How did a kid from Crookston, Minnesota — a farm town and regional hub in the northwest corner of the state — end up becoming an authority on one of our country’s most intense and searing moments of racial hatred?
May 31, 1921. In a period of less than 24 hours, white citizens burned much of Greenwood — Tulsa’s vibrant Black community — and murdered as many as 300 people.
For Crookston native Tim Madigan, the journey began in the year 2000. He was writing feature stories for the Fort-Worth Star Telegram when his editor asked him to write a story on “the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.”
“There had been national publicity going back to the 75th anniversary [1996], because that was the year that the Tulsa Race Riot Commission was formed by the Oklahoma state legislature,” Madigan told me. “And when it was formed there was an initial spate of stories. But what got it stirred it up again was that the commission had made known their intention to look for mass graves. And so that generated a lot of international publicity, and that’s when my editor came by my desk and said, ‘Have you heard about this?’”
Madigan hadn’t heard about it, but soon would. He traveled to Tulsa to write a piece for the paper, work that would eventually lead to his 2001 book “The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.” It’s the bestselling title on the subject, was recently released in a version for young readers, and served as the source material for the opening sequence of HBO’s “Watchmen” series.
[image_caption]Tim Madigan[/image_caption]
“The difference between the Swedes and the Norwegians, between the Catholics and the Lutherans — those were the only differences, the fissures, in that society,” Madigan noted.
Moving to urban Texas expanded his exposure to a wider variety of people, but even so, “It didn’t take up any space in my heart or head at all,” Madigan confessed. But if digging up the past is a form of archaeology, the Tulsa assignment forced him to do some personal digging.
“I realized I had been oblivious — maybe even willfully oblivious — to the whole question of race in the nation. I knew that there were people who were different than me living out there, but I really wasn’t at all curious about what their story was, or what their experience had been in America,” Madigan told me. He was oblivious, perhaps, but not entirely ignorant.
“I knew about Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King, Selma, the Civil Rights movement, Rosa Parks — what are considered the watershed moments of African American history. I knew about all those things. Even oblivious guys like me would. But from the day that I read that 300 Black people in this prosperous American community had been destroyed by a white mob, it just seemed to me that that deserved a place in the upper echelon of history, and the fact that I had no clue that it had happened struck me as being remarkable.”
This year, Madigan returned to Tulsa to write “Remembering Tulsa: American Terror” for the April edition of The Smithsonian Magazine.
“When I first came to this story 20 years ago, a lot of the survivors were still alive, and I had the opportunity to interview them and get to know them. That was an amazing experience. Now of course, they’re all gone, and I am talking with their children, or in some cases, grandchildren or great-grandchildren.”
The trial of Derrick Chauvin and the resurfacing of the initial statement from Minneapolis police (describing a male suspect who appeared to be “suffering medical distress,” who resisted officers and was placed in handcuffs, and who then died a short time later at Hennepin County Medical Center), left many feeling that without the cellphone coverage from the scene, George Floyd’s murder would have remained hidden. That’s just one life. How does a massacre of perhaps 300 people and the torching of a neighborhood, an event witnessed by thousands, get hidden?
In the usual ways: fear and shame.
“In the white community, it was shame, and the fear they might be prosecuted for what happened, even decades later,” Madigan recounted. And when it comes to burying the truth, those in power have the biggest shovels.
[image_credit]American National Red Cross/Library of Congress[/image_credit][image_caption]A view of the Williams Building, west side of 100 block, in the Greenwood neighborhood following the race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma.[/image_caption]
For the Black survivors, fear led to silence. “The survivors rarely talked about it. A survivor would talk with another survivor if they really knew that person well, but otherwise the fear factor caused them to keep their mouth shut.”
In interviews for his Smithsonian piece, children and grandchildren of survivors told Madigan it was like growing up in the household of a Holocaust survivor. “They knew that something dark and painful lived in their house but they had no idea what it was, because no one was talking about it.”
But the silence wasn’t strictly out of fear. There was also a much loftier reason.
“A lot of these survivors didn’t talk about it with their children or grandchildren because they didn’t want them to hate,” Madigan told me. “What had happened was so terrible, and so other-worldly, and would inspire so much anger and so much hatred, that they just didn’t want to pass that down to future generations.”
Some of the ghosts of Tulsa 1921 still linger, including the loss of intergenerational wealth. In today’s dollars, the looting and arson prevented $200 million from being handed down.
Madigan describes two formative experiences in his life: this Tulsa-fueled epiphany on race, and his friendship with Fred Rogers – yes, Mr. Rogers. An assignment to do a story on Rogers led to a close, long-term relationship, which Madigan later chronicled in his book “I’m Proud of You.”
More than a friend, Rogers became a spiritual mentor to Madigan. At a time when Madigan was struggling to reconcile his love and admiration for his stoic Cold War-era father, Rogers encouraged Madigan to dig into his father’s personal story.
“When I learned my father’s history, and the deprivation and difficulties he grew up with, it fundamentally changed how I looked at him,” Madigan explained. “I stopped seeing him as a god-like figure of my youth, and started seeing him as just another suffering human being doing the best he could.”
How did Mr. Rogers and father issues bring racial reconciliation to a man raised by a loving small-town community — one that provided him with an idyllic childhood and a blistering slap shot, but did not expose him to other races?
“By learning my father’s story, his humanity was revealed to me,” Madigan explained. “And it just occurred to me in the last few months that the same thing happened to me when I learned the story of race in the United States. I don’t know exactly how or why that happened, but it did. And the capacity for compassion grew, the capacity for curiosity grew.”
“One of my favorite sayings of Fred’s is, ‘It’s much easier to love someone when you know their story.’ I think that’s what happened to me. I was a decent person. And that kind of dynamic played out when I realized that all of these people who I now lived and worked with had this very difficult and very different experience in the United States than I did.”
[image_credit]American National Red Cross/Library of Congress[/image_credit][image_caption]An entrance to a refugee camp on the fairgrounds in Tulsa.[/image_caption]
As the 100th anniversary of this very dark day approaches, Madigan continues to recite the details and lessons of what is now a century-old story whose racist themes, unfortunately, still appear regularly in today’s headlines.
“It’s kind of strange how I ended up in the middle of this. … It’s not about white shame, it’s not about guilt, it’s not about saying America is a bad place; it’s just seeing the country in a different light, and basically learning the story. Which is not easy, because it is painful and ugly in so many respects. Try to understand what happened after the Civil War, and then maybe your heart is changed, maybe it’s not. Just learn the story. And my life is an example of that.”
Thank you for this story, “How a Kid from Crookston Became an Authority on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre” in the May 29, 2021, MinnPost.com edition! Tim Madigan’s metamorphosis from a small-town White kid who was oblivious to the world outside of the Swedes and Norwegians, the Lutherans and the Catholics in his community, to one of greater awareness and compassion rings home to me.
I, too, grew up in a snowy White environment — until my time at De La Salle Catholic Senior High School, a boarding school for youth between the ages of (then) 16-25 (Elverum Folkehøgskole), Macalester College, University of Minnesota, and a language and cultural institute in Costa Rica (Forester Instituto Internacional). It was only then that I began to realize the great wealth of history and character that people of all races can bring with them as intellectual, spiritual, and emotional feasts to nourish all souls and minds.
News media around the world now often talks about the rifts and racism in society, and not enough about the joys which people from different backgrounds can enjoy with one another. We see it in Minnesota with the stories of a relatively small percentage of police officers who are brutal and racist. We see it in Israel and Palestine with a 73-year old conflict and the deaths and destruction in various communities, and with little mention of the friendship organizations which bring people of the various religious communities together in that region. We see it in Myanmar and China, with race, religious, and political persecution. But seeing a man from a small-town who has grown beyond oblivion to other peoples and cultures, to one who has become an expert on a traumatic and vile event in the early 1920s, speaks volumes of our capacity to learn and educate others.
The idyllic community which Madigan knew as a child is something to behold. Based on his story, he was without huge conflict or fear in his life, and was able to summon the qualities necessary to become more sophisticated and more refined as a thinker and reporter — and as a citizen and as a man.
I have lived in a mostly East African U.S. community in Minneapolis over the past twenty-eight years. I grew up in a mixed economic class White community in Ramsey County, Minnesota, and an upper middle class neighborhood in Minneapolis where the only Black family I knew of in our neighborhood was that of The Honorable Alan Page (Minnesota’s first and yet only Black supreme court justice).
Learning of the intelligence and capabilities of others, I endorsed the first Somali-American to serve as our local precinct chair for the DFL caucus in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. The young man, at age fourteen-years, founded the Cedar-Riverside Youth Council which taught friendship, sportsmanship, good citizenship, and in an effort to keep the young Muslims kids away from influences which came to the neighborhood to recruit terrorists for work in Somalia. Why? Because I realized that my time as the precinct chair required me to recognize the intelligence, interests, strides and yearnings of my Black and Muslim neighbors. With this, I admire Tim. Madigan’s achievements.
Let’s hope that Hollywood begins to tell stories of Blacks who have developed their lives which lead others to understand most Blacks as intelligent, civil, and considerate people. We need to see more examples of admirable people from all races. Growing up, I remember seeing, as a seven-year old boy in the metro area in the 1960s, stories of only murder and rape suspects who were Black; and the only “redeeming” Blacks which I read about were sports figures, singers (The Supremes, Aretha Franklin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and a few others), and then Sidney Portiere in “To Sir, With Love.” Later, it was Will Smith and his friends in television and real life, in “Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire.”
Most of the movies and television dramas have depicted Blacks as poor, not well-educated, and as both victims, and as violent killers, drug-dealers and pimps. We must expand our understanding of the noble and the common and enjoyable people around us if we are to develop our senses and sensibilities which allow us to recognize the joys we can find in sharing our communities with people of all races and who have similar aspirations, morals, and emotional responses to life.
Let’s work together to develop a world where friendship and peace, good health, and love exists.
Thank you for this moving article and Tim Madigan’s story. What resonates with me is the fact that the pain and anguish from this atrocity is still carried by the descendants of the survivors just as the descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust carry the pain and anguish of that atrocity. It seems to me quite evident that how we treat others carries enormous implications not just for them, but their families, their friends, their communities and even succeeding generations. I intend to read Tim’s books and search for ways I can continue to learn and grow in my understanding of these long buried events which shaped our history unconsciously, as it were.
Great article, Dr. Bowron — it spoke to me in explaining that feeling of waking up and just sort of seeing things differently after the George Floyd killing. Very well written. Thank you.
“How does a massacre of perhaps 300 people and the torching of a neighborhood, an event witnessed by thousands, get hidden?”
The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. A 2001 state commission examination of events was able to confirm 39 dead, 26 Black and 13 White, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates and other records. [Oklahoma Commission 2001]