Your turn. True, no one stopped to build crosses and film themselves burning them in the middle of a riot. No one knows the demographics of the dead, but to say less than 2/3 were black ignores an obvious point. "Home field advantage" is more painful in war than in football. All the noncombatants in harm's way were black.
More than a few eyewitnesses say planes were bombing Greenwood. As in, some have said it
to me, and I may have just been a kid but I believed them. No one said anything about the military. That's statist thinking. Tulsa was a booming city in 1921, with the Cushing Field and the Glenn Pool making millionaires monthly. Tulsa oil men, oil field suppliers and other businessmen probably had more airplanes between them than the military did at that point. And even if they didn't, they had higher quality than the military. Seriously. These are the guys who were bankrolling Wiley Post while he was inventing the space suit. It is not difficult to believe one of them delivered a load of Molotov cocktails to the "party".
But that's just a distraction, a historic first which no serious person believes was highly effective. Considerably deadlier was the mounted machine gun strafing the main Greenwood district businesses on the west side of the street. There's no reason to believe the blacks were able to maintain even a halfway respectable "kill ratio". If that's important to you, sorry.
When I was a kid, I looked for the front page of the evening paper, the
Tribune, from that date. The front page was missing from the microfilm record. You could see where the page was torn. Apparently someone kept the torn page, as a later spool of microfilm showed it. No, it did not call for a riot in so many words. Nor was it difficult to read between the lines. It was insurrectionist in tone.
Page and Rowland never talked, at least to anyone who was willing to print them on the record. Both left town in 1921, never to return. Which is hardly surprising, and just what one might expect regardless of what the backstory may have been. General consensus forty-seven years ago was he stepped on her foot, thought
oh gawd I'm gonna get lynched, and started apologizing very earnestly. She probably couldn't understand a word and only knew she was in a small space with a big stranger who was freaking out. That story was by far the most prevalent. That could have been because that was what Page and/or Rowland said later, or because it was good whitewash.
I specifically say 47 years because the people who remembered it were all so ashamed of it they clammed up about it. But in 1974, when they saw rioting over forced bussing in other cities, they started speaking up, white, black and other. "No riots. Find a peaceable way to deal with this $#@! Washington's stirring up. We never told you this, but... Not another one." And Tulsa hasn't had a major race riot since 1921, either.
This thread contains far more information, of a far higher quality, about the riot than you could ever get from NBC.
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...y-police/page5
And besides, I was right.
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