Counter-Currents
544 words 
This is a short historical essay from 1929’s Oklahoma: A History of the State and Its People, Volume 2, (Appendix L-2, p921)
THE TULSA RACE RIOT
It is difficult to account for such sudden outbreaks as the Tulsa race riot. Muskogee narrowly escaped a similar outbreak a few years before, when a white mob attempted to break into the county jail in order to wreak its vengeance upon the negro murderers of a peace officer, while a negro mob with high powered rifles and automatic pistols lay in hiding nearby, waiting to open fire on the white mob in case it undertook to make an actual physical attack upon the sheriff and his deputies. So too, less than four months after the riot at Tulsa, Oklahoma City narrowly escaped a similar race riot after a young negro boy had been spirited away from the unguarded county jail, and lynched in the outskirts of the city. The vengefulness of the negro people was deliberately inflamed to a point where a single shot might easily have led to a duplication of what had happened at Tulsa. Only the cool nerve, courage, and resourcefulness of a very few public officials forestalled what might have been a very serious affair. The people of Oklahoma City as a whole, slept peacefully that night, wholly unaware of the imminent danger. The story did not even appear in the newspapers then nor afterwards.
Age-long racial antipathies are elemental and, when these are disturbed by any tragic or incendiary act, it seems to be easy for certain types of civilized man to revert to savagery. At such times abstract justice, patience and forbearance seem to disappear. The simultaneous occupancy of any region, in any part of the world, by two unlike and unassimilable races has always led to friction and trouble and violence throughout the past, and the student of human relationships can find but little to warrant hope for the elimination of such scenes of strife in the future. Seemingly neither violence nor a well-meaning but misguided sentimentalism can lead to a solution of this great problem.
This outbreak of mob spirit in Tulsa was the more remarkable for the reason that, only a few months before under the initiative of Governor Robertson, there had been an honest and conscientious effort for the systematic organization of an inter-racial conciliation movement, the purpose of which was to prevent just such exhibitions of unreasoning hate and unbridled lawlessness. Failure of such a praiseworthy endeavor only serves to emphasize the importance and necessity of some wisely directed effort under public auspices to find some solution for the problem that will settle it for all time to come.
Nearly two-thirds of a century has passed since the negro people of the United States were freed from the bonds of slavery. During that time, there have been comparatively few sporadic instances on the part of individual students and voluntary associations to study the facts and principles which underlie this great problem. But there has been no nation-wide effort yet initiated for the purpose of finding a rational solution for the same. In the meantime, the problem has become complicated far beyond what it was in the beginning. It remains today, the greatest problem that confronts American statesmanship.
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3 comments
“Nearly two-thirds of a century has passed since the negro people of the United States were freed from the bonds of slavery.” I think you need to add another century, but that only strengthens your point…
This was an excerpt from a work published when it had been nearly 2/3 of a century. I myself missed that at first
Well, here we are a century after the Tulsa Dust-Up.
In 2024 we can look back on two-thirds of a century of civil rights, de-segregation, war on poverty, affirmative action, black studies, enterprise zones, “To Kill a Mockingbird” reading lists, an expanding diversity-equity-inclusion commissariat, non-stop voice-of-the-voiceless(tm) babble machinery promoting the Narrative, and who knows what is next coming down the pike. Yet America has still not arrived in the promised land of equality.
A century ago the USA did not have the systemic and institutional discrimination policies against white people which have become prevalent today. Nor in those days was there much tolerance for the criminal violence which has resulted in the weekly drive-by shootings straight out of the ‘hood, destruction of national memorials by lawless mobs, and wholesale looting of cities while the police are ordered to stand down by the powers-that-be.
The obvious point is that a century ago white people more more than willing to take up arms to defend their interests against racial competitors. But commencing with the Long Hot Summers of the 1960s and continuing through to today’s BLM mayhem, virtually every urban uprising has been precipitated by blacks (with the cheerleading of regime media and NGOs). Meantime, white people have in the main not fought back in the streets, at least not on the scale of Tulsa 1921.
Of course, mob violence and lynch parties really cannot be tolerated if one wants a civil society. Yet it is precisely the presence of unassimilable racial groups in the same country which has led to this endemic civil disorder in the first place.
An inkling of this realization may be, consciously or unconsciously, behind the growing interest in a national divorce.
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