It took Tulsa 126 years to elect an African-American mayor. It then took Mayor Monroe Nichols about seven months to announce a tangible effort to address the legacy of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, via a charitable trust aiming to raise $121 million over the next year.

You can almost hear the average comment section firing up at that news, so let’s hit a couple of key points.

The trust will be funded by private money.

The trust’s activities will not involve direct compensation to citizens.

Such moderate pragmatism must get under the skin of right-wing racists. Maybe that’s why the comments are turned off on the Fox News article about it.

The trust does intend to direct support toward developing homeownership by descendants of massacre victims, developing the affected area of Tulsa in general, and a forward-looking fund focused on scholarships and land acquisition.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know at least the basics about the massacre. But I bet you didn’t learn it in school. I know I didn’t. My “can’t we all just get along” / “I don’t see color” / Reagan youth classmates didn’t, either. And that’s just how the white veterans of Virginia segregation wars wanted it as they designed our curriculum.

It’s easier to not see color when the history books skip over a white mob destroying over 1,000 homes, killing hundreds of people, and eliminating tens of millions of dollars in Black economic capital and business ownership — not all that long ago.

POST-MASSACRE PUNCHES

This Brookings report points out that the local Black community managed quite a rebound pretty quickly.

Against all odds, Greenwood’s Black residents were able to pool their remaining resources to rebuild the district in just a few years, despite their lack of access to outside capital funds controlled by Jim Crow governments and banks. In 1925, only four years after the massacre, Greenwood hosted the National Conference of the National Negro Business League. The district continued to flourish throughout the 1940s; the Oklahoma Historical Society notes that during this period, the district “boasted 242 black-owned and black-operated business establishments.”

But a joint Congressional report in 2019 pointed out that, “White Tulsans today are nearly twice as likely to own a home as Black Tulsans. There is also a significant national gap in home values; the typical white families’ home value is $230,000, while the typical Black families’ home value is $150,000.”

It proceeds to mention that a typical Black household in Tulsa has 6% of its white counterpart. The report also discusses the power of wealth passed down within a family, and by extension the poverty compounded by the chronic lack of such transfers.

So why did Black neighborhoods on the north side of town experience such lasting decline after the initial swift bounceback? Because the greatest hits of mid-20th-century American institutional racism were fully opened upon its residents.

Redlining.

Rezoning.

Racist planning choices in implementing the national highway system.

When slavery failed, there was Jim Crow. When Jim Crow failed, on came these tactics. Redlining and the use of the highway system’s design as blunt instruments to beat down African-American neighborhoods continues to interest me, in part because the history is right there in dozens of American cities but it simply went untaught. And so it largely remains unknown.

Here in Richmond, all kinds of folks wailed and wept about how “you can’t erase history” when the Confederate statues came down a few years ago, but their parents and grandparents knew you didn’t have to erase it. You just had to never talk about it.

It takes ignorance to cultivate that sort of oblivious selective vision (and outrage) in a person who thinks they are simply pro-meritocracy. And so ignorance is what we generated.

GETTING PAST THE PAST

Tell your all-grown-up Reagan youth acquaintances that their opinions about race and race-related economic policy in America will mean as much or as little as they can explain about redlining and the effects of highway placement. Then see how that goes.

When 80% of U.S. high school seniors can do a passable job on that front, we’ll be getting somewhere as a country. In the meantime, a round of applause for Mayor Nichols for knowing that you can’t go around the past. Sooner or later, if you want to get anywhere real, you have to go through it.

This post was constructed thanks in part to Nils Frahm’s Screws album, a quiet piano collection he wrote when he just couldn’t resist playing piano despite having broken his thumb.