"Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer," on Nat Geo, Further Exposes Painful Truths

Dawn Porter's film, premiering Friday, June 18 on National Geographic&#160;and Hulu, explains what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over Memorial Day weekend 1921. Until specials and documentaries popped up to commemorate the century mark of the killings and pillaging, this shameful part of history had been largely unknown.Even Porter, educated at excellent institutions -- Bronx High School of Science, Swarthmore College, Georgetown Law -- told MediaVillage that she only learned about the Tulsa massacre about seven years ago while working on four short films for the Smithsonian's African American Museum."The first time you see this, it takes your breath away," she said. "You cannot tell this story enough. But what I wanted to add to this collection of films and events was to push us back in time, was to see what came before. There were more than 20 massacres in this concentrated time period."Porter (John Lewis: Good Trouble, Bobby Kennedy for President) connects the dots of history. The film reminds viewers how many Blacks had flourished during Reconstruction. By the summer of 1919, while some Blacks thrived, some whites felt threatened. Greenwood, a neighborhood in Tulsa known as Black Wall Street, bustled with professionals and businesses. Jealously poisoned with bred-in-the-bone racism among whites, resulted in these acts of terrorism.The film not only reveals what happened a century ago but explains the direct line of hate-fueled crimes from Greenwood to police killing Blacks in America today."Tulsa did not happen in a vacuum," DeNeen Brown, a Washington Post reporter at the center of this film, explains on camera. "There is a direct connective thread from East St. Louis through D.C. and Omaha, Nebraska and Elaine, Arkansas -- all the way to Tulsa. The patterns of the white mob attacking Black people is the same in each of these communities. Many of the factors are the same: economic envy, the fallacy of white supremacy, the accusations that a white woman was accosted by Black men. There are patterns in each of these massacres. The patterns set the stage of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921."Brown's extensive reporting on the subject is evident. As a Black journalist, she explains that her mission is "to tell the stories of people who might not be represented in the newspaper."Few episodes better exemplify the selective accounting of history than what happened in this neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, from May 31 through June 1, 1921. Filmmaker Porter weaves together oral histories with elderly survivors, maps illustrating how race massacres spread across the country, and how, today, descendants of these massacres continue to fight for reparations.Despite a common misconception, Blacks did not simply surrender. Notice the first two words of the title &#8211; Rise Again. The documentary stresses that Blacks rose up and fought back."You had the soldiers who took up arms in D.C., and in Tulsa, men also gathering to fight back and get (Dick) Rowland out of jail," Porter said of the man used as the excuse to start the massacre. "And you have the story of Black resistance. That is important to highlight. People did not allow themselves to be slaughtered."The calumny that sparked outrage was the white damsel in distress scenario. Rowland, who shined shoes in a Tulsa office building, got into the elevator one day. The elevator didn't line up evenly with the floor, and Rowland stumbled when he entered and brushed into the white female elevator operator. One accepted story had her running, screaming, terrified. He was arrested and taken into custody.Photos show whites scaling the building where Rowland was jailed. Armed with guns, ignorance and unbridled fury, they were determined to get what they wanted -- in this case, a perverted sense of justice, and to hell with the law. They are hauntingly similar to the January 6 insurrection.In the images before the massacre, beautifully dressed Black professionals in well-appointed homes pose for the camera, happy, thriving. The after photos reveal a razed, charred moonscape of buildings. Thousands of people were rounded up and interned. Hundreds were dead. The onslaught also came from above as turpentine bombs were thrown from planes."All of us were in the house when we saw coming up the walk four men with torches in their hands," survivor George Monroe relays. "The torches were burning. When my mother saw them coming, she said, 'You get under the bed.' While I was under the bed, one of the guys coming past the bed stepped on my finger, and I was about to scream. My sister put her hand over my mouth so I couldn't be heard. They set our house on fire. And went right straight to the curtains and set the curtains on fire, and I remember that."Now that we know Monroe's and many others' histories, we must never forget them. And Porter's aim is that we learn these truths."For a while when President Obama was elected, there was this idea that we were multi-racial and all of that history was in the past," Porter said. "And I think that is categorically untrue. The root of racism, the root of this behavior -- police targeting Black people, this kind of falsely charging Black people with minuscule crimes and criminalizing Black life -- has these ugly roots. And if you don't know your history, you are doomed to repeat it."Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer&#160; will premiere Friday, June 18 at 9 p.m. on Nat Geo. It will also&#160;be available on Hulu.Click the social buttons to share this content with your friends and colleagues.The opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author and/or subject(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet, Inc. management or associated writers.

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"Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer," on Nat Geo, Further Exposes Painful Truths

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"Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer," on Nat Geo, Further Exposes Painful Truths

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