both in quiet ways and loud ways, it's essentially saying that the elected representatives of particular Americans are defacto illegitimate and cannot wield or hold power.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, our phones are open for your thoughts and questions for New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, on the Tulsa Race Massacre in the context of racial pogroms that proliferated in the US and other acts of community racial violence against African Americans, Let's say between the 1870s and the 1920s. Does your family history include anything related to anything like this in American history? Do you have victims or perpetrators in your ancestry, or what would you like to ask Jamelle, maybe including what it's like to be on paternity with a newborn or maybe not. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280.

Another one you mentioned in your first answer was Elaine, Arkansas, one, again, lost to history as far as most Americans growing up and learning history are concerned, but as the Washington Post cited last week, a massacre of 200 Black farmers and their family members slaughtered, and it says one of the worst of dozens of attacks, dozens, in what was known as the Red Summer of 1919. Now we're already up into the era leading right up to Tulsa, which was two years later. Can you describe what Red Summer refers to?

Jamelle Bouie: Sure. The Red Summer refers to, [chuckles] if you think words, refers to a summer, the summer of 1919, roughly May to September, when you have basically a wave of episodes of collective racial violence in Georgia, in Washington D.C., in Chicago is one of the larger ones. The precipitating factor for much of this is the return of Black veterans from the war in Europe. Many of the incidents involve a Black veteran coming into town, asserting themselves, and incurring violence from whites as a result. Every individual incident is complicated because of course through all this, there are also these questions of land and resources, but that's generally the thing that unites them all.

Elaine, for example, is one of the ones where it's very much about labor power and political power. A group of farmers essentially trying to unionize for themselves are attacked and there's community-wide violence, but I think they go back to a point that I made at the beginning, this is why it's important very much not the flatten this stuff all out because not only are the specific circumstances and contexts for each incident a little different but also the purpose of the violence varies as well.

I think it's worthwhile to distinguish between violence essentially meant to eliminate a community, that would be Tulsa, that would be the Oco-- I think I'm probably pronouncing this wrong, but Ocoee massacre in Florida in 1920, I believe, that would be the Forsyth County, Georgia killings in 1912, where basically the entire Black population of Forsyth County was removed.

Then I would say that we should extend the timeline here even further. There's a pretty well-regarded book by, I believe a sociologist named James Loewen called Sundown Towns. It's about these phenomena of towns throughout the Midwest and Indiana, Illinois, largely where Black populations were driven out, driven out basically to the nearest city. I would consider that to be in the same category of violence of Tulsa, something not just meant to reaffirm hierarchies, but really to just remove an entire group of people under cover of law or with some sort of state sanction entirely.

Brian Lehrer: I hear you about not flattening these things and that the circumstances are different. One of the things that I wonder is why there was a bit of a national bubble of attention to Tulsa's 100th anniversary this year, and nothing to something as serious as Elaine, Arkansas, its Centennial just two years ago. Did it have to do with that there was a lot of wealth in the so-called Black Wall Street area of Tulsa, there's capitalism matters and the other was farmers, less status in that respect, or is it possible to speculate on why this one has gotten so much attention now and so many of these others, and we've just touched on a couple, in the ways that they were different have not?

Jamelle Bouie: I have been thinking about this exact question a lot because it's interesting. A couple of years ago, four years ago, I don't think there was nearly this much public knowledge about the Tulsa Race Massacre, and now there's the time set an op-ed by Tom Hanks, which to me just means it's totally mainstream. When Tom Hanks is talking about it, it becomes a mainstream thing.

Part of my explanation, it's a confluence of things. I think you're right to note that the extent to which Tulsa and the Greenwood neighborhood, in particular, can be situated in a narrative of uplift of capital accumulation that the most prominent victims are middle-class or are wealthy even, I think that matters. I think that makes it something of a more comfortable thing because it allows you basically to say that these Black Americans are behaving exactly as we expect all Americans behave in that you lost it all because of the color of their skin, which just come to the extent that there is a-- that is I think the mainstream understanding and narrative of what racism is. I think that that element of Tulsa really plays into that.

Missing in this is the fact that most of the people who lived in this neighborhood were not middle-class, they were working people. That most of the victims of the violence were working-class people and so even within this narrative we're erasing the working-class victims from all of this, but I think you're right, that it's the extent to which this can almost be read as an affirmation of capitalism makes it a bit more palatable, compared to Elaine which is very much a labor story and the victims are largely poor in working. I think that's part of it.

I think another part of it is over the last 10 years and some change, you have had this new generation of Black journalists and intellectuals and cultural figures who have really brought history to bear on their work, and I think that's basically made its way--

Brian Lehrer: I do.

Jamelle Bouie: [chuckles] I might be one of them. I think it's basically made its way through the intellectual life to some extent. For example, the 2019 HBO show Watchmen, which opens with a dramatization of the Tulsa Massacre, it was written Damon Lindelof who said in an interview that he was inspired to do this by Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations from 2014, which mentions or makes note of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Just in that, and of course, the Watchmen, which is very popular, ends up seeding knowledge of this throughout the world of HBO viewers, just millions of people. I think just in that line of transmission, you can see how this enters the mind space of more Americans than it has before.

I think to conclude, I think it's a combination of basically the past decade of journalistic and intellectual work that's really, I think, changed how people think about American history, and also the fact that the destruction of "Black Wall Street" is as far as incidents of racial violence goes much more palatable to think about because you can frame it in such a way so that it doesn't unsettle ideas about the worthiness or value of market society of capitalism of these things.

Brian Lehrer: Picking up on you bringing up Watchmen, Carl in Miami you're on WNYC with New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. [crosstalk] Hi Carl.

Carl: Hi. I'm glad that you know about the Watchmen and also I mentioned Lovecraft Country having an episode where that's like a key thing where the family goes back in time to try to help their family during the riots, but also I wanted to make a connection to the right talking about critical race theory and how it has to be gotten rid of or something like that. I just want to know your thoughts on that and how this is all coming to a head or something.

Jamelle Bouie: Sure. The thing about the critical race theory, moral panic, is what I would call it, is that much of what's being blasted as critical race theory has nothing to do with the actual intellectual discipline. Part of even discussing this is trying to figure out exactly what people mean. My view, and I admit this is probably a little bit uncharitable, is that "critical race theory" has come to be a stand-in for any discussion of racism as something that is not simply personal animus. If you're talking about racism in a historical sense or a structural sense, meaning reproduce through institutions, reproduce through systems, then that becomes "critical race theory" even if it has nothing to do with that discipline.

To answer your question part of me, wonder I don't have any firm answers here. I've not sat down and thought deeply about this, but as I think about it now, part of me wonders if what we're thing is not basically a rear-guard action. That, to pick up from my earlier point, a lot of these ways of thinking about American history, a way of thinking about American history that puts more attention on race hierarchy and racial oppression, that attempts to not position these things as somehow foreign to, or in contradiction with the American idea or narrative but tied up in them, that's been seeded through society.

That there's been a remarkable growth in the number of people who take these ideas seriously, who write about them, who talk about them in formal and informal circumstances. It's no longer confined to a segment of the population. I think that the current hysteria about critical race theory is a reaction to that, that the extent to which you can, even with all the caveats about the current commemoration of the Tulsa Massacre, the center, which that is just something that people are talking about and also tying in other similar incidents, also thinking about what this means about our understanding of the United States and its claims to being a democracy or its claims to being a place for liberty.

I think that that represents the triumph, if you will, of that way of viewing things. For a view that seeks to basically treat historical education as a way to inculcate the most narrow patriotism, ra, ra, ra, America's great, that's really threatening. The backlash to "critical race theory" could be thought of as a belated backlash to things that have already changed in the culture, and it'll probably continue moving in that direction. States can try to repress these things but they can't ban books. They can ban HBO series. They can't erase this from a culture.

Brian Lehrer: Olivia in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Olivia.

Olivia: Hi. First-time caller, long-time listener. Thank you so much. Yes, this is all very interesting to me. I called in because basically, over the last year for a couple of reasons, I've been tasked with doing some family history. I'm from North Carolina, I live in New York, staying in New York. I'm from North Carolina and have generations of ties to Wilmington, North Carolina, where there was a massacre, not a riot, a massacre in 1898. One of the things that has come out is a family member of ours, I've never really discussed with my-- we just didn't get into details.

I come from a very progressive family, at least my immediate family is very liberal, very progressive, but one of the things I've learned just recently is that Roger Moore, who was the head of the KKK of Wilmington and the head of the Red Shirts, who basically was responsible for massacring many Black people, was my grandmother's cousin, basically, her grandfather, and this woman is someone who I grew up spending a ton of time with and she was a social worker. She was someone who was a social justice warrior back in the day, she's now passed away, but her grandfather was the head of the KKK.

This person was in business with my great-grandfather who worked in real estate, and they had a building supply company. It's so interesting, in our family it was always like, "Oh, Roger Moore was involved in that thing that happened and that he helped prevent a certain number of extra deaths. He guarded the prison or did something," but what has become really clear to me doing some more research, actually, just around some land my family owns, which is totally unrelated, but has come into the picture.

I watched Wilmington on Fire, Chris Everett's 2015 documentary, I'm reading Wilmington's Lie right now, and I had a conversation with my dad about this, this weekend, and it's just, I had no idea growing up. I'm 37 years old. This is the first I've ever heard of this connection in my family to what is the most disgusting things that have happened in Wilmington, I'm assuming, I don't know but--

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask Olivia? The romantic notion of doing your family genealogy as it pertains to race is that, oh, a lot of white people are discovering that they have some Black ancestry, some Native American ancestry, and it's changing people's perspectives for the better on things. That's definitely happening, but we don't hear stories like this very much. I wonder what it's actually been like for you to just discover in the last year that you have an ancestor who was head of the Ku Klux Klan.

Olivia: Really pretty sickening. I was on my computer and I was looking some stuff up and it felt a little sick to my stomach. I've been obsessively going down this rabbit hole at this point, my poor husband's like, "What are you doing? What are you trying to do here?" If anything, it just makes me-- I do as much as I can today to do the right thing. We give to causes, we are allies, we do all this, but at the same time, this almost makes me want to double down on my efforts and maybe get a little more specific, maybe do some stuff in Wilmington to try to make up for this part of my family.

It didn't come about because I had an inkling of this, it came about because I was looking up deeds about some unrelated land outside of Wilmington. I just started to be like, oh, my great grandfather did this. Well, he did some real estate in East Wilmington. Well, how is this person related to this person, and then this name came up. It's not like it was obvious necessarily. At the same time, it's totally obvious and I'm surprised I haven't heard about this.

I don't know if it's just something that the younger generations just didn't want to talk about, like my grandmother's cousin I mentioned before, she's a social worker, she was a family therapist. She did the good work. My mom almost said I wonder if she wasn't just trying to make up for the horrors committed in-- not her father's generation necessarily that I know of yet, but her grandfather.

Brian Lehrer: There are so many stories of people who have things in the family that for whatever reason they become ashamed of, and they never actually get handed down orally. A lot of times, those stories get lost, and sometimes people like you do the genealogy and of them reappear. Olivia, I have to go, but we really appreciate your candor. This is I think an important story for people to hear, even though it's a story of you and one family, so we really appreciate you being a first-time caller, and please call again.

Olivia: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Jamelle, we're almost out of time. Any thought about Olivia's story, put it in any context, or anything else you want to say as we wrap this up?

Jamelle Bouie: I think I'll make a point that's been made many times before by many people, which is that the history of racial violence in the United States, the history of white supremacist organizations, the history of all these things, this is not Black history. It's not specifically for Black Americans. It's an American story and it's relevant to everyone who calls this country home, not just because of perhaps direct connections and direct relatives might be involved in some of these things, but because they shape the world in which we live.

You don't have to take a hyper determinant view of things to recognize that events like Tulsa and like Elaine and like Wilmington have a lasting influence on the life of the nation, on our civic understanding, on our sense of ourselves as democratic citizens. I think it's important for us to learn this stuff, not to create any kind of guilt or anything, but to really have a better sense of what it means to live in this country with its particular history.

Brian Lehrer: I'll follow up by asking, does opening our national eyes to events like all these from history help foster equality for the future? Because I know one of the things that I hear critically in some media, it depends on your media outlet is, well, these things may have happened, but focusing on them this much just divides people and makes it harder to bring equality for the future. I'm guessing you have a different take on that.

Jamelle Bouie: I do. I think in learning these things, I've spent much of the last five or six years, especially, really learning about this stuff. It's certainly possible that people can learn about this stuff and feel embittered or angered, but I don't think that's how most people take away these things they learn about them and I don't think that's the reaction they should have. I think that an essential part of living in a democratic society, [unintelligible 00:31:41] democratic society is its members feeling like they receive equal respect from the society in which they live, equal respect, equal consideration.

If basically whitewashing away histories of racial violence that have had a real material impact on people's lives, if that is a thing that makes it difficult from a variety of angles to engender that kind of respect, the victims and their descendants feeling like they've been neglected, feeling like they haven't been able to receive any repair from the society, others looking at the impact and the consequences of that violence and maybe saying, well, the reason why these people don't have are poor, the reason why these people are disadvantaged is because they don't work, they don't take care of themselves right.

That the snowball effect of ignoring these things, ignoring their impacts can be such that it erodes respect and equal consideration or a sense of ourselves as citizens who have full status in the society. I think that learning about these things and grappling with them is part of restoring that and of building a culture of equality that we can use to help actually realize equal treatment. I fundamentally disagree with that. If nothing else, we have kind of a control. That we actually did spend like a century ignoring stuff and burying it under the rug and, lo and behold, it did not make for a more equal society. Maybe doing the opposite is what we got to try now.

Brian Lehrer: New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie, currently on paternity leave. I'm also a fan of your Saturday newsletter, by the way, which also often has a lot of history in it. When do we get these things back?

Jamelle Bouie: July. I'm off of leave, I'm back to work in July. Pretty soon I will be back to writing and sending out newsletters.

Brian Lehrer: Well, congratulations on the baby, and thanks so much for taking the time out to join us for this. Really, really appreciate it.

Jamelle Bouie: Thank you.

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