No one will ever accuse the Republican Party of being overburdened with sensitivity. In two stick-in-the-eye moves just oozing with impeccable timing, the Grand Old Party is telling the world just what it can do with its Black Lives Matter folderol.
First, the GOP’s unquestioned leader, President Donald Trump, like a too long cooped up horse, has decided to resume his rallies, which for him seem to be better than crack cocaine. This week in Tulsa Oklahoma he and as many of his followers as campaign officials can cram into the 19,000-seat BOK Center will gather for a couple of hours of The Best Of Trump as if the COVID-19 pandemic had never happened, neither masks nor social distancing required. Reminds me of Ebenezer Scrooge discussing innovative methods to “decrease the surplus population.”
In the first of his two impeccable timing decisions, Mr. Trump announced he would hold his Tulsa rally on 19 June, known as Juneteenth, the date on which in 1865, the last of the South’s slaves were notified of their freedom under the Emancipation Proclamation. It would take until the following December and the 13th Amendment to officially abolish slavery in America.
Juneteenth is recognized as a state holiday or ceremonial holiday in 47 states and the District of Columbia (what are you waiting for Hawaii, North Dakota, and South Dakota?) and is the oldest celebration marking the end of slavery, dating from 1866.
According to the Associated Press, Trump was unaware of Juneteenth, let alone the significance of it to the Black community, when he announced his rally’s date. Consequently, he did not anticipate the blowback he would get. But get it he did. Even from his own supporters. In a rare instance of backing down, he moved the rally to the next day, the 20th, still in Tulsa at the BOK Center.
But in America’s Black consciousness, Tulsa is known for a lot more than Juneteenth, as significant as that is. On another day in June, the 1st June day of 1921, Tulsa was the site of the worst race massacre in American history.
The day before, police had arrested a young black man by the name of Dick Rowland for allegedly attacking a white woman in a Tulsa elevator. Soon after Rowland’s arrest, rumors began to spread about a group of whites planning a lynching party. To protect Rowland, African American World War 1 veterans surrounded the jail holding him. There was a standoff with a mob of whites. Somebody fired a shot, and a firefight ensued. The much larger white mob pushed the black vets all the way to Greenwood, Tulsa’s black section.
Greenwood was the wealthiest black neighborhood in the country. Oil had made it rich. Racism was about to destroy it. Over the course of the day, 6,000 homes and businesses and 36 square city blocks were turned to ash. Pilots of two airplanes dropped turpentine bombs on buildings, instantly igniting them. Three hundred African Americans were slaughtered, most thrown into mass graves. Not a soul was ever prosecuted for anything. Then Tulsa, population 100,000, swept it all under the rug. Two generations later nobody knew a thing about it. It was never taught in schools, no books were written, no oral history passed down. It was as if it never happened.
Tulsa’s current mayor, G. T. Bynum, wants to take the rug up to see what’s hiding under it. He’s committed to investigating what happened and determining accountability. He thinks he’s found a couple of the mass graves and is having them excavated. The goal is to at least identify as many victims as possible through DNA analysis.
For the people of Tulsa, especially the black people of Tulsa, this is a deep, open, festering wound, and next Saturday Donald Trump will come riding into town on his big, very white horse to preach the gospel of Trump to 19,000 of his followers. It’ll be an interesting day.
There is one more incident of impeccable timing.
The Republican National Covention had been scheduled for North Carolina, but because North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, concerned about the spread of COVID-19, would not guarantee a full house for the late August event, the Republican party has moved most of the convention to Jacksonville, Florida. The Coronation of Mr. Trump is set for the night of 27 August.
And, you guessed it, there is a black history story about 27 August and Jacksonville. It is known as Ax Handle Saturday.
The year is 1960 and the Jacksonville Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is holding peaceful lunch counter sit-ins. Peaceful demonstrations. A group of outraged whites taking exception to this level of daring, begin spitting on the demonstrators and calling them names no one should ever be called. Then ax handles, mercifully without ax heads, suddenly appear along with baseball bats, and the demonstrators begin to get hit. Things go downhill from there. When it is all over dozens of young African Americans would be wounded in various ways. On a brighter note, nobody died, but that was probably blind luck.
To give you an idea of racial relations in Jacksonville at the time, a year earlier, in 1959, the year before Ax Handle Saturday, Nathan Bedford Forrest High School opened in Jacksonville, celebrating the memory of a Confederate General and the first Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
The 60th anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday will be celebrated on 27 August in a park about a mile away from the convention at about the same time the balloons come down. Impeccable timing.
Tags: race relations, violence