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(Not just a single moment in time. The violence preceded the Greenwood Massacre, and it has echoed to our present time. This *is* the USA. Please, good people, resist mainstream takes on this incident. Read as much as you can from locals & historians immersed in this.)
Here in the United States, our schools and our culture teach us to see such things as aberrations. Flaws in the program. Exceptions to the US American Dream myth. Even Black US history is often taught (wrongly) as progress. From slavery to freedom, from Jim Crow to Civil Rights.
The level of violence during the Greenwood Massacre was extraordinary, but I marvel at how utterly poor our collective grasp of late 19th century US history is beyond the ubiquitous trope of the Western.
Not an aberration. *Inevitable.* Let that chill you to your bones.
Not an aberration. *Inevitable.* Let that chill you to your bones.
"Although Black presence on the Trail of Tears is a documented historical fact, many have willed it into forgetfulness." https://www.cnn.com/2012/02/25/us/pain-of-trail-of-tears-shared-by-blacks-as-well-as-native-americans/index.html
By the time of the land rushes, some Black people had been there for decades. Some were enslaved by Native nations forced out of the South. Some were Freedmen. Others were of mixed heritage.
OK was CLOSED to White settlers until the late 1880s. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-oklahoma-land-rush-begins
OK was CLOSED to White settlers until the late 1880s. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-oklahoma-land-rush-begins
I am not a historian. So how do I know this? I am a children's literature scholar, and several of my colleagues have written about the kidlit classics set during that historical period -- most notably, @debreese, about Little House on the Prairie.
…https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/search/label/Little%20House%20on%20the%20Prairie
…https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/search/label/Little%20House%20on%20the%20Prairie
As late as 1882-1885, the period covered in the second Little House book, the Ingalls family was trespassing in Indian Territory, and had to leave, which is portrayed as a tragedy. But what we know as Oklahoma *was not open to White settlers* until March 1889.
(Do. The. Math.)
(Do. The. Math.)
This is why I miss teaching K-12. The professoriate is a different kind of teaching: we're specialists, so we don't teach general subjects any more. But I enjoyed providing the historical perspective for the stories we read in my English language arts classes.
And here's where I get to plug two books you should immediately add to your collection in order to understand what was happening in the Plains and out West in the decades before the Greenwood massacre.
http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-United-States-P1164.aspx
http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-United-States-for-Young-People-P1492.aspx
http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-United-States-P1164.aspx
http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-United-States-for-Young-People-P1492.aspx
When you narrate these histories together, a fuller picture emerges. I think that the nadir period is sometimes misunderstood as solely White exclusion, when in this case, it was White settler encroachment on Native lands they'd only (relatively) recently been able to access.
In our early 21st century imagination, we think of many states between the Mississippi & the Rockies as "White." However, they've only been that way since the late 19th century because of specific federal policies of settlement, broken treaties & terror.
Terror, like Tulsa 1921.
Terror, like Tulsa 1921.
