by Charles Rammelkamp
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| After the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, whole neighborhoods such as the Greenwood district were destroyed. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images via The Guardian, May 30, 2021. |
“Every year it was one of the most stolen books from the Tulsa library system. Every year I would send them a new box.” —Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
In the late fifties I was teaching history
at Booker T. Washington High in Tulsa
when I told my students
about the massacre in 1921.
“The whites came over the tracks,
machine guns blazing, wiped out Greenwood,
probably more than three hundred dead.”
In fact, I told them, they’d used this building,
Booker T. High, as a hospital for colored folks.
“I don’t believe that!” one of my students shouted,
a pool hustler named Don Ross.
“How come don’t nobody know nothing about it, Mr. Williams?”
But I remember. I was sixteen,
fighting next to my father,
trying to save our building, our business,
Williams Confectionery, down the block
from our other business, Dreamland Theater,
corner of Greenwood and Archer.
The whites finally overwhelmed us.
They marched me down Greenwood,
my arms reaching for empty sky.
I watched a white boy running from our house,
a fur coat belonging to my mother
clutched to his chest like the pelt
of some animal he’d just killed.
Next day I showed Don Ross the pictures,
charred corpses and burned-out buildings,
took him to meet other survivors.
How come don’t nobody know nothing?
I told Ross: “Because the killers
are still in charge of this town, boy.”
Author's Note: My source for the true story of W.D. Williams is Tim Madigan's "American Terror" in The Smithsonian.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two full-length collections were published in 2020: Catastroika from Apprentice House and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, was published earlier this year by Clare Songbirds Publishing.