By Anuoluwapo Adefiwitan
DeNeen Brown, veteran Washington Post reporter and associate professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, discussed her process researching and reporting the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on Thursday, Feb. 24.
Brown and Alana Hackshaw, associate clinical professor and chief diversity and inclusion officer at UMD’s School of Public Policy conversed in the Frank Theater of Van Munching Hall. The discussion, “Facing the Truth of History: A Discussion with DeNeen Brown,” was part of the School of Policy’s “Facing Truth” series.
The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 was a two-day event that started after an editorial, “To Lynch Negro Tonight,” ran in The Tulsa Tribune. After the article came out, a white mob gathered around the Tulsa courthouse to kidnap 19-year-old shoe shiner Dick Rowland, a black man suspected of attacking a white girl in an elevator.
According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, Rowland mistakenly stepped on a white woman’s foot as he entered an elevator, causing her to scream.
Black men confronted the mob in an attempt to protect Rowland, who had been arrested for the attack. After a struggle, a gunshot was made in the air and mob members began a spree, attacking and killing Black people.
The murderous spree began on Greenwood Ave, otherwise known as Black Wall Street, a street that held lucrative businesses solely owned by Black people. Mob members set fire to Black homes, businesses, schools and communities.
Survivors of the massacre were marched through the streets at gunpoint, with their hands lifted above their heads. Survivors stayed in what they called “internment and concentration camps.”
Once the massacre was over, many of the survivors were forced to place the dead black bodies on the streets in mass graves. Brown believes the driving force for the massacre was economic envy.
Black people were not beyond a century out of slavery, yet Brown said,“they had built their own towns, colleges and schools.”
Associate Clinical Professor Ebonie Cooper-Jean said Brown’s answer of economic envy being the cause of the massacre resonated with her. As someone from Wilmington, North Carolina, city of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 Cooper-Jean said “it made complete sense because Wilmington was that town.”
“This is the driving force behind my reporting,” Brown said. “I want people to know that real people, Black Americans, citizens of this country were killed, in a history not that long ago.”
Brown’s research into the Tulsa Race Massacre was inspired by three events. The first was a blog called Retropolis started by her editor at The Post. The blog was composed of a group of Post writers who investigated the history of live news events and reported stories on their findings.
The second was Brown’s visit to Alabama to report on the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial consists of steel columns to represent coffins. Edged in at the bottom of the columns are the name of those lynched.
“It hits you right in the face,” she said.
Brown’s lunch date with her father in Tulsa was the third event. “My people are from Oklahoma,” she said.
The restaurant she ate at with her dad sits directly opposite a mass grave from the massacre. “Oh my God, this is the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and it’s being gentrified,” Brown thought when she saw it.
After a brief talk with her editor, Brown wrote about the Tulsa Race Massacre and how commercial businesses were being built on the grave site. Brown’s story included her interviews with Tulsa activists, community leaders and living survivors of the massacre.
Brown’s story caused the mayor of Tulsa to open an investigation into the mass graves, which formally began in 2020.
“They actually found a mass grave. There were as many as 35 coffins in that mass grave,” Brown said. “They found a man with bullet holes,” from one of the 12 coffins that were exhumed.
Brown’s reporting and Tulsa’s investigation morphed into a National Geographic documentary, “Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer” that chronicled the events leading up and through the massacre.
The bodies were placed back in the mass graves, and as of right now the investigation is closed, which Brown thinks is due to political reasons.
“The mayor has gotten a lot of backlash from people in Oklahoma saying ‘why are you opening this can of worms?’” she said. There is also an ongoing lawsuit against Tulsa demanding reparations for the massacre.
Community activists have demanded that the investigation be continued and the city says it will.
“When the truth is covered up, it has to get out in order for there to be healing. There has to be a reconciliation before there is healing,” Brown said. “That has never happened in this country.”
Brown said she believes the reason why no one really knows about this history is because of its intentional erasure.
“These massacres were deliberately left out of textbooks by the daughters of American confederate soldiers, who around the turn of the century deliberately rewrote history, rewrote textbooks,” Brown said. “That’s when they changed what we often were taught about why the Civil War erupted. That’s around the time when they began erecting these confederate monuments. So the history that many of us were taught is not true. The work that I’m doing is in pursuit of that truth.”
Additionally, Brown said that Tulsa city officials of the time made efforts to cover up their history. A library curator in Tulsa who is a source of Brown’s said that when he first began his job in 1980, he found that someone had gone through a stack of periodicals and cut out the articles that referred to the massacre.
“City officials of 1921 called what happend ‘an embarrassment,’” Brown said. “They didn’t want what had happened to get out. It was deliberate.”
Brown’s reporting on the topic also morphed into an on-campus project for UMD’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism called “Printing Hate.”
Hackshaw felt it was important that her students hear about Brown’s reporting. “There is so much about policy that is shaped by societal norms, views and attitudes. There is so much conversation right now on how race influences policy,” Hackshaw said.
Brown concluded the discussion by saying to the students and professors in the audience, “I want you to become researchers in search of the truth.”
Featured image: Alana Hackshaw, associate clinical professor and chief diversity and inclusion officer at UMD’s School of Policy sits across DeNeen Brown, veteran Washington Post reporter and associate professor of journalism at UMD to discuss her experience researching and reporting the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Photo by Anuoluwapo Adefiwitan.