Oklahoma is turning a blind eye on its own history

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a law targeting “critical race theory” in May 2021. The law prohibits public schools from teaching concepts that would cause students to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race or gender. Since the law was implemented, two school districts have had their accreditation downgraded due to their instruction on race.

The law was signed a month before the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, one of the worst instances of racially motivated violence in U.S. history.

Last week, at an event at the Norman Central Library, sponsored by the Cleveland County Republican Party, Ryan Walters, state superintendent of schools, was asked, “How does the Tulsa Race Massacre not fall under the definition” of critical race theory in the 2021 legislation?

“I’d say you’d be judgmental of the issue of the action, of the content of the character of the individual,” Walters replied, “but let’s not tie it to the skin color and say that the skin color determined that.” To say individuals are inherently something because of the color of their skin, “is where I say, this is critical race theory.”

The next day, following a firestorm of criticism, Walters explained that he was “referring to individuals who carried out the crime … They had evil, racist intentions and murdered people … They didn’t act that way because they were white, they acted that way because they were racist.” Students “should be able to learn that history.”

Walters’s tortured clarification underscores what should be obvious. Oklahoma’s 2021 legislation prevents educators from fully analyzing what virtually all U.S. historians (not just adherents of critical race theory) agree is voluminous and irrefutable evidence that racism is not only the product of individual prejudice, but has been embedded in our nation’s legal, social, economic and political practices.

Along with court-approved Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and literacy tests to suppress voting, segregated schools and public transportation, zoning laws and redlining, the Tulsa Massacre is a tragic example of the effect systemic racism can have.

When the two-day orgy of violence ended in the late spring of 1921, heavily armed white mobs had destroyed homes, businesses, churches, a school, a hospital and a library on all 35 blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood. Booker T. Washington called neighborhood “Black Wall Street,” an engine of economic opportunity created by and for Black residents of Tulsa.

The violence was precipitated by an alleged altercation between Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoeshine “boy,” and a 17-year-old white female elevator operator. When Tulsa newspapers published incendiary stories about the incident, Rowland was arrested, and a large lynch mob gathered at the courthouse. The police did not disperse them. About 75 Blacks, many of them World War I veterans, arrived to protect Rowland, a scuffle broke out, a shot was fired, and all hell broke loose.

The governor declared martial law and sent National Guard members to restore order. Guardsmen and local police disarmed and arrested Black protestors, who by this time were outnumbered by whites 20-1, deputized many whites, and placed many Blacks in detention camps. Airplanes reportedly dropped turpentine bombs on Greenwood. More than 10,000 Black people were ultimately left homeless. No insurance payments were made, due to riot clauses, and the city did not provide any assistance to them. A grand jury report declared that “armed Negroes precipitated and were the direct cause of the entire affair.”

For decades, Tulsa authorities — and public schools — engaged in a conspiracy of silence about themassacre. In 2001, a report issued by the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission found that deputies did not stem the violence “but added to it”; public officials provided firearms and ammunition to individuals, “all of them white”; some agents of the government “deliberately or otherwise destroyed” houses, businesses and churches in Greenwood; and Black detainees were released only when a white person endorsed their applications. Even though as many as 300 people may have been killed, prosecutions were not pursued at any level of government. The 2001 commission recommended reparations, and the state of Oklahoma eventually provided some compensation to descendants of Greenwood residents.

In the last two years, at least 18 states have, like Oklahoma, restricted how teachers discuss issues of race, gender and identity. States and localities have adopted over 4,000 bans on books, many of them addressing race, racism, and LGBTQ issues. The vague and sweeping language in these measures is chilling speech, diminishing students’ education and costing some teachers their jobs.

In Oklahoma, the Tulsa Massacre is still in the 3rd, 6th and 11th grade curriculum of the city’s public schools. Thanks to the 2019 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, teachers can now draw on survivor interviews and contemporary documents in classroom discussions.

Ironically, however, the state law, aimed at critical race theory, which does not say what critics say it says (and, in any event, is not taught in Oklahoma schools), now prevents educators from teaching American history as it actually happened.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.” David Wippman is the president of Hamilton College.