The Bombing of Black Tulsa

(Quote of the Week)

On 31 May 1921, police obliterated the heart of black Tulsa, Oklahoma, dropping dynamite from airplanes that killed at least 75 people. This racist bombing, followed by the detention of thousands of black people, came after black residents had taken up arms to defend a teenager from a white lynch mob. In the face of anti-black pogroms sweeping American cities from East St. Louis to Washington, D.C., at the end of World War I, black radicals like those in the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) advocated race pride and armed self-defense against racist terror. Leaders of the ABB, which was mainly composed of West Indian immigrants, joined the early Communist Party, drawn by the liberating promise of the October 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia. Accused of inciting a “race riot” in Tulsa, the ABB replied with a defiant editorial excerpted below.

As at Washington, D.C., so at Tulsa, Okla. The entire power of the State, all of the forces of capitalist “law and order,” were turned upon the Negro in the process of “putting down” race riots that were started and most actively prosecuted by white mobs. All the deputies sworn in by the Tulsa authorities during the recent race riot were white. All the prisoners taken up and sent into concentration camps by these deputies, the Tulsa city police and the Oklahoma State militia were colored. That is the kind of justice the Negro gets in capitalist America! That is the kind of justice the Jew used to get in capitalist-Czarist Russia, until the workers of all races arose in their wrath and overthrew the capitalist-Czarist combination, and set up Soviets. Now the workers of all races get equal justice—in Russia. How long will the Negro in America continue to fall for capitalist bunk? How many more Tulsas will it take to line up the Negro where by all race interest he belongs—with the radical forces of the world that are working for the overthrow of capitalism and the dawn of a new day, a new heaven and a new earth?

—“The Tulsa Outrage,” Crusader, July 1921