Tulsa Race Riot Didn't Destroy Historic Greenwood Neighborhood As Much As Integration Did

What is your opinion?

 

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/alixwinter/files/sampson_winter_2016.pdf

https://www.childtrends.org/blog/redlining-left-many-communities-color-exposed-lead

 

Yeah bro, bullets and bombs don't do as much damage as economic forces. Just ask the folks in Hiroshima.

They are equally as bad.

 

tl;dr - more people b****ing about gentrification?

 

@Os Trigonum

 

There's a blog for that.

 

Another stupid pgabs thread. It’s not my opinion though my opinion is the same.

 

Doubt it.

Rich ol' Southern California is loaded with ethnic enclaves. Even as property values skyrocket, the older areas get gentrified or bought out by the city through imminent domain. The new LA Rams stadium made a bunch of prospectors jump into Inglewood despite how crime ridden the neighborhoods are. That wave are the early adopters but the surrounding areas in general are already crazy overpriced for what they are. Once the stadium opens, the flood gates will open towards kicking out the locals and putting funds into law enforcement to "clean up" the place.

As that happens the original inhabitants move eastward. Probably all the way to Riverside if they didn't own the properties.

That's just a recent example. Plenty of places have been transformed because of Asian immigrants turning "undesirable suburbs" into commercial hubs while the original folks move to other towns for them. Part of it is preference (like minded needs), but there's the obvious economic aspects influencing it.

 

The only flaw in Candyman's dissertation is that adult life for blacks is not a cafeteria in a large, integrated school district. You can't predict where you're going to be a few years, there isn't always a black kid's table, none of the educated white adults have to talk to you or show you anything, and none of the uneducated white adults have to give you any square pizza, so the people in secured office buildings and with leasable residential property need to be conditioned to not see you as a basketball daughter rapist with n-word privileges.

Hence....integration!

 

poor pgabs! he starts a thread with potential to have some interesting discussions and immediately gets s*** on...i cant say he doesnt bring it on himself though - haha - sorry brah!

i saw that documentary on PBS last night...definitely worth watching. the tulsa massacre was only part of the story - it was a full history of greenwood up through desegregation. full of interviews with people who lived there including survivors of the massacre. some of those must have been done in the 70's. they had lots of really interesting stories...many tragic ones. but its also a story of self-sufficiency. they were barred from the white side of town so they made their own community. pgabs comment about needing "good influences" was touched on by a guy who talked about how the school had all black teachers, many of them who taught there for 30+ years so they were not just community role models, but legends to their students. he said something that struck me - "we knew who these high school teachers were in second grade - and ten years later when we were in high school they were still there" - the teachers were true institutions and the kids actually looked up to them. one dude talked about how his teacher made them all learn shakespeare and he could still quote these long passages.

the documentary actually discussed the premise of this thread...it was a perspective i had not thought of, but it made sense.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/t-town/

Goin’ Back to T-Town tells the story of Greenwood, an extraordinary Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that prospered during the 1920s and 30s despite rampant and hostile segregation. Torn apart in 1921 by one of the worst racially-motivated massacres in the nation’s history, the neighborhood rose from the ashes, and by 1936 boasted the largest concentration of Black-owned businesses in the U.S., known as “Black Wall Street.” Ironically, it could not survive the progressive policies of integration and urban renewal of the 1960s. Told through the memories of those who lived through the events, the film is a bittersweet celebration of small-town life and the resilience of a community’s spirit.

 

...one of the things I always remind myself of, whenever the history of black people in the United States is given any type of scrutiny...

...is that the "American Way of Life" is almost exclusively a social construct and experiment, and not an organic occurence.

It is dangerous to suggest, from my perspective, that the resiliency of black people throughout this nation's segregated history, was anything more than a cracked mirror version of what was already happening elsewhere...whether or not those communities were some denomination of Eastern European or Spanish or French.

I have long considered that one of the great misstatements of American life was that this was a "melting pot" of ideas and cultures.

That is certainly what can be gathered, from a superficial glance...and as superficial observances go, not an altogether inaccurate one. But as is often the case with constructs, the framework must be examined if a true understanding of the structure is to be gleaned.

I've always reckoned that America was more of a patchwork quilt than anything like a melting pot...and that was long before it started to fray and unravel (yet again) into public discontentment and violent, seditious upheaval.

And the thread that stitched together this eclectic mishmash of human beings was the black Americans, who would encounter roughly the same impediments to progress and freedom no matter where they were or what they attempted to accomplish, as individuals or as communities.

The suggestion that morality preceded vanity in the establishment of this nation is at best not accurate...and to ascribe that morality is revealed to be the elixir for social ills (in this instance, particularly, or for any other involving Negroes) is a tacit acceptance of a separate but equal state of being that should not have lasted as long as it has in this country...and but for the structure of the construct, possibly might not have.

Neither morality or vanity preceded the other in the affectation and transduction into the reality in this case (or any other). That is the result of choice...a uniqueness to the human condition that can ascribe levels of importance to those abstracts, and subsequently define what is "truth".

I do not accept that the humanity and morality exhibited by black people in this documentary was borne because of the circumstances in which it found a way to flourish. Material gain or accumulation has never been a prerequisite for human dignity...except where Negroes are concerned.

They achieved those material successes BECAUSE they were human. And while the rest of the nation largely had the power of the state at beck and call to defend and preserve their humanity and their endeavors, Negroes did not, and on very few occasions if they ever did.

This was never going to be "one nation" as long as there was going to be allowance for, tolerance and legal edification of segregated interactions along monetary lines.

And that is why that community was destroyed (overtly)...as were many others of similar construction at the time...and why much of that destruction persists into the present day.

The human stories of the Negroes here are of the saddest variety, to me...because the inference is that these people were somehow only people because of what they were able to build by "playing by the rules" or "getting over the past" or pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.

The sobering truth is that, if communities like the one in Tulsa, Oklahoma, could not rise out of a sense of shared experience or common endeavor without the external press of societal rejection and/or confinement, then it was destined to fail at some point, because the larger construction of the nation proper (again, legally...not morally) would not support it.

This "logic" skirts along the lines of those who try to find the "good" in chattel slavery of black people in this country. Or of those who want to note the moderate (comparatively speaking) gains of black Americans in spite of state-sponsored racism or segregation...

...it can't have been all bad...or it's not that much of a problem...because x-person or y-person were able to succeed...

...to excuse the pervasive and calculated and regimented circumstance in which the "success" was achieved in the first place...and to excuse the consequences of preserving or reinforcing that perverted circumstance.

I find, personally, no fault in either the enslaved Negro finding some way to survive under such adverse conditions or the enslaved Negro who decides to end his own life before he suffers the indignity of such conditions. Neither choice is wrong because neither choice had any agency for him.

It is good that these people were able to tell their stories and grant their perspectives and recount their experiences. It is the best way to preserve not only history or the future...

...but the truth as well.

...but it is perhaps more telling (and more sinister) that this and so many other similar stories have been religiously excised from the American record.

...because for some, the lie is more compelling than the truth...

 

I really would like to see this documentary.
I agree with assertion that integration (while wholly needed) ended up having unintended bad consequences because it is impossible to successfully integrate into a society filled with systematic racism. Blacks were leaving schools where they were succeeding and moving into all-white schools where (for the most part) the teachers/administrations/other students didn't want them to succeed. The same thing with jobs and home ownership. While some barriers were being lifted, even more barriers were being added. While integration may have begun a very long time ago, it's still not over until there is a complete level playing field in all aspects of life.

curious Pgabs - have you ever read Tony Brown's "Black Lies, White Lies"? It discusses a lot of these same issues.

 

HUNH?!

Drive around Greater Houston and you mostly see predominantly black, Hispanic, etcetera neighborhoods.

Sure, you get a bit of a mix in the suburbs, but look at a map that shows where races tend to live in Houston.

 

This is something that isn't discussed much because the concern is that racists will use it to justify policies of segregation.

However you are absolutely right, it did in many respected harm middle and upper middle class blacks and neighborhoods as well.

I remember an old black man telling me that segregation wasn't something most black people thought about, that it just was how it was. That in general black folks didn't really want to be around white people, that they had their own community and friends. He said segregation failed not because of the "separate" part but because of the "equal" part. He said that the schools, hospitals and everything else was so starkly unequal that black people started to complain. He told me that he really believes segregation would exist today had it been close to equal.

History, or the general belief of past history tends to simply things as black and white and often there is some grey.