After decades of silence, the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre is being told
It's a little more than two weeks from the 100th commemoration of the Tulsa Race Massacre — one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history for decades, eliminated from school history books and museums in Oklahoma.
“When we opened this exhibit in 2005, there were over 500 museums and historical societies in Oklahoma. Not one had a permanent exhibit of African American history. Not one," Bruce Fisher said.
Fisher has been a curator for the Oklahoma History Center since 1999 and largely responsible for their African American exhibit created six years after he arrived.
“They were in the process of designing this building,” Fisher said. “We had very little artifacts."
Fisher's first mission to make sure the story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was told, ensuring one of the most painful, darkest and significant stories in American history had a permanent place here.
“Hundreds of Black people are murdered. Every house burned to the ground. Nothing, there was no precedent for this. Anywhere,” Fisher said.
Newspaper headlines, such as the one from the "Black Dispatch," chronicled only a fraction of the untold story. Days of mass chaos and destruction in the Tulsa Greenwood District, hundreds were killed and Black Wall Street was burned down to ashes, destroying African Americans’ dreams of hope and prosperity.
Fisher believes one reason this critical part of history was dormant for more than 70 years: fear.
“You had people who didn't know whether it would happen again," Fisher said. “You had people in smaller communities if it happened there, it might happen to us. I think that's one of the reasons people didn't really talk about it."
Fisher said many even denied the massacre ever took place despite the lives lost and damage done.
“There were pictures and videos, but nobody knew where they were and who had them," Fisher said.
Fisher said many of the documented articles he tried to collect were altered or deleted from the archives.
“From 1893 until now, but when you go to the page of May 29... May 31, the riot, when you go to that page in the newspaper, you see it cut out. Every newspaper we could find had the article cut out," Fisher said.
Fisher said some survivors, including his own grandparents, moved to all-Black towns in Oklahoma or out of state altogether. The stories were passed down to their descendants.
Fisher said it wasn't until 75 years after the massacre in 1996 when State Rep. Don Ross and Sen. Maxine Horner created the Oklahoma commission, which provided a safe place for survivors to speak out and be recorded.
“You know this was trauma on steroids," Fisher said.
With the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre approaching, Fisher said it's up to remaining survivors to continue telling their stories for historians to accurately document them and for schools to teach it.
“It's got to be incorporated into the curriculum," Fisher said. “The teachers have a lot of latitude on what they can use in the classroom. They can't claim ignorance anymore.”
So that history doesn't repeat itself.
“There's nothing in the history of this country comparable to that. Then or now," Fisher said.