On Tuesday evening, students, professors and community members gathered in Kresge Auditorium to hear the 2024 Alfred E. Golz Memorial Lecture delivered by Professor Scott Ellsworth of the University of Michigan, titled “Hidden Histories: The Tulsa Race Massacre and the Fight for America’s Past.”

Gracie Loney ’25, a Tulsa, Okla. native, introduced Ellsworth and reflected on how she had barely learned about the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre growing up. Loney also acknowledged that for decades Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma deliberately wrote the massacre out of the history books.

“I didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of what happened in 1921 until I was in high school, but, by then, erasure of this history had already taken root in my community.… One of my best friends never learned about this massacre in school. My mom, who lived in Tulsa for 33 years, never heard about it until I brought it up,” Loney said. “The silence was no accident. For decades, Tulsa downplayed what happened in 1921. History books didn’t mention it, and teachers didn’t teach it.”

Ellsworth then began the lecture describing the sheer brutality of the massacre, which was the single worst incident of racial violence in United States history. Over the course of some 15 hours, more than a thousand Black homes and businesses were looted and burned to the ground, more than 10,000 people were made homeless and the death toll is estimated to range from 80 to more than 300 people.

The violence occurred with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan following the First World War. The Klan reemerged as an anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic organization with massive electoral success, taking over the legislature of many southern states and cities, including Tulsa, but was not limited to the South, gaining control over state governments in New Jersey, Oregon and Indiana.

Ellsworth explained that Tulsa was able to grow economically due to the oil found in Oklahoma. Some of that money flowed into the area’s Black community, creating Greenwood, a part of the city that flourished with Black-owned businesses and community centers.

“It was an absolutely vibrant, prospering community,” Ellsworth said. “It was a place where, for many African Americans, this was a sense where this might be a place where the American Dream is going to work.”

However, the increased wealth coincided with an increase in crime. In 1920, a white teenager named Roy Belton was lynched by a mob for the murder of a cab driver, and instead of condemning the lynching, Tulsa’s elected leaders praised it.

Eight months later when Dick Rowland, a young African American man, was arrested and falsely accused of assaulting a white woman, a newspaper reporter picked up and exaggerated the story hoping to generate sales via embracing sensationalism.

The newspaper article prompted a crowd estimated to number around a thousand white men to gather outside the courthouse. Black World War I veterans armed and in uniform then showed up to defend the courthouse and Rowland. Tensions continued to rise. Over the course of the night, a white-led mob gathered and planned an invasion of Greenwood.

Ellsworth shared how one of the members of the community described the view of the mob gathered at dawn.

“It looked like the Milky Way. There were all these little dots of lights all over the place, and those dots of lights were the cigarettes and cigars of pipes of thousands of armed white Tulsans who had gathered to invade Greenwood,” Ellsworth said.

The mob proceeded to destroy and loot Greenwood. A plane even dropped dynamite on the city, making it the first place to be bombed by air in the United States.

“Greenwood afterwards, it looks like, if you see photographs of it, it looks like Hiroshima or Nagasaki or maybe Frankfurt during World War II. There’s this crumbling brick, there’s blackened trees and everything is gone,” Ellsworth said.

Following the massacre, the city began a deliberate campaign to hide proof of the destruction.

“Official records of the massacre start to disappear. The National Guard records are taken and destroyed. Lots of other things. The front page article and the editorial in the Tulsa Tribune was scissored out [of] the bound volumes. Tulsa’s white newspapers for the next 50 years went out of their way never to mention the massacre,” Ellsworth said. “What happens during that time too is that this curtain of silence falls upon the city.”

Only in recent decades has the history of the massacre become widely known, leaving Tulsa and the United States to grapple with the implications of the massacre and the attempt to hide its existence.

“It’s a national story about the cost of forgetting and the necessity of reckoning with our painful past. Tulsa is my home. It shaped my childhood, my education and my sense of self. The story of Greenwood, though tragic, is also one of extraordinary resilience,” Loney said. “We cannot change what happened, but we have the power to shape how we remember, and that starts with us.”

Attendee Abigail Woldgebriel ’28 was aware of the massacre but didn’t realize the lengths to which the government went to attempt to hide its existence and was shocked at the lost wealth of the Black community in Tulsa.

“I didn’t know the extent to which the government tried to erase the massacre afterwards, and when I heard the money, about how much money was lost, generationally, more than an estimated $610 million.”

Jickinson Louis ‘26 also attended the talk and reflected on the importance of teaching history.

“I think that my high school, one of many across the United States, just is representative of how a lot of Black tragedies in the United States are hidden or just like not talked about as much,” Louis said. “That silence, that aversion of teaching something that’s uncomfortable, it is a disservice to many of our students.”

Ellsworth ended with a quote from William Faulkner, reminding the audience, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”