The aftermath of the Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa, Okla., June 1921.
Photo: Bettmann ArchiveIt was just another media-manufactured “controversy”: President Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla., originally scheduled for Friday, was deemed “insensitive” and “inappropriate.” The reason? June 19 is Juneteenth, the day commemorating the end of slavery. On that day in 1865, the order to free the slaves was read out in the last former Confederate state to hear the news, Texas.
You might wonder, as I did, what was so inappropriate about a Trump rally taking place on Juneteenth. The critics’ answer was the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, in which scores of African-Americans were murdered. What did the Tulsa massacre have to do with the scheduled Trump rally? Nothing, other than that it was in the same city. The president’s detractors needed an excuse to associate him with racism, and that was the quickest one they could find. His campaign postponed the rally until Saturday.
Yet our history, especially the history leading up to the 1921 massacre, leads me to think Tulsa is exactly the right place for a Trump rally. American society is the cumulative result of all who have come here, regardless of their condition when they arrived. This is particularly true of the black Americans who, once exposed to freedom, embraced it wholeheartedly.
America’s first martyr for the cause of freedom was Crispus Attucks, a former slave and the first person killed in the Boston Massacre and thus the American Revolution. America’s first self-made female millionaire was an early-19th-century Louisiana native and black entrepreneur named Madame C.J. Walker, creator of a cosmetic line for black women. The first nationwide network of business owners was the National Negro Business League, founded in Boston by Booker T. Washington.
But perhaps the greatest embodiment of American self-sufficiency was the state of Oklahoma. Unlike other states and territories, Oklahoma promoted itself as a safe haven for former black slaves after emancipation. Between 1865 and 1920, black Americans founded more than 50 black townships there—more than anywhere else in the country.
One of them was the Greenwood District of Tulsa. Known as Black Wall Street, it was the most affluent segregated black community in the nation, and it coexisted with white-dominated Tulsa for 30 years. Three decades after the Civil War it had a population of 10,000 and thrived as the center of African-American business and culture.
By 1920 the Greenwood District had far exceeded the success of the neighboring white segregated community of Tulsa. It was a bustling community of black-owned businesses, churches, grocery stores, movie theaters, restaurants, hospitals, banks, post offices, schools and libraries. One black businessman, Simon Berry, owner of a popular bus line for blacks, was one of the wealthiest men in the state. In all of Oklahoma there were only two airports, yet six blacks owned their own planes.
The dream came to a violent end on May 31, 1921, when hundreds of white rioters—many of them members of the Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist wing of that day’s Democratic Party—went on a racist rampage through the district. They burned buildings, assaulted innocents, and—according to witnesses—dropped firebombs from private airplanes. Hundreds of homes and businesses were destroyed in two days of rioting. The rioters were supposedly agitated by allegations that a black man had assaulted a white woman, but in truth they were outraged by black economic success.
Black Americans have made enormous social and political progress since then. But too often white liberals have encouraged black Americans to think of their ancestors as victims. You can see it in the way we treat history: We hear plenty about the ways in which black people have suffered, but very little about black economic achievements brought about by blacks themselves. Nearly gone from the history books are black triumphs like those in the Greenwood District. What blacks needed, according to this account, was a white hand to lift them up.
Particularly in the past few years black Americans have begun to achieve real economic gains by their own labor and ingenuity. Until the coronavirus shutdowns, black unemployment was at its lowest level in this country’s history, and black-owned small businesses were growing at the fastest rate ever. For the past three months we’ve seen a pause in black economic achievement—a pause largely brought about by Democratic mayors and governors. But the pause, I hope, is almost over.
Tulsa is the right place, and the day after Juneteenth is the right time, for this rally. It’s a celebration of the tenacity, work ethic, faith and entrepreneurial grit of an African-American community that has overcome both white racism and liberal paternalism to achieve economic independence. Let the rally begin.
Mr. Owens was a Super Bowl champion with the Oakland Raiders. He is a candidate for the Republican nomination to represent Utah’s Fourth Congressional District and author of “Liberalism: Or, How to Turn Good Men Into Whiners, Weenies and Wimps.”
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