Separating Fact from Fiction in the Tulsa Race “Massacre”

INTRODUCTION

Last week, President Biden came to Tulsa and poured gasoline on race relations.  We shouldn’t be surprised as that’s par for the course anymore.  In a rambling, poorly delivered, and barely coherent speech (which was also poorly attended), Biden tried to rewrite the history of the Tulsa Race Riot in the most  dishonest and inflammatory way possible, 

As stated, the ostensible reason for his visit was to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Riot.  In reality, it was to further divide the American nation and to provide an excuse for making the case for reparations, ostensibly through spending untold trillions of dollars on something called “infrastructure”. 

In order to usher in this new racial dispensation, the Tulsa Race Riot was hastily rechristened as the Tulsa Race Massacre.  The riot was a black mark on Tulsa.  In fact, it was the largest race riot in American history. 

But it was not a “massacre” as the word normally implies, i.e. an indiscriminate slaying of many (usually unarmed) people.  

As shall be pointed out below, this new terminology completely misrepresents what happened during those three fateful days in 1921.  Calling it a massacre is not only intellectually dishonest, it is historically illiterate.  Instead, it would be more accurate to describe it as but one of a long series of battles in a race war for which both sides share the blame.

TULSA, ITS FOUNDING, AND EARLY RACE RELATIONS

Tulsa, at the bend in the Arkansas River, was founded by the Lochapoka (Turtle Clan) band of Creek Indians, between 1828 and 1836.  The elders named it Tulasi, for “old town,” in remembrance of their ancestral home in Alabama.  

From that date, until its incorporation in 1898, “Tulsey Town,” as it came to be known, had a population that was never more than 1,000 people.  Most of the residents were Creek (Muscogee) Indians, black slaves, freedmen, and white settlers.  Unlike other Indian tribes, intermarriage between Creeks and their black slaves was common.  So, too, was intermarriage between Creeks and the whites.  

In 1901, barely three years after its formal incorporation as the city of “Tulsa”, oil was discovered at nearby Red Fork, on the other side of the Arkansas River.  Tulsa’s population exploded, going from approximately 1,200 people in 1898 to 72,000 in 1921, the year of the riots.  Tulsa became a boom-town in every sense of the word, outpacing nearby towns like Muskogee, Claremore, and Okmulgee in both growth and prosperity.  

Oil was abundant.  In the 1920s, per capita, the Osage Indians were the wealthiest people on earth.  There was an oft-told story of an Osage chief who went to a Tulsa dealership to buy a car.  Driving off the lot, he got a flat tire and didn’t know what to do.  So, he hobbled back to the dealership and bought a second car.

The strength of the oil economy enabled many black people to own automobiles.  For those that didn’t, streetcars provided mass transportation.  

This prosperity did not bypass the blacks who migrated from the tiny, all-black townships of Oklahoma.  The “Northside” or  Greenwood district (named after Greenwood Avenue, the hub of the black business district) was bustling.  In spite of segregation and the legal disabilities that were in force against black people at the time, they quickly became self-sufficient.  In short order, drug stores, groceries, laundries, diners, and a cinema sprang up to accommodate the growing black population.

Thriving black businesses on Wall Street in Greenwood.

 

 

 

Despite official segregation, race relations were mostly peaceful, remarkably so, for a city with strong Southern and Klan sympathies.  Interracial crime was practically non-existent.

In fact, there were no lynchings of black men in Tulsa either before or after the race riot.  Ironically, this did not apply to the lynchings of the whites in Tulsa before that time.

Blacks were respected well enough that –even during this period of rigid segregation–there were black men on the police force.  This will prove to be a crucial factor as shall be pointed out below.

So what exactly happened?  And how did a simple (possibly innocent) interaction between two teenagers explode into the largest race riot in American history, becoming a mythical “massacre”, where there were deaths on both sides?

THE FACTS 

First of all, we need to state what didn’t happen:  Biden’s demagogic speech described a tinderbox of hatred that simply did not exist.  Contrary to his febrile imaginings, Tulsa was no cauldron of racial animosity just waiting to explode in genocidal fury against innocent black people.  Nor were blacks hunkered down cowering in their homes because of the constant dread of whites. 

Instead, white people were living under the fear of a very real, perceived threat of a “Negro uprising” which had engulfed many other American cities, including Philadelphia, Lexington, and Houston (among others).  In fact, it will be shown that the whites in charge of Tulsa did everything within their power to prevent such an outbreak of violence and did what they could to stop it from spreading once it had gotten out of hand.

The facts are these:

  1. On the morning of May 30, 1921, a young, nineteen-year-old shoe-shine boy named Dick Rowland went into the Drexel Building to use a segregated restroom on the top floor.  The elevator in question was operated by a seventeen-year-old white girl named Sarah Page.
  2. No one knows what exactly took place in that elevator save for these two individuals.  Some claim that there was a lovers’ quarrel; others said that Rowland tried to accost Page.  The most likely event was that Rowland merely “tripped” and fell against Page because he was jostled by the elevator ride.  In any event, Page screamed.

    Dick Rowland

  3. Once the elevator stopped, Rowland (who was also known as “Diamond Dick”) ran from the elevator and a clerk who witnessed the event reported that Page was “visibly distraught”.
  4. Police arrived but they did not take Page’s accusation seriously.  It should be mentioned that Sarah Page later recanted the version where she had been harmed.
  5. News of the incident spread, mainly by word of mouth.  
  6. The next day (May 31st), two officers arrested Rowland.  One of the arresting officers, interestingly enough, was a black man.
  7. Rowland was taken to jail without incident. 
  8. That night, Sheriff Willard McCullough sent armed men to the jail to protect Rowland.  When several angry whites showed up and demanded that Rowland be handed over, McCullough sent them away and gave orders to his deputies to “shoot any intruders on sight”. 

    Law enforcement in front of the police station.

  9. Simultaneously, several armed blacks showed up at the jail to protect Rowland.  A black deputy tried to convince them that this would only inflame the situation.  As with the earlier white mob, McCullough was able to turn them away as well. 
  10. It was at this point that things started to get out of hand.  Several whites went to the National Guard Armory to get more guns but they were unable to convince the officer in charge to unlock the armory so they could acquire them.
  11. Several armed blacks drove the streets of white-majority areas of Tulsa that evening, warning the whites to stay away from the jail.  This unprecedented show of force by armed blacks driving in motorcades caused many whites to fear that a “Negro uprising” was imminent.
  12. Later that night (around 10 pm) a group of 75 armed black men left their cars and marched in military formation to the courthouse, in order to “defend it”.  The police told them to go away.
  13. At this point, a white man tried to disarm a black man, and “a shot rang out”.   It is unknown who shot first, a black or a white man.  Soon, entire mobs of blacks and whites were killing each other.  Twelve men died in this initial altercation:  2 blacks and 10 whites. 
  14. There is no evidence at all of a conspiracy between the National Guard, the city fathers, the constabulary, and the white mobs; in fact, the chaos of the moment suggests otherwise.   
  15. In the ensuing melee, the blacks gave as good as they got.  One of the legendary black heroes of that event, “Peg Leg” Taylor, was said to have fought off more than a dozen white rioters.  This was no “massacre” of passive blacks.

    “Blacks gave as good as they got.”

  16. Things rapidly spiraled out of control.  The police did deputize random whites, some of whom took it upon themselves at a later point to attack random blacks. The situation was chaotic, to say the least.  The National Guard rushed to intercept a train which (according to rumor) was scheduled to arrive in Tulsa with 500 armed black men. There was no such train.
  17. Word got out that the black population had been infiltrated by members of the Communist Party which further inflamed the situation.  Disinformation about reinforcements (such as the aforementioned train) stoked feverish speculation on both sides.
  18. Mount Zion Baptist Church, a venerable landmark in the black community, was burned to the ground by several pillaging whites.  (Biden made mention of this in his speech).  What Biden didn’t mention, however, is that some blacks had created a sniper’s nest in the belfry.  According to The Guthrie Daily Leader, these snipers were shooting at the white firemen who were trying to put out the fire.  One of the snipers killed a white woman.  If anything, this was a pitched battle over territory.  The Leader called this the “Tulsa Race War”.
  19. In order to restore order, National Guardsmen, police, and deputized white civilians held hundreds of black people captive.  These were short-term detentions where no one was killed or otherwise beaten.  This cannot be stressed enough:  hundreds of unarmed black people who had been detained by the authorities were let go after a few hours.  
  20. In the meantime, Sheriff McCullough quietly took Rowland from his jail cell and slipped him out of town to Kansas City.
  21. Order was not restored until 8 pm the following evening (June 1st).   In the meantime, vast tracts of the Greenwood district lay in ashes.
  22. According to a contemporary report by the Oklahoma Department of Health’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, 36 people died over that 48 hour period:  10 white and 26 black.
  23. The devastation to the black part of Tulsa was horrendous.  According to the Red Cross’s initial claim, no fewer than 1,256 houses were burned, while another 215 were looted.
  24. The Tulsa Real Estate Commission estimated there was about $1.5 million in property damage, one-third of which was in the business district.  Since then, the 2001 report bumped that number up to $2 million in damages; a figure, which adjusted for inflation, would be about $30 million today. (By comparison, the property damage done by the 1992 Rodney King riots was $1.4 billion.)

    Aftermath

  25. Dick Rowland quietly moved to Oregon and Sarah Page recanted her allegation against him.  
  26. Tulsa’s city fathers were embarrassed by the riot and did what they could to cover it up.
  27. Greenwood was devastated and it took years for the black population to recover from the riots.  No reparations were paid to the survivors. 
  28. Within weeks of the riots, lurid and increasingly fanciful accusations were made by black victims and their sympathizers, most of which were quietly forgotten.  One of these accusations was that Greenwood had been bombed by military aircraft.  Another accusation was that hundreds of black bodies had been buried in mass graves.   

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY

The facts on the ground were as described above.  While they describe an unfortunate incident that tragically got out of hand, ruining relations between the races for years, they do not describe a race “massacre” by any stretch of the imagination.  The purported black “victims” fought back heroically against white mobs.  In the initial fracas, for example, 10 whites were killed and only 2 blacks.  (See #13 above.) 

In any event, none of the major actors or witnesses had any hidden agendas or the time and inclination to fabricate such.  Simply put, things quickly spiraled out of control and panic spread throughout both black and white communities.  People on both sides were fearful for their very lives.  In retrospect, it is impossible to imagine a scenario in which during the pell-mell of the mass confusion evident that day, combined with febrile rumors of reinforcements from outside the state, would enable anybody who was there to know what was going on or what the outcome would be.  

Editorial

One of the most inflammatory things that were said in the subsequent historiography about this riot was that The Tulsa Tribune had run an editorial on May 31st (the day after the initial incident between Rowland and Page) with this scandalous title:  “To Lynch Negro Tonight“.  If true, this would have been a clear incitement.  In reality, nothing of the sort happened.  Instead, the Tribune had published a far less incendiary news article entitled “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator”.  Despite its lurid title, it merely describes the incident, the arrest, brief biographical sketches, and the charges which were to be filed against Rowland.  (Click on the link to read the original article.) 

It was easy (in retrospect) to impugn malign motives to the Tribune, which was one of Tulsa’s two daily newspapers.  Like many pro-Democrat newspapers of the time, it was sympathetic to the Democrat Party and the Jim Crow regime of racial segregation.  That said, a violent frenzy was already starting to break out in both communities before this edition of the Tribune had been published. 

Jenkin Lloyd Jones, the publisher of The Tulsa Tribune, was a committed Progressive and segregationist (the two went hand-in-hand at the time).  Jones had many other claims to fame:  one of them was that he was a founding member of Tulsa’s first Unitarian Church.  The other, that he commissioned his second cousin (the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright) to design a home for him.   

In order to find out exactly what happened, in 2001, eighty years after the event, the State Legislature created The Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, which published a 188-page reporthttps://archive.org/details/ReportOnTulsaRaceRiotOf1921/mode/2up

Its stated purpose was to sift out fact from fiction and its lack of bias is plain to see.  This should not be surprising given the historians who were tasked to create it.  Among its principal consultants was the noted black historian (and Oklahoma native) John Hope Franklin.  Most of the known living witnesses (who were extremely aged)  were interrogated.  

As can be gleaned from the title, the name for this tragic event, as well as the report itself, was “the Tulsa Race Riot”.  At no point prior to that time –or for the twenty years that followed–was it ever called a race “massacre”.  This latter appellation did not enter the popular discourse until earlier this year when the city fathers (for whatever reason) decided to rename it into something it never was or was ever known to be.  It is the contention of many (myself included) that it was done in order to deflect attention from the hundreds of actual race riots that erupted throughout America following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Beginning fairly recently, The Tulsa Daily World began publishing articles under the newer, more inflammatory moniker on a daily basis.  Often, the front page devoted many stories to increasingly absurd stories about the riot, usually with little or no corroborating evidence.  There is constant reportage for example, about mass graves which never seem to surface.  Interestingly, this happened at the same time that national periodicals and newscasts were doing so as well, clearly indicating that the re-branding of the 1921 riots was a coordinated effort.  Even conservative journals (such as The National Review) were on board with this program.  It was also around this time that whenever the words black and white appeared in print they were reedited as Black and white.

The Commission was not a whitewash.  It was a heavily researched 188-page document with named sources.   Its authors took a sober look at the actual events as reported at the time and interviewed any of the witnesses who were still alive.  

RACIAL RELATIONS IN AMERICA BEFORE THE RIOT

It is clear from the recent re-branding (from “riot” to “massacre”) and the incessant, wall-to-wall coverage of an event that has taken on mythological proportions, that there has been a concerted effort to cast all blame on the white population.  We are led to believe that all white people are primed to respond in genocidal fury at the slightest provocation.  No doubt because of perceived (but never proven) “white supremacy” or “white privilege”.  

What is not stated is that beginning in 1917, there was an explosion in crime against whites instigated by black criminals in many cities throughout America.  In many instances, whites responded savagely.  In East St Louis for example, white mobs killed scores of blacks in response to the murder of a single white person.  Some peg this number close to 200 black victims with an estimated 6,000 blacks forcibly evicted out of their homes.  Based on sheer numbers alone, this atrocity far outpaced anything that happened in Tulsa.

The peak of this interracial conflict (which more or less ended in 1923) occurred in 1919, during the “Red Summer”.  The Red Summer was so named because of the belief that Communist Party members were inciting blacks to commit crimes against whites.  In any event, by the time 1923 arrived, hundreds of black people lost their lives and thousands were made refugees.

It is the opinion of many that the reason Tulsa has been singled out for particular obloquy is that, unlike these other riots which were inflamed by actual black criminality, this story was about Dick Rowland, and contrary to the original news article which may have been exaggerated to inflame its readers, may have been innocent of the charges against him.  The worse thing that can be said about the altercation between Rowland and Page was that it was a clumsy attempt by a young man to make a pass at a young lady.  As noted earlier, Page recanted her original charges.  

On other hand (based on my own personal experience with that elevator, of which more below) it is hard to imagine how Rowland could have had more amorous intentions in mind while the elevator was moving.  The elevator was not completely enclosed and if anybody was jostled and fell against the building’s walls as the elevator was in motion, serious injury would ensue.  

HOW THE RIOT BECAME A “MASSACRE”

Alleged Mass Graves

As mentioned above, the Tulsa Race Riot had never been known by any other name for a full one hundred years.  No mass graves had ever been found, and the distribution of victims was almost equal in number.  In fact, at Oak Lawn Cemetery, one of the sites of the alleged “mass graves”, the bodies that were unearthed were all buried in coffins, a fact that is incongruent with massacres where victims are buried en masse in hastily-dug pits.

To be sure, tremendous numbers came from the Red Cross which estimated that as many as 300 people had died.  The Nation at that time said that perhaps 50 whites had perished along with 200 blacks.   The 2001 Commission for its part took these numbers into account but given the absence of mass graves and/or unaccounted bodies, the most it could say was “there is no well-documented evidence for the number of people who died during the violence”.  Accordingly, the authoritative report of the Commission was to hold to the accepted numbers of no more than 40 people killed.  

This bears repeating:  the reason that the Commission was more skeptical of these inflated numbers was the absence of any mass graves.  One alleged site was excavated in July of 2020 and no remains were found.  Another excavation in May of 2021 found a gravesite with perhaps 20 bodies, all buried in coffins (as stated above).  What is not reported is that this was a Potter’s Field where indigent blacks were buried, most of them possibly victims of the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918.

Still, the desire to continue to look for mass graves is ongoing.  The reason is because the present racial grievance industry is dedicated to making a massacre out of a riot.  The so-called Tulsa Race Massacre has become a religious narrative for many on the Left, an excuse to explain all of the deficits which plague many parts of the black community, both in Tulsa and elsewhere. 

The search for bodies continues.

That being said, a prosperous black community in Tulsa was destroyed, which was most unfortunate. But as tragic as those riots were, “Tulsa” is not some grand unified field theory to be used to explain why reparations (in the form of “infrastructure spending”) should be made.  To stigmatize –and confiscate–wealth from one race to give to another race is a betrayal of all American ideals.  It is certainly not an explanation for the continuing pathology we see in many black neighborhoods.

Reparations for the actual descendants of the home and business owners at the time of the riots should be considered.  There is a precedent for this:  several years ago, Japanese-Americans who had been deprived of their homes and businesses and herded into concentration camps, were compensated, albeit decades after the fact.  So, too, should the actual descendants of black Tulsans who were likewise deprived of their property.  This should be a priority.  But it does no good to create a myth of white outrage and black passivity when the facts do not support the narrative.

To scapegoat a city is just as unfair as scapegoating a person.  In this particular case, branding Tulsa as a “murderous, racist community” is equally damaging to race relations everywhere.  Fiction cannot be allowed to replace fact without fanning the flames of fear and mistrust.   Without the truth, there can be no healing.  

We cannot continue to allow the Establishment to poison the well of goodwill in our society or it will never heal.

On a personal note, I am familiar with the Drexel Building (which no longer stands).  Sometime before I was born, it had fallen into disuse and was the epicenter of Tulsa’s Skid Row.  Eventually, it was purchased by the Goodwill Industries.  My grandfather, who was retired by that time, hired on as a night watchman.  My mother would take my sisters and me to visit him in the evenings every now and then.  (Like all Skid Rows, that area of town was “colorful” and we met several hobos and winos who were invariably kind to us.)  He regularly gave us rides in that infamous  elevator.  –Little did we know that this was the same elevator in which the original altercation between Rowland and Page had taken place.  

AFTERWORD

This was one of the most personal, time-consuming, and difficult essays I have ever written.  I could not have done it without the lovely publisher of this blog.  We all owe a special debt of gratitude to Gail.  The research she did for this piece was herculean.  Her suggestions, critiques, and editing went above and beyond.  –The Monamakhoi (the man and his wife who fight alone.)  [Edited 06/13/21]

 

Comments

  1. Excellent!

  2. Austin Martin says

    Great article. Oklahoma is one of the places that seems like it has a really interesting history, but you never hear about it. It’s not quite the southeast, not quite the southwest, not quite the midwest. I’ve been through it a decent bit, and personally it seems more southwest to me, but I don’t really know.

    I notice that you don’t say “Native American”. I assume that’s because you live around them and know that they all call themselves “Indians”. It’s sort of like how almost all black people just call themselves black. “African-American” is a white people word.

    https://nativetimes.com/index.php/life/commentary/11389-native-american-vs-american-indian-political-correctness-dishonors-traditional-chiefs-of-old

    “Tulsa’s population exploded, going from approximately 1,200 people in 1898 to 72,000 in 1921, the year of the riots.”

    All wars are a battle over resources. Any ideological reason is just the justification to ease the guilt over murder. Sometimes these justifications hold up a century later, and sometimes they don’t, but the reason the history books give is never the reason. We want the world to work like Harry Potter where there’s a good team and a bad team, and our movies portray every conscripted Nazi soldier as just as psychopathic as Hitler himself. But really, all war is murder, and we do it because we want someone else’s stuff. Sometimes it might be necessary murder — I’m not a pacifist — but surely social causes are not worth murder.

    We murdered to end slavery. We murdered to bring democracy to Afghanistan. We murdered to stop communism from spreading in southeast Asia. We murdered to keep Mexico from pretending it still owned Texas. That doesn’t make it sound any more righteous than to say, “We went to war with Germany so that continental Europe would be crushed enough that America could fill the vacuum of power.”

    “This prosperity did not bypass the blacks who migrated from the tiny, all-black townships of Oklahoma. The “Northside” or Greenwood district (named after Greenwood Avenue, the hub of the black business district) was bustling. In spite of segregation and the legal disabilities that were in force against black people at the time, they quickly became self-sufficient. In short order, drug stores, groceries, laundries, diners, and a cinema sprang up to accommodate the growing black population.”

    You may have noticed that this doesn’t exist anymore. You go to the black part of any city, and there’s no business district. There’s a few businesses with bars on the window, but mostly it’s burned out crack dens.

    By any objective measure except for theoretical ethics, America was a better place for the black community in the 1920s than in the 2020s.

    You mention that there were no lynchings despite a Klan presence. Lynchings were actually very rare, and they were probably never done by the Klan. At this point the Klan was more of a pyramid scheme focused on Catholics than a race mob. The only Klan murder I can think of was the Birmingham bombing, almost a century after the founding of the Klan (of which there was no connection between the 1860s group, the 1920s group, and the splinter cells in the 1950s and 60s).

    It’s sort of like how white liberals in Oregon assume that gays in Alabama are casually murdered by roaming bands of Baptists and the local sheriff’s department just overlooks it.

    You mention that there were rumors of the communist party stoking the blacks. I don’t know how this can just be “rumors”. It’s historical fact. Most of the major civil rights saints a few decades later had strong communist leanings and even direct training, particularly at the Highland Folk School in Tennessee.

    “Jenkin Lloyd Jones, the publisher of The Tulsa Tribune, was a committed Progressive and segregationist (the two went hand-in-hand at the time). Jones had many other claims to fame: one of them was that he was a founding member of Tulsa’s first Unitarian Church.”

    Funny how that happens.

    Didn’t progressives also want to lynch Bill Cosby because of baseless claims that he raped some white women? Some things never change.

    “To scapegoat a city is just as unfair as scapegoating a person. In this particular case, branding Tulsa as a “murderous, racist community” is equally damaging to race relations everywhere. Where fiction is allowed to replace fact, it fans the flames of fear and mistrust between the races. Without the truth, there can be healing. ”

    Maybe Oklahoma should secede. Last year they gave half your state to a racial minority who didn’t build anything, and the state government just said, “Well our hands are tied.” Maybe there should be another riot. Storm the state capitol. Defend your land. Is Oklahoma not a colony of Washington? Do the bureaucrats in DC view you any differently than the British viewed the Asian Indians?

    *****

    I’m from Chattanooga. Probably the most famous race lynching ever happened there. Like with Tulsa, there had recently been several instances of black crime that had white people on edge. Like with Tulsa, the white woman later waffled on her story and wouldn’t testify under oath. The federal government intervened to try to save the man’s life. All evidence seems to indicate that he was innocent. The whole thing was messed up. Like with Tulsa, Democratic politics played a major role (although the Klan didn’t exist at the time). The man had coworkers who were willing to testify that he had been at work that night, and the judge wouldn’t let them. Supposedly Ed Johnson spent his last hours praying and trying to forgive the mob breaking into his jail cell.

    It’s kind of funny, in that the spot coincidentally is a major tourist attraction. Most people walk under that beam on the bridge and have no idea that it caused the only criminal trial in the history of the supreme court.

    Nobody in Chattanooga is proud of what happened there. There are no hidden Klan cells wanting to have an anniversary. Nobody thinks, “Normally I don’t support murdering men over false rape accusations, but one less black person is a better Chattanooga.” It’s something no one talks about, and many people don’t even know about it. Supposedly the city was going to put up a statue.

    The way Chattanoogans would feel about Biden coming and stoking that fire over a century later after everyone has moved on, I imagine that’s how Tulsans feel about his speech and the massive media coverage. “Go away and let us handle our own internal problems, which don’t even exist anymore.”

    • “All wars are a battle over resources…
      all war is murder, and we do it because we want someone else’s stuff.”

      Indeed. History is a function of Geography.
      Where are the people? Where is the stuff?
      Who has it and who has not?
      That’s where (and why) there are wars.

  3. Err… Surely: “Without the truth, there can be [no] healing” ?

  4. Jane Tzilvelis says

    I plan on taking my time to read this post today because their is a lot to unpack. In my opinion, Joe Biden is an instigator and not an unifier as he snd his followers purport. Joe Biden appears to me to be of the Marxist ilk.

    Here is a quote from Good Reads defining race baiting:

    1. CRT [Critical Race Theory] theorists see capitalism’s disparities as a function of race, not class. Capitalism, all the leading CRT proponents believe, is therefore “racist.”

    2. CRT intellectuals are trying to change the view that racism is an individual issue, and insist it is systemic, in order to get society to change the entire system.

    3. The purpose of the CRT training programs, and the curricula, is now to create enough bad associations with the white race.

    Race is suddenly all the rage. Employees, students, and parents are being inundated with “anti-racism” training programs and school curricula that insist America was built on white supremacy. Anyone who raises even the slightest objection is often deemed irredeemably racist.

    But what if the impetus behind a particular type of race-based training programs and curricula we see spreading at the moment is not exclusively, or even primarily, about skin color? What if race is just a façade for a particular strain of thought? What if what stands behind all this is the old, color-blind utopian dream of uniting the “workers of the world,” and eradicating capitalism.

    If this all sounds very Marxist, it should. All the giants in whiteness studies, from Noel Ignatiev, to David Roediger, to their ideological lodestar, W.E.B. Du Bois—who first coined the term “whiteness” to begin with—were Marxist. In the cases of Ignatiev and Du Bois, they were actual Communist Party members.
    (Mike Gonzalez)

    And now I will take my time to read, reflect, and get a historical perspective on the “Joe Biden Tulsa speech” meant to create disunity in our nation.

    • George Michalopulos says

      Thank you, Jane. Lot to unpack there. Lemme know what you think.

      • Jane Tzilvelis says

        Well well well. Have I got news for you!

        This article was a fascinating archeological dig into the lie perpetrated by Biden, the news media, and whomever was “in charge”of the current Tulsa History Museum exhibit: ? The Tulsa “Massacre” ?

        I did a search on the web and found a discrepancy!
        The Tulsa Library called it a race RIOT!
        Check out these two links and let’s dig deeper!

        https://www.tulsahistory.org/visit/exhibits/
        https://www.tulsalibrary.org/tulsa-race-riot-1921

        • George Michalopulos says

          Looks like the library didn’t get the memo! Thanks for checking it out.

          • Jane Tzilvelis says

            And further…if one scrolls all the way down the library page, one can see that every book posted on the Tulsa library site directs readers to various books discussing the “ race riot.”

            The Tulsa History Museum has an exhibit titled The Tulsa Race Massacre!

            Thank you for a stupendous post.

    • George Michalopulos says

      BTW, according to an authoritative biography of W E B DuBois, he was wined and dined in 1935 in Nazi Germany and he was absolutely ga-ga of National Socialism, calling it the “perfect synthesis” between Communism and Capitalism and he was hoping to get back to the States where he could try it for the black population.

      • Austin Martin says

        So you’re saying that one of the first black activists was a communist?

        • George Michalopulos says

          Either that or at the very least a major communist sympathizer.

          • Austin Martin says

            I just can’t believe that the civil rights movement was based on Marxism. I thought it was so noble and pure and all-American. Equality is our values. It’s who we are. This is the current year.

            One might call a Marxism applied to culture “cultural Marxism”, and to disbelieve in it is unamerican. Otherwise you might as well just shoot Doctor Reverend Martin Luther King Junior all over again.

            [Sarcasm]

            All of Marxism is antichrist, because it takes anger, pride and greed and calls them virtues. Therefore, anything based on Marxism (and its forerunners) is antichrist. Therefore, the civil rights movement, abolitionism and all waves of feminism were antichrist.

            It’s a a basic Aristotelian syllogism. Perhaps the Greek Orthodox Church doesn’t do Greek philosophy anymore.

      • Archpriest Alexander F. C. Webster says

        How serendipitous that you would mention W.E.B. Dubois and his Communist leanings late in life. As it happens, I submitted a letter to my undergraduate alumni magazine (The Pennsylvania Gazette) in January 2021. Here is the text of that letter:

        Dear Editor:
        Your report in the Sep-Oct 2020 issue that Penn plans to remove the statue of the Rev. George Whitfield in the Quad indicates that Penn is fully engaged in the notorious “cancel culture” of the moment.

        Is my alma mater also considering removing the name of W.E.B. DuBois from the college house that honors him?

        His many scholarly and civil accomplishments notwithstanding, DuBois officially joined the Communist Party of the USA in 1961 when he was 93 years of age:
        https://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/11/05/specials/dubois-communist.html
        In 1961 the Soviet Union was still the scourge of freedom-loving peoples around the globe, a vicious persecutor of Christians (especially the Russian Orthodox Church, the historic majority faith of Russians for almost 1,000 years) and Jews in the USSR who dared to resist the intermittent purges and pogroms by the Communist Party and the atheist state apparatus. In addition, the USSR under dictator Nikita Khrushchev was working overtime around the globe to continue its often violent suppression of liberty in the East European Communist nations behind the Iron Curtain (most recently and spectacularly in Hungary in 1956) and in more recent Communist nations such as Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

        Last summer, I, like millions of other Americans including fellow Penn alumni, was horrified at the selective political and cultural iconoclasm that swept the cities, towns, and college campuses. Normally I would prefer that no historic statues or buildings and institutions named after Americans who, heretofore, were deemed worthy of such honors for their contributions to society or institutions of higher education, despite the unworthy, morally reprehensible activities in the course of their lives, be demolished or removed for ideological reasons. In that camp I would name Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate military officer and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan organization during Reconstruction, as well as Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, an organization that has aided and abetted the despicable murders of some 60 million unborn children in this country, including a disproportionate number of African Americans. My preference is to allow statues of such dubious public figures to remain, but with the addition of historical plaques explaining the enormities as well as achievements (if any) of those honored in stone.

        However, if Penn has decided to go down this anti-intellectual, anti-history, Orwellian path and to remove statues of folks such as Whitfield and to remove from dormitory houses the names of other complex, flawed individuals who owned slaves in the 18th century such as the Rev. William Smith, first Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, then an even-handed pursuit of justice, “social” or otherwise, would require that Penn also “cancel” W.E.B Dubois posthumously and rename the college house on campus currently dedicated to his complex, flawed life.

        Fr. Alexander F. C. Webster C’72, Ashburn, VA

        As you might expect from that very woke elite institution, the only reply that I received was this brush-off: “Although we don’t have room to print every letter we receive, we publish as many as possible, with an eye toward reflecting the range of opinions on a given issue.”

        It is both obvious and predictable, however, that the editors of The Pennsylvania Gazette would never, for a number of reasons none of them honorable, allow “the range of opinions” to include my criticism of their icon W.E.B. DuBois’ as a disgraceful, inexcusable toady of Soviet Communism

      • George Michalopulos says

        Very well said Fr.

        FWIW, Gen Forrest later left the Klan (or the Knights of the Grand Camelia I believe it was) and spent the last years of his life working for racial reconciliation in the South.

        • Archpriest Alexander F. C. Webster says

          Right you are, George! That’s all the more reason that Forrest should not be simplistically and mindlessly “cancelled.” His is a story of repentance that earned him a prominent place among the redeemed sinners in U.S. history.

        • Ellyn Nixon says

          George, it was the knights of the white camellia. Their newspaper came to our house in Louisiana in the early 1960s. One summer, the week after I returned from the Methodist youth fellowship summer camp in North Louisiana, the headline on their newspaper screamed, Methodists hold sex camp in Piney Woods! I don’t think he ever connected that story with where I had just been.

  5. In class-based Marxism, the kulaks were ‘bad’.
    Therefore the kulaks were eliminated.
    In Critical Race Theory Marxism, the whites are bad.
    Therefore the whites must expect to be eliminated.
    Unless…

  6. George Michalopulos says

    So, Tom, was it worth it to you to be such an anti-conservative all these years? The Left is coming for you now:

    https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/06/14/npr-tv-critic-hits-tom-hanks-for-playing-righteous-white-men-its-time-for-him-to-be-anti-racist/

    It’s called autophagy.

  7. George Michalopulos says

    Yet another example that we’ve been gaslighted all along. According to today’s issue of The Tulsa World it looks like the “mass graves” hysteria may be dying down:

    Page 1 headline: “Grave search prompts questions”.

    “Other differences, however, cause the researches to leave open the possibility that ‘perhaps we’re looking at separate events,’ said state archeologist Kay Stackelbeck.

    “That would be significant, especially since the eight burial sites exhumed as of Monday noon included those of two described as juveniles and two described as adult women.”

    “On the other hand, researchers say the women’s and children’s deaths could be unrelated to the massacre.

    “Of the seven exhumed burials…we have not seen any indications of trauma.”

    –Randy Krehbiel, http://www.tulsaworld.com, June 15, 2021

  8. https://pjmedia.com/columns/dennis-prager/2021/06/15/the-moral-and-religious-case-against-unconditional-love-n1454656

    Dennis Prager had a good column on unconditional love (see above) which reminded me of our prior conversation regarding forgiveness and repentance. By and large, I agree with Prager’s sentiments.

    Sooner or later we are going to have to have a very, very frank and open conversation in this country about slavery, racism and race. If whites are historically informed and honest, it will be a barn burner. The Slavery/Racism Libel is probably the biggest lie ever foisted upon European Americans. It is purely a creature of political expediency.

    In the 18th century, European whites did not think of black Africans as full fledged human beings but rather as some cross between man and beast. This is clear from the writings of our Founding Fathers and this was the norm at that time. The notion that they were anywhere near equal to whites would have been seen as ludicrous.

    So in our Constitution, blacks are treated as 2/3 of a person for representative purposes, more man than beast, but less than fully human, so as to not over represent slave holding states in the legislature. The thing to realize is that these people sincerely believed this and everything in their experience served to confirm this bias. It was common sense. Whether blacks should be enslaved or not was only just starting to be a question for debate at the end of the 18th century. Black Africans in Africa at the time had no objection to enslaving their own race. A high percentage of black slaves brought to America were actually purchased from black masters in Africa.

    The District of Columbia only banned slavery in 1847, a short fourteen years before the War Between the States. There was no question of black inferiority, only a newly minted question of whether slavery was objectionable or not. Thus the landscape looked very different in the mid 19th century than it does today and morality varied on this question.

    It is a staple of the criticism of slavery in the Old South that a) Southern whites knew it was wrong, and b) it was exceptionally cruel. Neither proposition is true. Slavery itself had been around from time immemorial, it is accepted in the Bible and approved by such Church Fathers as St. John Chrysostom. It was practiced using white servants as well, that being called indentured servitude inasmuch as the term of servitude was limited, generally to seven years, in the case of whites. This follows the biblical pattern of differing terms for Hebrew slaves and foreign slaves.

    Now, slavery was often cruel, as was life in general at that time. But it was not exceptionally so when viewed in the course of Western civilization. What has changed is the appreciation whites have for the black intellect. With the increased appreciation for the mental capacities of African Americans came a politically motivated attempt to exploit the past for contemporary political gain by guilting whites for their alleged mistreatment of blacks. It is as if your pets or farm animals were suddenly discovered to be capable of advanced thought and communication. Imagine a universal translator were devised that could translate their brain waves into language and that they actually are of comparable intelligence to humans, just unable to express it verbally.

    Now, give them the vote and convince them that they have been knowingly oppressed and mistreated.

    Tinderbox, no? That is a rough analogy, but illustrative of the predicament.

    To add a further wrinkle, blacks are a different race and thus are psychologically perceived automatically as “other” by whites. Regardless of the confusion regarding intellect, the pitfalls of multiculturalism alone are prohibitive. Mix that in with white guilt and black vengeance and you get a political mad house, which is what we live in now.

    Believe me, Russians in their natural habitat, Latinos in their natural habitat, Japanese in their natural habitat, do not have to deal with anything like the social anxiety and estrangement that multiculturalism has foisted on us in America and the West. Everything is much more natural and flows in a homogenous environment.

    How white Americans treat(ed) foreigners among us should not be the defining characteristic of the US or any part of it. We are much more than that. Our culture, especially in the South, is much more than that. We should never apologize for our heritage when it comes to race. At worst, we were par for the course. At best, we freed and entitled everybody even when it was against our own self interest.

    The Great War of Northern Aggression (against the humble servants of God Almighty and His Son, Jesus Christ), was a war of secession. The right asserted was secession, not slavery. Lincoln famously quipped that he would even extend slavery if it would preserve the Union. The South did not have to assert the right of slavery. It was already the law. The North had no power to abolish it until it removed the Southern states from the amendment process and made their readmission to the Union contingent on their acceptance of the War Amendments. The fact that they had to be “readmitted” was itself a tacit admission to the fact that they had, in fact, successfully seceded. They simply repealed the articles of ratification of the federal Constitution that their state legislatures had passed originally in order to join the Union.

    Now, did they think Lincoln and the Northern Abolitionists were a danger to their economy and “way of life”? Certainly. They also thought Northern tariffs were a blight on their cotton trade. But the remedy they chose to all their differences with the North was the subject of the War – Secession itself.

    Read the Constitution and tell me where it mentions “secession”. Then read the 10th Amendment:

    “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

    The South had the right to secede. There was no provision against it in the Constitution. Would the Constitution have been adopted had the States felt it to be a roach motel from which there was no possible escape? How does this juxtapose with our initial severance of ties from Great Britain. Does the course of human events cease to progress?

    Having outlawed slavery by amending the Constitution without the participation of the “states in rebellion”, the North proceeded to impose an unconscionable government of Reconstruction upon the South such that blacks who had just prior been illiterate field slaves were in charge of the legislatures under the auspices of Northern Republicans. From thence emerged the Klan to reimpose white supremacy in the face of the federal government’s attempt to impose black supremacy.

    The entire history of Jim Crow, segregation and racial violence in the South proceeds from this factual basis. The twists and turns, ebb and flow would be enough for any number of articles, but you get the point.

    So, in a sense, the whole federal government has been illegitimate since the 1860’s. But we don’t dwell on who killed who and we move on.

    Or do we?

    If we are going to dwell on who killed who, on who enslaved who, on who oppressed who, then let us have a full venting of the lungs so that we can all breathe more easily. Because it has only been since about WWII that the notion that blacks were approximately equal to whites in terms of intellect has become the conventional wisdom – and that happened gradually, really only becoming the overwhelming consensus in the late 1960’s.

    Since then, it’s been surreal. The attempt has been made to saddle whites with guilt similar to that of Germans for Nazi atrocities somehow equating slavery and Jim Crow with the Holocaust. But that’s nonsense.

    • George Michalopulos says

      As usual, Misha, a lot of what you say is profound or at least makes one think. A minor quibble: the Jim Crow was not created to restore “white supremacy” per se but to protect poor whites from the depredations that the Northern whites had imposed upon them with Reconstruction.

      I remember talking with older people (when I was much younger) and these were the second generation that came out of Reconstruction. I couldn’t believe the atrocities that they told me that occurred to their families during that period (which ended in 1877). Many of these people placed the blame for their suffering squarely upon the backs of Northern whites. Their hatred for the Republican Party literally knew no bounds.

      Also, as regards to secession, you are right. But in ways some of us don’t realize. The question to be asked is: which came first, the States of the Constitution? Answer: the States.

      Question: who created the Constitution? Answer: the States.

      Ergo: it stands to reason that secession is not only legal but natural. The 9th and 10th Amendments recognize this reality.

      • George,

        Jim Crow may not have been but the Klan itself was dedicated to restoring white supremacy and it disbanded after Reconstruction.

        You perceptively isolated the true villains behind it all. Certainly wasn’t blacks. They have been relatively innocent pawns in the whole matter, at least until recently when they have been weaponized by consent and ideological indoctrination.

        It’s the damn Yankees . . .

  9. Jane Tzilvelis says

    Biden says, “Lookie here 1921 Massacre!” Idiot!

    Our teens, worldwide, are experiencing myocarditis from US Covid vaccines and being pressured to take them. Please send your letter of concern to your Congress regarding Biden’s lack of concern for the “massacre” of teens worldwide from American Covid vaccines. Please write to the FDA to stop this!

    The CDC is having an emergency meeting on Friday due to the “higher than expected” rate of myocarditis in teens. Everyone Email peter.marks@fda.hhs.gov & ayv6@cdc.gov to STOP the use of this shot on teens! Do it now!

  10. AnonymousII says

    Forgive me, maybe these were reported already, and although this doesn’t come as a surprise, I think we are ready for another reality check …

    What, exactly, do most Americans make of this news?

    What of our hierarchs? There’s no way of softening the reality we are definitely in a coup by international communists.

    And how do you think the vaccine will play out, how does it fit into this narrative, with the links below? I understand that I’ve asked three questions.

    Thoughts?

    See: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/15/biden-administration-asks-americans-to-report-potentially-radicalized-friends-and-family/

    See: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/15/massachusetts-district-students-teachers-report-bias-incidents/

    And: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/15/fbi-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-catalyst-for-political-violence/

    • Austin Martin says

      Yeah I saw that! The first article in particular!

      I made peace with this a long time ago. I have already decided how to respond if and when they take me, and so there will be no panic decision when it comes. I don’t fear the federal government. Only God can judge me. But this state of mind is only because I have meditated on this for many years. When I go to prison for whatever hate thing I wrote five years ago, I will view it as a missions opportunity. I do not even fear solitary confinement, because the Spirit of God is within me.

      Effectively at this point the rule of law does not exist. The federal government will do whatever they want, and there will be no pushback. Maybe three or four congressmen will gang up to form a token resistance, but they can accomplish nothing. Search and seizure is already dead. Free speech has been relegated to corporations. Erasing the right to self defense will be done with the same means that public schools have used for decades to punish any kid fighting for any reason.

      I go to a very ethnic parish where most people have a funky accent. It amazes me that these people spent decades under communism, and yet they still do not understand the heart of man. They quite literally grew up in a communist country under communist propaganda, and they cannot see the same thing growing up here. They assume that just because we have McDonald’s and interstates that we must not be a communist country.

      Communism is not about economic policy. That is just a feature. What the heart of communism is is a rebellion against all truth and order. Anything good and normal and healthy, communism says is evil, and anything conventionally evil, communism says is good. The economic distribution is just the justification, but it is not the driving force. What drives forward the communist is malice. It’s a heart of pure hatred. They hate themselves, they hate God, and they hate you.

      None of what has happened in the last 30 years to our county has been an accident. They did it because they hate us and want to hurt us. It was not incompetence. True power is hurting someone and having them thank you for it.

      Likewise with the rot in the EP. Archbishop Elpi is not a fluke. He doesn’t just have some bad ideas. He is subversive for the purpose of being subversive himself. He teaches a world-focused substitute of Christianity using the same words and categories but with opposite meanings, because that is what it means to be an antichrist. What disturbed me the most about the 2016 Crete documents (most of which I read) is that they quoted Jesus about bringing peace, namely the peace not as the world gives that is beyond all understanding, and they then said that because of this we must have world peace between countries. How is that not antichrist?

      The government will use white women and homosexuals to snitch on their right-wing male co-workers, and these men will be herded into maximum security prisons and possibly killed. Whatever ostensible reasons about “white supremacy” and “domestic terrorism” are irrelevant. The real reason is because the right-wing is truth and order and masculinity, and these are reflections of God.

      The secular-leftist has entirely taken on a demonic nature, and he hates anything that reminds him of God, because any truth, no matter how small, sets a standard for behavior. This is why, you will notice, that most liberals are incapable of ever saying anything entirely straight-forward. They can only speak around things, but they never actually speak about things.

      This is also, by the way, why saying the demons name is so effective in an exorcism. Demons don’t actually have names, but forcing them to accept some kind of identity is existential torture to them. And you will notice that the left-wing today is obsessed with changing identities.

      People can do anything to you except take away your integrity. They can set you on fire. They can kill your kids in front of you. They can turn your wife against you and bankrupt you. They can strap you to a chair and force you to take the vaccine. But the one thing they cannot steal from you is your integrity.

      The reason we have “great martyrs” is because, in these moments of persecution, they were given an extra measure of the Spirit, and they were able to easily endure. So also, if we steel ourselves now and determine to hold to our integrity, will we receive that extra measure of grace needed to endure, and it will be no difficult thing.

      But the time to make that decision is now, not when it comes.

  11. Antiochene Son says

    Juneteenth seems set to become a federal holiday.

    I don’t have a problem with celebrating the end of slavery — it never should have existed on these shores, and it was foisted upon the US by foreign powers and largely Jewish-operated slaving companies. It would have died out naturally by the 1890s, but in any case, it’s good that it ended.

    But we all know that this new holiday will be used as a Marxist bludgeon against the shrinking White population, not celebrate the end of a bad era in this country.

    • George Michalopulos says

      AS, slavery should have never existed for many reasons. One reason it should not have existed is that it drove down the wages of the poor whites in whatever state it was practiced.

      For this same reason, open borders should be shut immediately to increase the wages of the white, black and other native working class. Cesar Chavez (who was a communist) knew that.

      My point is that it was never really about slavery because if it was, the Republican/Chamber of Commerce elites would have embraced Trumpism. Hispanic helotry is different from African chattel slavery only in degree, not kind.

  12. Austin Martin says

    So if all the leaders of the civil rights movement and its antecedents and successors (such as BLM) are open Marxists, does that mean that all of civil rights is really just a cash grab? Would it be reasonable to conclude that civil rights is more about stealing from white people than about equality?

    If not, then why?