Just over one year ago, Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, in the context of a system of policing that continues to treat much of his and other officers’ violence as legal and blameless. This intersection of state power and racial violence is neither a unique nor a contemporary development. One hundred years ago, a mob of white Tulsans murdered hundreds of Black Tulsans, in the context of a system of policing that helped to create the conditions resulting in the Massacre and exacerbated those conditions in the Massacre’s immediate aftermath.

At a time when “racial reckoning” and “police accountability” are terminologies de rigueur, what do those terms require in response to state participation in such tragedies? In the case of Tulsa, monetary reparations are one necessary ingredient of any meaningful racial reckoning. Yet, the Massacre not only involved property loss and human devastation; it was also an assault on Black democratic agency. It was a form of estrangement of the Black community that was physical, economic, legal, and epistemic.

Alongside necessary monetary reparations, a democratic reckoning and commitments to repair are also necessary. Governments that have actively silenced and diminished the political voices of marginalized people have an obligation to correct that injustice by taking a multifaceted approach to restoring that lost political voice. Restoring political voice has implications for voting and electoral practices, school curricula (including education on histories and theories of racism and political violence), municipal governance and investments in the development of marginalized neighborhoods and small towns, and more.

State-Sanctioned Racial Violence

On Tuesday evening, May 31 and Wednesday, June 1, 1921, an angry mob of white Tulsans firebombed the city’s Black district, then known as “Greenwood,” the “East End,” or “Little Africa,” but now more frequently called “Black Wall Street,” in broad public discourse. The mob burned Greenwood to the ground, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses. It slaughtered hundreds of Black Tulsans, burying some in unmarked graves and slaying many more whose bodies have never been recovered. Beyond the killings, the white mob effectively exiled thousands more Black Tulsans who left the city for destinations north and west, traumatized, destitute, and humiliated. Those who remained in the city rebuilt Greenwood and restored the area, to some degree. Yet, despite the efforts to rebuild, the community never fully recovered.

Since the Massacre, survivors and their descendants have claimed that Tulsa Police officers actively participated in the Massacre, perhaps even arming the white mob.

Those likely hoping to avoid municipal liability and, thus, reparations have emphasized the blame of private individuals for the Massacre, with no mention of police involvement or state sanctioning. In an August 2020 speech at the groundbreaking for Greenwood Rising, a museum that is meant to pay homage to survivors of the Massacre, Tulsa mayor G.T. Bynum described the Massacre as an episode in which “people murdered our neighbors, and then they covered it up—for decades.” Instead of “whites” and “Blacks,” or “those with control over the state” and “those who were oppressed by it,” Bynum’s description reimagines the Massacre through a color-blind, power-blind, and aberrant lens—an inexplicable episode carried out by “people” against “neighbors.”

Yet Tulsa Police and criminal system actors, both as individuals and through policy, were part of the impetus for the Massacre and contributed to the humiliation and oppression of Black Tulsans in its immediate aftermath.

“The Police Peril”

Before the Massacre, Black Tulsans were advocating against police racism in Greenwood. For example, in January 1921, The Tulsa Star, Tulsa’s primary Black newspaper, published a lengthy editorial condemning “the police peril.” This peril, according to the newspaper’s editor A.J. Smitherman, was caused by white police officers who routinely came to the Black district, usurping the authority of the Black officers who had been appointed to patrol the Black district, unjustifiably searching Black establishments, and terrorizing Black Tulsans. Smitherman wrote of his own experience being unjustifiably stopped by police. He claimed that five white officers stopped a taxi with him inside and threatened his life simply because he stood up for himself and criticized their practices. His conclusion was that the white officers did not see that “all citizens have legal rights that even police officers must respect.”

It is thus unsurprising that less than six months later on May 31, 1921, Black Tulsans were wary when the Tulsa County Sheriff assured them that he would protect 19-year-old Black man Dick Rowland, who had seemingly falsely been accused of assaulting a 17-year-old white woman in a downtown elevator.

As a white mob gathered in an almost certain attempt to lynch Rowland, a group of Black Tulsans organized to protect Rowland from the mob. This confrontation at the county jail was a direct response to the interlocking failures of harsh police presence paired with little police protection for Black people. As Roscoe Dunjee, editor of another Oklahoma Black newspaper, The Black Dispatch, explained on June 3, 1921: “The sheriff of Tulsa county has permitted men to be lynched by the same gang that was at his jail door Tuesday night.”

Even as policing theories have evolved over the past 100 years, the basic truth has remained: far too often, police are present in Black communities not to provide Black security, but to undermine it. This seemingly timeless truth ultimately resulted in the Massacre that May evening in 1921 and through the next day.

Much inquiry about the role of police in the Massacre over the past century has focused on whether police officers directly armed the white mob or participated in mob activities themselves. But this inquiry overlooks the fact that police malfeasance and ineffectuality created the conditions for the Massacre.

Policing also intensified the Massacre’s brutal aftermath. For example, in the days following the Massacre, the City set up “detention camps” for Black Tulsans on local fairgrounds, packed with tents and barracks, vulnerable to flooding and other environmental hazards. One week after the massacre, Tulsa’s police chief issued an order requiring that Black Tulsans wear green identification tags bearing their employer’s signature or be arrested and banished to the detention camps. Although the green card would ostensibly protect Black Tulsans from police involvement—“the certificate of industry and decency,” one white-run local newspaper called it—the measure unsurprisingly offered little protection from arbitrary police contact.

Justifying their actions through a claim that Black Tulsans were sharing green tags, white Tulsa Police officers began rounding up  any Black person they wanted to and demanding evidence of employment. When Black people “were unable to prove to the police that they were engaged in any lawful occupations,” white Tulsa Police officers captured and deposited them into a detention camp. Both the green card order itself, and its implementation, are examples of the racially oppressive practices by police at the time that intensified the already horrific nature of the Massacre.

The Tulsa Police Chief lifted the green card order on July 7, 1921—but only for “bona fide negro citizens.” Although it is doubtful that many Black people would have wanted to move to Tulsa immediately after the Massacre, the law assured that they could not: Black people who wanted to move to Tulsa had to receive an endorsement from “some reputable white resident of Tulsa.”

As the City debated what to do with the Black district after the Massacre, it convened a grand jury to assign blame for the event and to come up with a set of proposals to prevent future outbreaks. The grand jury unsurprisingly concluded that Black Tulsans were to blame. Specifically, the jury concluded that “indiscriminate mingling of white and colored people in dance halls and other places of amusement” raised concerns. Its proposed solution was to replace the Black officers who were assigned to patrol the Black district before the Massacre with white police officers who would ensure that “a proper relationship may be maintained between the two races.”

Ideas for Democratic Repair

The silence that took root in Tulsa’s Black community after the Massacre was a direct consequence of state action. Given this articulation of the democratic harms that policing caused during the 1921 massacre, what might democratic repair look like in contemporary Tulsa?

As an outsider to Tulsa, I am hesitant to devise highly specific prescriptions for a milieu that is not my own. For too long, Tulsa’s Black community has been overlooked in articulating its own agenda for justice, including reparations. Part of “democratic repair” has to mean shifting decisionmaking power to those who have suffered marginalization.

Yet, there are some general, basic features of what a capacious commitment to democratic repair in the wake of state violence might mean.

• First, given the centrality of police as state actors setting an environment for and exacerbating this violence, transformative change in policing is not just good public policy in the present—it is a way of repairing the democratic harms perpetuated in the past. The need for transformative change to policing in contemporary Tulsa is demonstrated through multiple sources. The City’s Equality Indicators reports, initiated by Mayor Bynum’s office, have consistently given some of the lowest equality scores in the city for “justice,” with the lowest equality score in the justice category for “Officer use of force by subject race.” Worse—justice equality scores have decreased each year since the annual reports started in 2018. It is too early to tell how to interpret these declining scores, but they suggest that reform efforts have either been ineffective or slow to show results for racial equality. The mayor appointed the city’s first Black police chief in 2020, whose key initiatives have been creating new units for community engagement and public relations, especially through social media. Local activists have been advocating for change to policing in Tulsa, but they have faced serious resistance on many fronts.

• Second, the linkages between education, including school curricula, and democratic voice is well understood. This is why the new state law banning certain aspects of education on race—including lessons that teach that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” is especially insidious. One hundred years after the Tulsa Massacre, the only way Tulsa youth will be permitted to learn about it at school is through a highly politicized lens that ignores its contemporary legacy and discourages reflection on continued responsibility for its harms.

• Third, vibrant community organizations, journalistic enterprises, and aesthetic works are the lifeblood of democracy. Part of a program for democratic reparations could mean grants for Black-led local community organizations and organizers, journalists and other writers, artists, and musicians in Tulsa who are contributing to the process of bringing the community out of the silence that both state and private violence constructed.

• Fourth, of course, voting is a critical piece of democratic engagement. Barriers to voting take on special concern in a state like Oklahoma, which has the second highest state imprisonment rate in the nation. As in most states, there is a severe Black-white disparity in state incarceration. While Oklahoma has restored voting rights for people with felony records, the State Election Board’s policy requires that they be denied voting rights until they have served out their full sentence, regardless of whether they are actually still incarcerated. It also fails to provide information to people with felony records that they can have their voting rights restored. Perhaps in Tulsa, part of an agenda for democratic repair would mean affirmatively expanding access to and information about the franchise, especially among those who have formerly been incarcerated.

• Fifth, the Massacre caused a mass exodus out of Tulsa, which also weakened Black collective democratic voice in the city. In a parallel way to the City’s efforts to attract remote workers by offering them $10,000 relocation grants, the City could offer relocation grants for those who would contribute to the strengthening of the political voice of survivors and descendants of survivors of the Tulsa Massacre.

To be sure, these ideas are preliminary and would certainly face political obstacles. Yet, this conversation is important as part of a long-term strategy of creating reparative tools after racially violent events that would restore lost democratic voice.

Photo credit: Nehemiah Frank (l), teaches his cousin David McIntye II of the Tulsa massacre, in the Greenwood district, on May 28, 2021 in Tulsa, Oklahoma (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

The post Reckoning with State-Sanctioned Racial Violence: Lessons from the Tulsa Race Massacre appeared first on Just Security.

We are in a new phase of the long police reform debate. Over decades, opaque spending, police staffing practices, expansion of criminal codes, and other factors have made some Black and brown urban communities neighborhood-level police states. We are now, perhaps for the first time, seriously interrogating whether police should be able to function in these ways and, more fundamentally, questioning the role of police in public safety.

Politicians and courts have typically deferred to police claims of expertise in the delivery of public safety and community security. Today, by contrast, policymakers and the public have begun to question whether greater police funding, power, and discretion actually increase security. Directly impacted communities, coupled with racial justice movements and new-generation political leaders, have credibly suggested that even as policing sometimes saves lives, policing is ultimately a security threat. This narrative shift places the police on uncharted moral and political terrain.

Through qualitative research in several American cities, I have interviewed many Black people about their beliefs on, experiences with, and hopes for policing and security. I have seen some of the complex fault lines at the heart of debates over police reform. In these debates — now centering defunding, abolition, and other measures aimed at shrinking the footprint of policing in American life — there is an inevitable response from skeptics: What about Black people’s safety?

One hard truth, at least according to criminological research, is that even as policing has been brutal and racist, it may have prevented some violence. It may have deterred deaths. The Great Crime Decline of the 1990s may have been partly attributable to policing tactics, including hot-spots policing and the rightly castigated “broken windows” approach. The devastating and multiplex harms to Black communities from techniques of control and caging are also well documented. Yet, in a world more focused on the interpersonal violence that shows up in crime statistics than the structural violence that does not, it appears that increased policing has some measurable relationship with reductions in violent crime.

Black people, experientially, are not ignorant of this fact. Research also suggests that many Black Americans, including those who live in marginalized neighborhoods, report that they want more police presence in their communities. They just want police to “stop killing us.” They want police to be better and fairer.

I have heard many Black research participants share thoughts that are reminiscent of these findings — but with important caveats. For example, Linda (pseudonym), a 46-year-old Black woman living in Washington, D.C., told me — with a jocular tone, sprinkled among numerous critiques of police bias and inefficacy: “I’d rather have [police] around here 24/7. It make me feel much safer, whether they’re crooked or not. I wouldn’t tell. They’re in the uniforms. As long as they look like police, I’m alright, or security. I’m alright with any type of protection.”

“It make me feel much safer, whether they’re crooked or not” is not a stunning endorsement of policing. Indeed, earlier in the interview, Linda complained about how much the police “suck” in her neighborhood, and later, she shared an unsettling story about her nephew’s experience of physical police violence. “They do that to our babies,” she lamented. Yet, in a poll that asks, “If you have to choose, do you support or oppose increasing the number of police officers,” there is a good chance that Linda would respond, “support.”

Even if experience makes it doubtful that American policing is the right institution to protect Black communities, many Black people still share the American Dream that the police can function to “protect and serve” everyone. This complex reality — that many Black people distrust police but still want more and better policing — presents a conundrum for policymakers. To the untrained eye, movement calls to defund the police and reinvest in social services and community groups might seem difficult to reconcile with social scientists’ and technocrats’ warnings that status quo policing is necessary, that “under-policing” is as much of a problem as over-policing.

There are at least three points about Black security that policymakers faced with this conundrum might consider:

First, social science might not be the most relevant form of policy expertise for our current moment. This moment calls for expertise of many kinds. One shortcoming of social science-primacy in policymaking is that it is inherently backward-looking, a way to assess the worlds we have already inhabited. Empirical social scientists can only study approaches that have existed and ideas that have already been implemented. Given this reality, it is obvious why research shows that people want the police to work better in their neighborhoods; there has never been another widely available, well-funded, politically powerful institutionalized protective force against violence within this nation. Offered a choice between the devil one knows and an unknown, most people, at least initially, choose the devil they know. It is unsurprising police presence deters violent crime when deployed in particular ways; again, there has never been a well-funded, institutionally embedded alternative with primary control over violence reduction.

Social science can help policymakers think carefully about the past and potential consequences of policies. Building security for Black America will require study of not only fluctuations in crime rates and opinions on the police, but also answers to other research questions. Here are a few:

• How much access do Black people have to supportive people to disrupt and interject in moments where we are at risk of violence?
• What resources do Black people have to find ways to rebuild a sense of security once it has been violated?
• How free do Black people feel to move through neighborhoods of all varieties without encountering suspicion?
• How free do Black people feel to pursue activities that bring us joy, such as running, birdwatching, or simply spending time with friends outdoors?

Yet, social science cannot answer more fundamental questions about the justice or moral rightness of approaches to security. It cannot tell us when we have reached the tipping point at which police-supported safety is not worth the broader unsafety and political, social, and legal estrangement of Black Americans. Supporting the security of Black America means taking stock of historical and social scientific research without being unduly confined by its terms.

Second, social scientists are likely misinterpreting the data on what security means to Black people, overstating the centrality of more and better policing. Most of the research and polling data on policing were designed to probe policing, so — unsurprisingly — their findings are about policing. The problem with this approach is that security, both objectively and subjectively, may not be solely or even primarily related to policing. Consider, for example, Sandra (pseudonym), a 41-year old Black woman who lives close to Linda in Washington, D.C. When I asked Sandra about the positive changes in her neighborhood, she replied:

I see a whole lot of condos being built really really fast, and I think that’s good. I got tired of seeing all Black people all the time. I want to be able to understand other people’s cultures … I started seeing gardens and people that show interest and come to the community and motivate you and your kids. They have a One Stop where kids can go and play ball after school and earn stipends. I think that it’s better than when we were coming up because there was nothing to do. We had to fight for summer jobs. We had to wait until school came back around until we could get our jobs back. I think it’s changed for the better for my children and my children’s children. It seems like it’s going in the right direction. There’s a lot more things to do instead of hanging out and being afraid to walk down the street. More police presence is here, and you feel a little bit safer. It could be better with the noise control sometimes. I understand on the weekend they’re having parties and all that, but I never seen that when I was coming up. They have parties and it’s all lit up … [T]hey rent the room and have block parties. We didn’t have that. There wasn’t no money, and if there was we didn’t know about it. It’s a lot of better options and food, shopping, and better quality of food. I’m just glad I have a chance to be a part of it.

A policing study would zero in on Sandra’s comment about feeling safe in the presence of police. But Sandra’s new sense of security in her redeveloping neighborhood has numerous components — economic integration, racial integration, greening, increased community engagement, activities for youth, employment opportunities for youth, social activities for adults, and widely available healthy food. While these are to some extent “root cause” investments, which some worry will take generations to promote security, many of these investments can have immediate safety effects. Narrowing Sandra’s thoughts about safety to one statement — “More police presence is here, and you feel a little bit safer” — gives a false sense of her vision for a safe and secure community.

Finally, in this time of great change, we need practical solutions. We must take stock of American policing for what it is. Demands for pragmatism in this debate are often aimed at defunding advocates or abolitionists. But from the vantage point of Black security, it may be that the most realistic approaches to our current crisis will stem from a recognition that American policing is “working the way it is supposed to” — its practices and incentives emanate from its longstanding, basic function as a tool of race-class control. Clinging to the dream of a racially equitable system of policing as currently constituted might be more utopian than abolition.

Abolitionists often speak of their approach as “radical imagination.” By “radical imagination,” they mean that their ideas are radical in a Leftist political sense and radical in their boldness and expansiveness. That language, though motivating to some advocates and activists, might seem frightening or unrealistic to others.

It is important to remember that there is radical imagination on all sides of this debate. It may take radical imagination to envision a world without police and prisons, but it also takes a very bold imagination to believe that it is possible to stop unjustified, extrajudicial, and racialized police killings within an institution built on those characteristics.

It is time to embrace new ways of evidence production, consumption, and visioning. We need approaches that are fit to the task of honoring and nurturing the security of Black people and Black communities.

Image: Protesters and police officers clash for the second morning in a row on July 1, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

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