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Book Review
| Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921—Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xx + 187. $25.00 (ISBN 0-19-514685-9).
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| During the evening of May 31, 1921—concerned that a young black man, Dick Rowland, was likely to be taken from his Oklahoma jail and lynched—three carloads of armed black men (among them veterans of the Great War) made their way from Greenwood, the black section of Tulsa, downtown to the courthouse. Crowds gathered, and a shot rang out, touching off a "riot" (33). Afterward, black Tulsans gathered back in Greenwood, prepared to defend the community against the invasion they feared was imminent; and white authorities in Tulsa, seeing a "negro uprising" (38), deputized a horde of white men. During the morning of June 1, after local units of the National Guard disarmed and interned many black men and thus neutralized the defense, this ragtag force invaded Greenwood and engaged in an orgy of murder, looting, and burning. Dozens of black Tulsans—perhaps more than one hundred—died that day, and thirty-five square blocks of homes and businesses went up in smoke. Eighty years later, in spring 2001, the Oklahoma legislature acknowledged that a great wrong had taken place. |
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Alfred L. Brophy shows how newspapers, black and white, revealed two political cultures at work in Oklahoma, and his analysis of the horrific events of 1921 is premised on rival conceptions of law in that time and place. Blacks saw law as an instrument for protecting life, liberty, and property. Whites saw law as an instrument for maintaining dominance over blacks. In the preceding decade, black Oklahomans—by resorting to the courts over segregation on railways, inequality of schools, and denial of voting rights—had been acting out their conception of the law, and whites saw those efforts, some of them successful, as demonstrating that blacks had to be brought back under control. Meanwhile, authorities had revealed that they could not be counted on to prevent lynchings, so there was ample basis for the fears that the men from Greenwood expressed when they went to the Tulsa courthouse to seek guarantees that Dick Rowland would be kept safe. |
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In another dimension of the story, Brophy argues that American law at the time provided a basis for finding in favor of black victims of destruction that had official sanction. Some states (though not Oklahoma) had laws that specified such ground rules. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which, pushed along by the events in Tulsa, passed the U.S. House of Representatives (but not the Senate) in 1922, would, in the event of a lynching, have made local officials—on the theory that they had failed to prevent the loss of life—liable for claims (up to $10,000) by surviving relatives. |
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Much of Brophy's reconstruction of the episode depends on legal materials he discovered. William Redfearn, a Native American whose property (including a theater and a hotel) had been destroyed, was denied compensation by his insurance company under a riot exclusion clause. Redfearn sued the city as well as the company for restitution. The city was immunized under state law, however; and at trial Redfearn lost his case against the insurance company. He appealed the decision, and the materials from that appeal—Redfearn v. American Central Insurance Company (1926)—supply extensive testimony regarding the events of May 31 and June 1. |
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The Dreamland Theater was one of the businesses destroyed. Within a year, its owners, relying on their own resources, reconstructed and reopened it. Brophy suggests that Greenwood itself can be thought of as having been a dreamland, a vibrant black community barely a half-century after the end of slavery, but the destruction of the community was deliberate, aimed (as the caption on a contemporary postcard stated) at "RUNNING THE NEGRO OUT OF TULSA." Yet even many white Tulsans conceded in the fury's aftermath that the white community owed the black community substantial assistance in rebuilding. Such assistance never came, though; nor did insurance companies pony up; nor did the courts rule in favor of people whose government, rather than offering protection, had permitted, even perpetrated, the enormous destruction. Adding great insult to injury, the debate at the time was largely forgotten, as were the events themselves, until the recent reconstruction of that lost past. |
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An epilogue addresses the issue of reparations, with Tulsa placed in a national and international context that includes the Civil Rights Act of 1988, which offered $20,000 compensation to each surviving person of Japanese ancestry who had been interned in the western United States during World War II. Brophy urges four criteria for a successful case for reparations, all of which he asserts are present regarding the 1921 incident—"the government that is paying was culpable; there are living survivors; the harm is concentrated in time and place; and contemporaries understood the moral claim" (107). |
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This slim volume is illuminating, although its execution is far from satisfying (we are told, for example, that "Plessey v. Ferguson" was decided in "1898" [80]). It presents original material; provides a provocative depiction of black and white conceptions of the law in Jim Crow America; and renders a thoughtful consideration of the conditions under which reparations might be both appropriate and achievable. For fuller accounts of the events of 1921 and their long aftermath, one may consult Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001), and James S. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). |
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| Peter Wallenstein
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| Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University |
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