Karen Hunter said she returned from Tulsa changed.
After taking Egunwale Chief Amusan’s Real Black Wall Street Tour, Hunter told her audience the experience “transformed how I see myself, how I see this country.” Amusan, author of “America’s Black Wall Street,” does not call himself a historian. He calls himself a “history recovery specialist.”
In their conversation, Amusan pushed back against accounts of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that present Greenwood residents only as victims. He said Black men went to the courthouse on May 31, 1921, to protect Dick Rowland from a lynch mob.
“They go to defend this beautiful soul named Dick Rowland, who many of them don’t even know,” Amusan said. “But they know he’s part of their community,” before noting that Greenwood had already prepared for the possibility of attack. “Get your sandbags and your rifles ready because there will be a time where we’re going to have to defend Greenwood,” he said. “And they were right.”
Hunter said that point stayed with her, especially because many of the men were trained veterans. Amusan called them “brilliant people, brilliant strategists, not just in thought or theory, but in action.” Still, Greenwood was destroyed and Amusan declared the use of planes showed that the attackers were not facing a defenseless community.
“You don’t use planes unless you’re losing,” he stated. “You don’t go get airplanes and drop bombs on defenseless people,” challenging the familiar emphasis on Rowland’s encounter with Sarah Page, calling it “the greatest scam in history.”
“You don’t go and destroy an entire district like that in 18 hours unplanned,” Amusan continued. “We got land. We got our own hospitals. We got our own schools,” he added. “They had the spirit of self-ownership, self-control of their destiny.”
Watch the full clip below.
