Kara W. Swanson, Northeastern University School of Law, has posted The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921: A Lesson in the Law of Trespass, which is forthcoming in the Connecticut Law Review:
Since 1921, Black Tulsans have been looking to law and lawyers to address harms suffered
Ruins after the Race Riot (LC)
during the Tulsa Race Massacre, largely unsuccessfully. Lawyers can translate stories into the language of law to seek remedies in court. This starting panel, though, is not about redress, as important as that topic is, but rather about the startling lack of recognition of the Massacre, that is, the seemingly impossible feat of forgetting the racially motivated wholesale destruction of a community. Dr. Scott Ellsworth, my fellow panelist and author of the first scholarly history of the Massacre, has described the ways in which that forgetting was encouraged and perpetuated.
There have been many layers to this forgetting over the last one hundred years. As a historian, I am particularly struck by the deliberate efforts of white Tulsa to destroy and lose the documentary evidence of the event, efforts that Ellsworth encountered in his research, from pages sliced out of surviving copies of a local white-owned newspaper to hide its editorial incitement to anti-Black violence to files and boxes of photographs that disappeared from government offices. The silence may have begun in Tulsa, but it has also been enacted throughout Oklahoma and in every state. In social studies classes, in history textbooks, in popular books, the Tulsa Race Massacre, perhaps the most extensive racially motivated destruction of a community in the 20th century United States, has been simply absent, even as the survivors and their descendants remembered.
--Dan Ernst
