Mr. Hanks is an actor and filmmaker whose projects include historical works like “Band of Brothers,” “The Pacific” and “John Adams” and documentaries about America from the 1960s to the 2000s.
I consider myself a lay historian who talks way too much at dinner parties, leading with questions like, “Do you know that the Erie Canal is the reason Manhattan became the economic center of America?” Some of the work I do is making historically based entertainment. Did you know our second president once defended in court British soldiers who fired on and killed colonial Bostonians — and got most of them off?
By my recollection, four years of my education included studying American history. Fifth and eighth grades, two semesters in high school, three quarters at a community college. Since then, I’ve read history for pleasure and watched documentary films as a first option. Many of those works and those textbooks were about white people and white history. The few Black figures — Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — were those who accomplished much in spite of slavery, segregation and institutional injustices in American society.
But for all my study, I never read a page of any school history book about how, in 1921, a mob of white people burned down a place called Black Wall Street, killed as many as 300 of its Black citizens and displaced thousands of Black Americans who lived in Tulsa, Okla.
My experience was common: History was mostly written by white people about white people like me, while the history of Black people — including the horrors of Tulsa — was too often left out. Until relatively recently, the entertainment industry, which helps shape what is history and what is forgotten, did the same. That includes projects of mine. I knew about the attack on Fort Sumter, Custer’s last stand and Pearl Harbor but did not know of the Tulsa massacre until last year, thanks to an article in The New York Times.
Instead, in my history classes, I learned that Britain’s Stamp Act helped lead to the Boston Tea Party, that “we” were a free people because the Declaration of Independence said “all men are created equal.” That the Whiskey Rebellion started over a tax on whiskey. That the Articles of Confederation and the Alien and Sedition Acts were cockeyed. Rightfully, Sacco and Vanzetti, Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party and the Wright Brothers had their time in my classes. Our textbooks told of the Louisiana Purchase; the Johnstown, Pa., flood; the great San Francisco earthquake; and George Washington Carver’s development of hundreds of products from the common goober.
But Tulsa was never more than a city on the prairie. The Oklahoma Land Rush got some paragraphs in one of those school years, but the 1921 burning out of the Black population that lived there was never mentioned. Nor, I have learned since, was anti-Black violence on large and small scales, especially between the end of Reconstruction and the victories of the civil rights movement; there was nothing on the Slocum massacre of Black residents in Texas by an all-white mob in 1910 or the Red Summer of white supremacist terrorism in 1919. Many students like me were told that the lynching of Black Americans was tragic but not that these public murders were commonplace and often lauded by local papers and law enforcement.
For a white kid living in the white neighborhoods of Oakland, Calif., my city in the 1960s and ’70s looked integrated and diverse but often felt tense and polarized, as was evident on many an AC Transit bus. The division between white America and Black America seemed to be as solid as any international boundary even in one of the most integrated cities in the nation. Bret Harte Junior High and Skyline High School had Asian, Latino and Black students, but those schools were mostly white. This did not seem to be the case in the other public high schools in town.
We had lessons on the Emancipation Proclamation, the Ku Klux Klan, Rosa Parks’s daring heroism and her common decency and even the death of Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre. Parts of American cities had been aflame at points since the Watts riots in 1965, and Oakland was the home of the Black Panthers and the Vietnam War-era draftee induction center, so history was playing out before our very eyes, in our hometown. The issues were myriad, the solutions theoretical, the lessons few, the headlines continuous.
The truth about Tulsa, and the repeated violence by some white Americans against Black Americans, was systematically ignored, perhaps because it was regarded as too honest, too painful a lesson for our young white ears. So, our predominantly white schools didn’t teach it, our mass appeal works of historical fiction didn’t enlighten us, and my chosen industry didn’t take on the subject in films and shows until recently. It seems white educators and school administrators (if they even knew of the Tulsa massacre, for some surely did not) omitted the volatile subject for the sake of the status quo, placing white feelings over Black experience — literally Black lives in this case.
How different would perspectives be had we all been taught about Tulsa in 1921, even as early as the fifth grade? Today, I find the omission tragic, an opportunity missed, a teachable moment squandered. When people hear about systemic racism in America, just the use of those words draws the ire of those white people who insist that since July 4, 1776, we have all been free, we were all created equally, that any American can become president and catch a cab in Midtown Manhattan no matter the color of our skin, that, yes, American progress toward justice for all can be slow but remains relentless. Tell that to the century-old survivors of Tulsa and their offspring. And teach the truth to the white descendants of those in the mob that destroyed Black Wall Street.
Today, I think historically based fiction entertainment must portray the burden of racism in our nation for the sake of the art form’s claims to verisimilitude and authenticity. Until recently, the Tulsa Race Massacre was not seen in movies and TV shows. Thanks to several projects currently streaming, like “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country,” this is no longer the case. Like other historical documents that map our cultural DNA, they will reflect who we really are and help determine what is our full history, what we must remember.
Should our schools now teach the truth about Tulsa? Yes, and they should also stop the battle to whitewash curriculums to avoid discomfort for students. America’s history is messy but knowing that makes us a wiser and stronger people. 1921 is the truth, a portal to our shared, paradoxical history. An American Black Wall Street was not allowed to exist, was burned to ashes; more than 20 years later, World War II was won despite institutionalized racial segregation; more than 20 years after that, the Apollo missions put 12 men on the moon while others were struggling to vote, and the publishing of the Pentagon Papers showed the extent of our elected officials’ willingness to systemically lie to us. Each of these lessons chronicles our quest to live up to the promise of our land, to tell truths that, in America, are meant to be held as self-evident.
Tom Hanks is an actor and filmmaker whose projects include historical works like “Band of Brothers,” “The Pacific” and “John Adams” and documentaries about America from the 1960s to the 2000s.
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A version of this article appears in print on June 6, 2021, Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: We Should All Learn About Tulsa. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
The Elaine massacre of 1919 is believed to be the deadliest episode of racial violence in Arkansas history. But when the historian Brian Mitchell began researching it a few years ago, he met teachers in the state who didn’t know about it or weren’t sure how to explain it to their students.
“Teachers who were having a difficult time talking about difficult histories didn’t know where to start,” he said.
So Professor Mitchell, an expert on African American history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, helped create a virtual exhibit about the massacre and packed it with teaching materials.
After the murder of George Floyd last year triggered widespread protests and calls for racial justice, there has been more public discussion of America’s history of racial violence. The recent centennial of the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Okla., which prompted President Biden to visit the city, is a prominent example.
But the Tulsa race massacre isn’t the only one getting a fresh look. In some American schools, museums and other institutions, events like Elaine are being discussed for the first time. And some of these efforts are gaining momentum even as Republican politicians in several states try to block curriculums that emphasize systemic racism.
Roger Brooks, the president of Facing History and Ourselves, an educational nonprofit based in Massachusetts, said it was thrilling to see “the examination of untold or forgotten histories gaining traction across the country.”
“These types of projects, when approached with integrity and deep scholarship, provide a path toward filling out the contours of the larger contemporary picture of the times we’re living in,” he said.
An Arkansas tragedy
The massacre in Elaine, which sits on a bend of the Mississippi River about 100 miles south of Memphis, occurred after a group of Black sharecroppers informed plantation owners that they had formed a chapter of a national union.
As the farmers met at a local church, police officers interrupted them, leading to a shootout in which one of the officers was killed. A mob of white men then “poured into the county to suppress the alleged Black revolt that had been reported to them,” Professor Mitchell wrote in a recent essay. Hundreds of U.S. Army soldiers were sent to Elaine at the governor’s request.
Over the next few days, soldiers, police officers and white mobs are believed to have killed hundreds of people. Homes were burned with Black families inside, and the victims included men, women and children, according to Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, a professor emerita of African American studies at Pennsylvania State University.
A jury later convicted 12 Black men for the murders of three white men in Elaine. They were sentenced to death, but freed years later after six of the convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923.
Textbooks in Arkansas once “basically accepted” initial, pro-establishment accounts of the massacre from local officials and newspapers, said Barclay Key, a historian at the University of Arkansas. More recent textbooks, he added, have better explained the role of the Black union organizers and how the massacre started.
‘This happened in my community.’
When Professor Mitchell and his students began researching the Elaine massacre a few years ago, there was virtually no record of Black deaths from it in the county where it had occurred, he said. They managed to find death certificates in a local funeral home’s collection that confirmed deaths that had gone unreported at the time.
The class created a searchable index of those records and donated it to the Arkansas State Archive. Separately, Professor Mitchell helped to create a virtual exhibit around the massacre’s centennial for the university’s Center for Arkansas History and Culture that includes teaching guides, archival records and interactive maps.
Hundreds of local teachers have incorporated materials from the exhibit into their lesson plans, said Deborah Baldwin, the university’s associate provost of collections and archives.
One of them, Ruth Brown, said she had taught the massacre to middle and high school students over the past decade, initially relying on materials and speakers from the Elaine Legacy Center, a local project to commemorate the massacre’s victims.
Over the past year, Ms. Brown used resources from the virtual exhibit and taught about the massacre as part of a broader curriculum that focused on literacy.
“The reason I get a good response is because they take ownership,” Ms. Brown, a social studies teacher in the Marvell-Elaine School District, said of her students. “You know, ‘This happened in my community.’”
Elaine isn’t the only place in the American South where teachers, historians, curators and others are trying to educate communities about race massacres, often in places where such events are not a major focus of public school curriculums.
In Florida, the Orange County Library System’s website has a page about the 1920 Ocoee massacre — in which a white mob burned Black homes and churches — with links to books, films and other materials.
In Louisiana, the Historic New Orleans Collection published a website this year about Black activists during Reconstruction, the period immediately after the Civil War. One page analyzes the Mechanics’ Institute massacre of 1866, in which a white mob killed dozens of people attending a state constitutional convention that had been called to consider giving Black people the right to vote.
And last year in North Carolina, a museum published an interactive map about a massacre that coincided with the 1898 overthrow of a Black-majority city’s multiracial government.
That massacre by white militias in Wilmington, N.C., which left at least 60 Black people dead, began with efforts by local Democrats to block people from voting. A mob burned the office of a Black newspaper and sent Black workers fleeing into nearby swamps. White supremacists also forced elected Black officials to resign and banished other Black people from Wilmington.
A “story map” about the event, published last year by the Cape Fear Museum of History and Science, offers a fresh account of what happened in Wilmington — and calls it not a “riot” but a “white supremacist massacre and a coup d’état.”
“The story map was conceived of before both the pandemic and the racial protests of 2020,” said Jan Davidson, the museum’s historian. “Still, it became a particularly relevant and timely intervention into the public conversation about race and power.”
Efforts to teach students and the public about race massacre have critics: Several Republican-led state legislatures have either passed or proposed measures that would limit how schools teach about racism.
Those efforts will make it harder for many teachers and school districts to introduce a “serious curriculum” around topics like slavery, freedom struggles and the legacies of white supremacy, said Professor Woodruff, the Penn State historian.
Young people today are “more willing to question the past” than their parents were, she said, and demands for reckonings over the legacies of slavery and segregation — as well as the genocide of Native Americans and underreported state violence against Mexican Americans and Asian Americans — may grow as the United States moves from a white to a nonwhite majority.
“But we are not yet there,” she added.
Family history
In Arkansas, the push to talk more about the Elaine massacre comes not only from historians and teachers, but descendants of the victims.
One of them, James White Sr., directs programs at the Elaine Legacy Center. This summer he is helping to organize a reading program for about 50 children that will focus on the writer Richard Wright, who lived in Elaine as a child. Mr. Wright’s 1945 memoir, “Black Boy,” tells the story of how his uncle was lynched there three years before the 1919 massacre.
One of Ms. Brown’s former students, Edlun Marshall, said that he grew up hearing about the massacre from his extended family. Teachers mentioned it in passing, he added, but he did not learn the full story until he took Ms. Brown’s class in high school.
“I can definitely remember feeling the sadness,” he said, “and also the rage, to hear that innocent people were brutally attacked and killed for simply trying to have some type of equality in this land of opportunity.”
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