Why 'Black Wall Street' matters

Buried in the annals of our history is a little-known catastrophic event in America called the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Only recently brought to light, President Biden spoke Tuesday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to commemorate the horrific incident on its 100th-year anniversary. He stood in the Greenwood District in downtown Tulsa, which once housed a prosperous African American community composed of well-to-do professionals, upscale homes and black-owned businesses. In the post-Reconstruction era, Greenwood modeled and exemplified black success and was dubbed "Black Wall Street."

An incident with no due process triggered contentious race relations that led to gunfire, killings and mass destruction in 1921. Black Wall Street, which had taken years to develop, literally disappeared in a matter of days.

This tragedy was not widely known or acknowledged until the mid-1990s. I was a Tulsa resident at the time, attending law school there. While studying constitutional law, I had a chance to review famous cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which sought to end public school segregation. In constitutional law we watched a documentary called the "Road to Brown," featuring Charles Hamilton Hughes who helped develop the legal strategy of overturning Plessy v. Ferguson as special counsel to the NAACP. Contrary to the fictional narrative in the movie "Mississippi Burning," where clean-shaven "Hoover boys" descend upon Mississippi to save the local black population from Jim Crow segregation and ultimately prosecute local KKK members for the murders of three young activists, the NAACP with lawyers such as Houston and Thurgood Marshall actually provided the legal muscle and strategy to gradually overturn segregation in housing, employment and public schools in the South.

Yet, there was no mention of the racially charged events of 1921 - no lectures, discussions, documentaries, conferences or memorials. Subsequently, local officials, historians and activists formed the Tulsa Riot Commission in 1997 to come to terms with and revisit Tulsa's past.

What is striking about this incident is how the collective memory faded about this racially motivated event. Imagine if such an incident occurred today. In today's Information Age, the opposite would hold true. Camera phones, social media and 24-hour news cycles continuously dominate our lives. Every image of a charred storefront, church up in flames, human remains or wailing family members would be showcased for all to see, repeated every hour on cable news.

As witnessed in May 2020, a knee on the neck that resulted in the death of George Floyd catapulted a little-known movement into the mainstream. Black Lives Matter took off with urgency, and elected officials, corporations and cable news outlets took notice. Continuous media coverage and information highlighted racial discord between communities and law enforcement. We saw whites, blacks and others, young and old, join forces to protest and march in the suburbs. Contemporary communication platforms yield that kind of power, influence and call to action.

But the black victims of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre had none of that - no press conferences, no lawyers, no protests. Only unmarked graves capture the symbolic end to that sad chapter. Back in 1921, the NAACP initiated calls for investigations into the killings, looting and burning of Greenwood but to no avail as the system was stacked against them. No one was ever held accountable. No justice, no peace for hundreds of victims and survivors.

Yet, truth, however slow to surface, has a way of rearing its head, and now in due time, we demand and work toward resolutions in systemic social, economic and racial imbalances. In August 2020, the city of Tulsa began construction of a history center named Greenwood Rising to provide insight into the horrific events of June 1, 1921. One-hundred years later, the Tulsa College of Law houses a legal clinic to provide pro-bono legal services to the residents of the Greenwood District.

Here, the DuPage NAACP recently commemorated the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre with a webinar featuring a panel discussion in order to keep its memory alive, not as some minor event in our distant past, but as a reminder of what can and needs to be done for racial healing and justice.

• Azam Nizamuddin is an attorney from Bloomingdale and lectures on constitutional and legal issues.