1921 Bombing of America's Wealthiest Black Community; Lynching Rituals

[JGeropoulas]

The account of this brazen vigilante bombing raid is outrageous, but the graphic details of what routinely went on at lynchings is outside of all humanity--complete psychopathic sadism. I could only bear to include two of those accounts in the full article.

May 31st, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The ‘Negro Wall Street’ [the wealthiest black community in the United States at that time] is bombed from the air. Whites invade the enviable black business district, looting, burning, killing. The police commandeer private planes. The 101st Airborne is flown in. A load of dynamite is dropped. 75 instantly killed. Hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed.

Four truckloads of bodies are shoveled into mass graves along the Arkansas river. 4,000 black men, women, and children arrested and placed in concentration camps, where they are required to carry ‘passes’.

The city quickly re-zones the neighborhood so that the railroad can be run through, thus completing the destruction of that neighborhood.

One official, the police chief, was found guilty of “failing to take proper precautions for protecting life and property, and for conspiring to free automobile thieves and collect rewards.” “No legal records indicate that any other white official was ever charged of wrongdoing or even negligence.”

Chauncey DeVega notes at Alternet:

American Exceptionalism [which The Washington Blog defines as, “the US state-worshiper’s version of ‘Our God is the One True God’ ”] blinds those who share its gaze to uncomfortable facts and truths about their own country”

...such as lynchings, as described by Harvard scholar Garikai Chengu:

“A lynching was a quintessential American public ritual that often took place in front of large crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Historian Mark Gado notes that, “onlookers sometimes fired rifles and handguns hundreds of times into the corpse while people cheered and children played during the festivities.

[Warning: graphic content to follow]

…in 1899 the Springfield Weekly [in a newspaper article!] described a lynching by chronicling how, “the Negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and genital parts of his body. He pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on…before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones crushed into small bits…the Negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver…small pieces of bones went for 25 cents…”. Such graphic accounts were the norm in the South, and photos, were regularly taken of the lynched bodies on display and made into postcards that were sent all over the country.”

As described by Chauncey DeVega:

Two thousand people gathered for the killing, some taking a special excursion train from Atlanta for the purpose. The leaders of the lynching stripped Hose, chained him to a tree, stacked wood around him, and soaked everything in kerosene. The mob cut off Hose’s ears, fingers and genitals; they peeled the skin from his face. They watched, a newspaper reported, ”with unfeigning satisfaction” as the man’s veins ruptured from the heat and his blood hissed in the flames.

_http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/05/1921-black-business-district-in-tulsa-oklahoma-attacked-aerially-bombed-and-razed-victims-dumped-in-mass-graves.html