Race riot commission anticipates report

Photograph courtesy: Tulsa Historical Society TULSA, Okla. (AP) - The most comprehensive account ever of the deadly 1921 racial clash that laid ruin to the city's black

Tuesday, November 21st 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Photograph courtesy: Tulsa Historical Society

TULSA, Okla. (AP) - The most comprehensive account ever of the deadly 1921 racial clash that laid ruin to the city's black business district soon will come under final review by a state panel.

Scholars, including noted historian John Hope Franklin, have been working for months, weaving together pieces of information uncovered during the Tulsa Race Riot Commission's three-year probe into what happened and whether reparations are owed. Panel members will receive the scholars' report next week, commission chairman Pete Churchwell said.

He believes the account will reinforce the case for reparations, which the commission recommended last year in a preliminary report to the state Legislature.

``I think the report will tell a much more compelling story than before,'' Churchwell said.

The commission will examine the historical account and draw its own conclusions in a series of December meetings, Churchwell said. The results will then be submitted to lawmakers.

Historians and scientists hired by the commission have looked at everything from death tolls to rumors of airplanes used to attack blacks to the potential of a mass grave in a Tulsa cemetery.

Among the report's contributors are renown forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, state archaeologist Bob Brooks, author and historian Scott Ellsworth and Franklin, who led President Clinton's advisory committee on race and is the son of a race riot survivor.

Ellsworth said the report, expected to be about 200 pages long, will offer an overview of the violence. But, he said, it can't answer all the questions about what happened nearly 80 years ago.

``There are areas of dispute about the riot and there will continue to be areas of dispute probably forever,'' he said.

The death toll, for example, likely will remain unresolved.

Seventy deaths have been documented, but Churchwell said experts maintain the death toll easily could have exceeded 300, making it one of the deadliest race riots in the nation.

The fighting broke out May 31, 1921, when a lynch mob clashed with a group of blacks seeking to protect a black shoeshine man who was being held in an attack on a white woman.

White mobs opened fire on Tulsa's successful black Greenwood district and torched churches, hotels, restaurants and more than 1,000 homes.

Churchwell predicted the most controversial part of the commission's final report likely will deal with legal culpability and whether city, county or state officials share in the blame.

Commission member Eddie Faye Gates said she has disagreed with the scholars about the role of the Ku Klux Klan and whether the riot was a planned attempt to seize land owned by blacks.

But she calls these disagreements minor and doesn't anticipate any barriers to the panel coming to conclusions about what constitutes fact or fiction.

``There are things nobody disputes. There are things that probably happened, but we can't prove. That's because this was a deliberate coverup,'' Gates said, referring to the decades of silence about the riot among the white community.

Fellow commission member Currie Ballard, a historian at Langston University, said the panel's final report will make clear what can be backed by evidence and what can't.

``We're not trying to rewrite history,'' he said. ``We're just trying to report what we can substantiate. ... It's unfortunate that time has taken its toll on our most precious artifact, and that's individuals.''

Last year, the commission recommended reparations to living survivors and descendants of those whose property was damaged. It also called for a scholarship fund and business tax incentives for Greenwood.

Gates, who led the commission in finding and interviewing 113 living survivors, said she wants what the survivors want _ acknowledgment first. They listed reparations later.

``They want the true story told,'' she said. ``They're tired of all the misinformation.''