The German University of Siegen introduces a new exhibit and course into its curriculum.
The University of Siegen, a long-time international exchange partner of The University of Tulsa, is currently showcasing an exhibition on the Tulsa Race Massacre, created by students enrolled in the university’s graduate English course “Institutions and Practices of Racism in the US: Tulsa’s Red Summer of 1921,” taught by Professor Marcel Hartwig.
The exhibition is titled “A Story of Both Tragedy and Resilience: Remembering the 1921 Race Massacre” and features over a dozen student projects, ranging from an interactive digital map of the Greenwood district to a collection of photographs sourced from McFarlin Library to an original sculpture. With many of the projects focusing on the documentation, contemporary response and historical footprint of the event, the exhibit as a whole reveals how the massacre was misrepresented and covered up by the media in order to put blame on the victims and how modern representations are awakening the public to its existence.
The exhibit begins with a collection of various articles printed around the time of the massacre, created by student Leon Schneider. The collection reveals how the massacre was both instigated and later erased by media coverage. The infamous “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In an Elevator” Tulsa Tribune article, as well as another article calling for white Tulsans to lynch a young Black man, are credited with the escalation of terror and anger that led to the start of the massacre on the night of March 31, 1921.
All copies of the second article were destroyed and later found to also have been burned from microfilm records. In the days after the massacre, newspapers around the country avoided blaming the riot on the white Tulsans who had burned down the Greenwood district, instead referring to it vaguely as a “riot” or a “fight between the races” and reporting instead that the National Guard had been called in to detain the inhabitants of Greenwood.
This project also pointed out that the actual death count has never been discovered, with the number probably being between 100 and 300, although newspapers at the time reported numbers as low as 33. Since the actual extent of the tragedy was downplayed and the white rioters were never blamed, the incident quickly faded from national memory and was never widely taught in schools, despite being considered the worst single action of racially-motivated violence ever to have occurred in the United States.
After the exhibit continues by displaying photos of pre- and post-riot Greenwood taken from the McFarlin Library archives, another poster details the second, even lesser-known destruction of Greenwood. Although many survivors understandably left Tulsa after the massacre, the exhibit states that the area was quickly rebuilt into the prosperous and culturally vibrant “Black Wall Street.”
Smoke billowing over Tulsa, Oklahoma during 1921 race massacre. Photo courtesy of U.S. Library of Congress.
But in the middle of the 20th century, I-244 was built directly through the heart of Greenwood’s business district, gradually reducing Black Wall Street to a collection of vacant lots. Posters show side-by-side aerial photos of the district before and after the highway was built, highlighting the complete destruction of the area that took place as a result of this infrastructural violence.
The exhibit then goes on to celebrate the many recent representations of the Tulsa Race Massacre that have reintroduced it into national consciousness. An issue of the Black history-inspired comic book series “Bitter Roots” is displayed along with the book “Strange Fruit and Bitter Roots: Black History in Contemporary Graphic Narrative,” written by University of Siegen professor Daniel Stein.
One poster, created by student Müjde Akyüz, is titled “Tulsa on Screen, Stage, and Page: Remembering Tulsa Through Popular Culture.” The poster includes images from HBO’s “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft County,” two popular TV series that each dedicated an episode to representing the massacre. Images of Greenwood in flames are surrounded by social media posts about the series in which people share that they had never learned about it before, and many question why the event was not taught in schools. The poster also features the Gap Band, a Tulsa-based funk band from the 1980s, pictures of Tulsa’s Greenwood Rising museum and pictures of commemorative murals from around the city of Tulsa.
Finally, the exhibit concludes with an interactive station created by student Leila Schoenstein. A mailbox stands on a table, surrounded by printed eyewitness testimonies describing the night of March 31 and fictional “letters” written by Tulsa police officers and journalists acknowledging their own responsibility for the destruction of Greenwood. An inscription on the table encourages visitors to write letters recording their own reaction to the exhibit.
One letter inside the mailbox reflects, “I felt deeply unsettled while looking at this exhibit, especially because of the pieces that revealed the cover-up of the massacre…. I find the reactions to events like this more disturbing than the event itself, because it demonstrates that the violence was not a one-time fluke perpetrated by a few people … but by a much larger community of people who, by their silence and unwillingness to pursue justice, enable this behavior and allow it to become more broadly acceptable, hardening the hearts of a nation against what we should all, as humans, be able to recognize as an atrocity.”
The exhibition gave a thoughtful and detailed exploration of one of the worst atrocities to occur in our country, revealing how public response to acts of violence is crucial. While the disregard and devaluation of the event at the time led to a lack of reparations and the systemic destruction of Black Wall Street, modern revisitations of the event can, hopefully, lead to a future where such a thing will not happen again.
