(Refiles to fix typos in paragraphs 6, 14, and clarifies
jailhouse interview in second last paragraph)
By Lindsay Morris
TULSA, Okla., April 22 (Reuters) – This city, where a
history of racial tension was inflamed by the Good Friday
shootings of five black people, plans to name a street in honor
of civil rights pioneer Dr. Martin Luther King but only the
section that passes through a predominantly black part of a
city.
The challenges in winning approval for the move and getting
it put into place — including the need to scale the proposal
down to get it passed by the largely white city council —
illustrate Tulsa’s legacy of racial animosities and resistance
to change.
“Is there a racial divide in this town? Just look at the
signs,” said Kavin Ross, 49, a black resident of Oklahoma’s
second-largest city whose father, former state Representative
Don Ross, helped pass the state’s hate-crime law.
More than 900 streets in cities and towns across the country
are named after King, according to Derek Alderman, a professor
of geography at East Carolina University. Tulsa was late to join
them, voting last summer to rename a portion of Cincinnati
Avenue as Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
Tulsa is not a place most Americans think of as a racial
flashpoint. Unlike the Deep South where slavery was the issue,
some freed slaves around the time of the Civil War came to
Oklahoma, an Indian Territory that would not become a state
until 1907, to escape slavery and racial oppression.
But a 1921 riot in Tulsa that left an untold number dead is
considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in
American history, and residents of the 400,000-person city grew
up hearing their parents’ horror stories of the events.
Some citizens said that the shootings in north Tulsa on Good
Friday, after which prosecutors brought murder and hate-crime
charges against two white men, brought back painful memories of
a rift that never healed.
“The racial divide has been there forever,” said Jack
Henderson, the sole black member of Tulsa’s city council. “You
don’t have to have a street separating us to divide the city.”
Henderson, who represents north Tulsa, began pushing for a
King street in 2002, two years before he joined the council. The
original proposal included renaming approximately 11 miles (18
km) of Cincinnati Avenue that extended into the downtown area of
mostly white-owned businesses.
Critics, including downtown businesses and churches,
complained that the street name change would be confusing to
long-time businesses in the downtown area, and the council
shelved the idea.
Henderson came back in 2011 with a compromise that the name
change stop at the railroad tracks that separate north Tulsa
from downtown, so approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) of the street
in the higher profile, mostly white downtown would not be
renamed. The mostly white city council approved the plan.
The railroad tracks have special significance in Tulsa,
marking the racial border, said James Goodwin, a 71-year-old
black Tulsa lawyer whose father’s high school graduation was
canceled because of the historic Tulsa race riot.
Little known outside Oklahoma, the Tulsa race riot of 1921
erupted at a time when American blacks were shut out of most
jobs, including Tulsa’s booming oil industry, and were
segregated in schools, businesses and housing. Blacks were
subjected to violence including lynchings elsewhere in Oklahoma
and around the country. Tulsa’s black community was determined
to protect itself from such lynchings, according to a 2001
Oklahoma state commission report on the riot.
On May 31, 1921, Tulsa exploded in violence after rumors
spread that white vigilantes planned to lynch a black man held
in jail and accused of raping a white woman. Armed black men
tried to defend the man, while white citizens, some armed by the
all-white police department, burned and looted 1,000 homes and
businesses in the all-black section of north Tulsa.
An official death count was never produced — the 2001
commission said 39 death certificates were issued but conceded
that the number could be significantly higher because of reports
multiple bodies were buried in graves. No one was ever arrested
for any of the killings. The state established a memorial park,
but attempts to secure reparations for the families have failed.
To this day, many blacks are suspicious of the police.
Henderson said that immediately after the Good Friday killings
on April 6 some black residents wanted to take vigilante action
to protect the community, but cooler heads prevailed. The police
acted quickly in arresting the two white men.
In north Tulsa, where about half the residents are black and
less than a third are white, the median household income is
$26,000, compared to $39,000 for Tulsa as a whole, according to
an analysis by the Indian Nations Council of Governments. The
population of Tulsa is about 66 percent white, 10.5 percent
black, 11 percent Hispanic and 5.7 percent Native American.
Daisy Rogers, 66, a retired housekeeper whose mother and
grandmother fled with other black women and children to a park
during the race riot, said north Tulsa is like a doughnut hole.
“If you drew a circle around this city, including the
suburbs, you would see that everybody has economic growth,” she
said. “But north Tulsa is right in the center with nothing.”
While south and midtown Tulsa and the surrounding suburbs
all have chain grocery stores, movie theaters and family
restaurants, north Tulsa does not.
The recent shootings – which left three dead and two wounded
— have perpetuated negative perceptions of north Tulsa, said
Goodwin, publisher of The Oklahoma Eagle, a newspaper that
covers the African American community in Tulsa.
Shortly before the April 6 killings, one of the suspects,
Jake England, had lamented on his Facebook page that two years
had passed since his father was killed by a black man, to whom
he referred with a racial slur. England said in an interview
from jail on April 14 that he felt no hatred or ill will toward
African Americans, according to a video of the interview.
As England and Watts remain in jail, the city still has not
put up the signs to rename part of the street in honor of King.
They had hoped to have them changed, at a cost of $100,000, by
Martin Luther King Day in January but highway signs were not
ready. So the goal now is to have them erected within the next
few months, Henderson said.
(Editing By Corrie MacLaggan; Editing by Greg McCune and
Cynthia Osterman)
