In this episode of Lovecraft Country, the characters must travel in time to retrieve a priceless occult tome destroyed during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. They come face-to-face with abusive family dynamics and the life-shattering events which determined their family’s future.

The Tulsa Race Massacre and violence of Racial Cleansing

The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of many instances of massive racial violence directed at Black Americans. These have commonly been called “Race riots,” but the term is being re-evaluated in light of their intent and outcomes. They are now more often described as “race massacres” or instances of “racial cleansing,” reflecting their outcomes. Learning more about these events, which are often left out of history textbooks, is critical to understanding American history.

Tulsa, Oklahoma is considered one of the most notable examples of race massacres as its Black community of around 10,000 thrived commercially and socially, despite segregation and other racial restrictions before the attack. After a Black man was accused of assaulting (or touching) a white woman in the elevator, a mob of thousands of white Tulsans shot, burned, and bombed most of the Black region of Greenwood. Even for those whose families survived and escaped, the city was no longer a safe place to live. For an eyewitness account of the Tulsa race massacre, read Events of the the Tulsa disaster, by Mary E. Jones Parrish.

The University of Tulsa Archives has an archival collection of materials related to the massacre, including 13 interviews conducted in 1978 with first-hand witnesses and survivors. Efforts are still underway to locate the graves of the victims of the Tulsa massacre. Past Lives, Present Learning, a project from Civics 101 and the Black Heritage Trail, explores historic gravesites of Black Americans in New Hampshire, which sheds some light on the labor required to research Black gravesites.

Such events occurred on a smaller scale throughout the country. The Langston League Syllabus for this episode includes newspaper clippings of many lesser-known incidents in which Black people were forcibly expelled from towns, losing their homes, stores, businesses, and communities. The consequences, including financial devastation, affected families for generations.

Our collections also contain one of the only extant letters describing a race protest in Amityville, New York: Letter from Emily Wilmarth, Amityville, New York, to Annie E. Trembly, Hudson City, New Jersey, 1866 October 23. The protest occurred on October 20, 1866, at a Political Republican meeting. Wilmarth recounts the event, including descriptions of weapons used, and mentions several people by name. The author employs racial slurs and mentions a rumor that the protesters will return, assuring her correspondent that “the boys are prepared for them” and that she is sleeping with a rifle at the head of her bed.

Memorializing the Dead

“As long as you speak my name I will live forever.” – Ashes to Ashes (2018)

After returning to Tulsa via time travel and watching the the city burn again as an adult, Montrose, who already lived through the massacre as a child, recites the names of the dead and their stories. In an artist’s book recently acquired by our Special Collections Library, Dr. Shirley Ann Whitaker’s Ashes to Ashes : a homegoing celebration for the unburied performs a similar act on a much larger scale. Developed from the 2016 funeral service to remember the victims of lynching, the book includes the names of nearly four thousand Black Americans whose lives were cut short by lynching, including Emmett Till. Dr. Whitaker and artist Winfred Rembert are interviewed in a New Yorker documentary on the aftermath of lynching.

Sonia Sanchez

The episode overlays several scenes, including the burning of Tulsa, with the poem “Catch Fire.” Written by Sonia Sanchez, Philadelphia’s first poet laureate, “Catch Fire” calls on her brothers and sisters to catch the fires of their past and carry them on. Her fires are not those of destruction but of resistance, of creativity, and of life.

Our Special Collections Library holds a letter and poem from Sanchez. In the 1969 letter, she writes to Walter Lowenfeld about settling in at the University of Pittsburgh, thanks him for a good review, shares news about her latest book, and asks him for a copy of his anthology [The Writing on the Wall]. The collection also has a printed pamphlet of “Ima Talken Bout the Nation of Islam.”

In 1977, Sanchez spoke out against University of Pennsylvania’s security department surveilling student organizations.

Jackie Robinson

Lovecraft Country includes many references to the Negro baseball leagues, Jackie Robinson, and a mysterious figure with a baseball bat who saved young Montrose’s life during the Tulsa riots. Robinson, like many other Black Americans, experimented with more than one path toward Black liberation during his lifetime. The cartoon below from the Jerry Doyle papers highlights Robinson’s support of business ownership and respectability as means by which Black Americans could obtain power. In the cartoon, he addresses the tiny figure of Stokely Carmichael (now Kwame Ture, carrying a “civil riots” placard) and gestures to a graph showing an increase in “Harlem Negro Owned Businesses.” The caption: “The kind of Black power that I advocate.”

As the episode shows, however, even a thriving Black business community can be completely destroyed by those who resent their success.

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