The Ghosts on the Walls

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

Four years ago, I had dinner with filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, who lived in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in south-central France as a boy, during World War II. Inexplicably, the town’s residents provided 5,000 Jews, including Sauvage and his family, refuge from the Nazis. (For their efforts, in 1990, those residents were awarded the “righteous among the nations” an honorific bestowed by the state of Israel on non-Jews who risked their lives to save the lives of Jews during the Holocaust.) It was during a local commemoration of Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass,” which refers to a night of violent anti-Jewish pogroms that took place throughout Germany in 1938) that the Jewish Federation of Tulsa invited Sauvage to Tulsa to premiere his film “Weapons of the Spirit,” which he had written, produced, and directed. The project, he said, was to chronicle and celebrate the “conspiracy of goodness” of those in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. In one of his speeches here, he quoted historian John Hope Franklin.

“Perhaps the very first thing we need to do as a nation and as individual members of society,” Franklin wrote, “is to confront our past and see it for what it is.”

The historian’s father, Buck Colbert Franklin, survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, a brutal two-day attack on Black residents by White Tulsans.

Joining us at dinner was Hannibal Johnson, who Sauvage wanted to meet. Johnson wrote, among other books, “Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District.”

For reasons still not clear, I was invited to join them.

At that speech, given in the heart of the Greenwood District, Sauvage said, “It is inescapable to recall your own Kristallnacht, what we Jews would call ‘the pogrom’ — a horrendous pogrom — that occurred here in 1921 and was then kept out of public consciousness for a very long time, with responsibility for the crime being stubbornly and massively ducked. I know that you don’t need a visitor to recall — but again, I would be remiss, in this context, not to do so — that several hundred blacks were murdered over one night and day, many thousands later persecuted, more than a thousand homes and businesses and churches savagely destroyed, strewing the streets and homes of Greenwood with their own broken glass.”

At dinner, they talked of affirmative action and wrestled with the notion of assimilation, identity, and shared pain.

“One of the things I like,” said Johnson, about the Sherwin Miller Museum, a repository of Jewish art on the grounds of the Charles Schusterman Jewish Community Center, “is that it included a Klan robe and reference to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. It’s the connectivity — the shared experiences around hate — that can and should draw us together. I’m a big believer in the King quote ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ African Americans and Jews share a rich civil-rights history in America, from the founding of the NAACP in 1909 to the 1960s King era and beyond.”

Of Sauvage, Johnson told me days later, “It was as though we’d known one another for a long time.” 

I bring this up for two reasons.

The first: I recently went with my daughter to Greenwood Rising: The Black Wall Street History Center, which recently opened and was built on land that was burned and destroyed 100 years ago — a story more or less forgotten for the past 90. There was a tour, the last one of the day, and our guide, an African American woman, was incensed, agitated, and exhausted. Imagine having to retrace that history four, five times a day. Most who accompanied us were African Americans, and if you looked closely, you could see the shared DNA between them and those in the photos, videos, and exhibits. 

Years earlier, Nina and I went to Auschwitz, and we, too, could see and feel ghosts. 

A street in Tulsa and a concentration camp in Poland — not so different.

The second: For decades, what happened in 1921 in Tulsa was called a riot, not a massacre. And that was because, by designating it a riot, insurance companies didn’t have to compensate survivors, didn’t have to rebuild homes and businesses. The headlines of the Tulsa World on June 1st, 1921, talked of the Whites who were killed.

It was linguistic jujitsu that was washing away the horror before the horror was even over.

In the decades that followed, so complete was the erasure that few students in Oklahoma schools learned about the massacre in their own backyard. 

And now future generations probably won’t, either.

Recently in Oklahoma, as in places all over the country, legislation was passed forbidding the teaching of Critical Race Theory, which is legal flypaper, attracting every ignorant, defensive, and obfuscatory posture by those who refuse to acknowledge systemic racism, all while paralyzing public-school history teachers, which is the purpose of such bills.

Confront our past? We don’t even want to mention it.

Someone asked Elie Wiesel what the Holocaust taught the world.

His answer was heard in Auschwitz and in Greenwood.

“You can get away with it.”

Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. In addition to “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Road Comic,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me,” his first novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages,” a book about the worst love story ever, was published by Balkan Press in Kindle edition in February and the print edition was published by Balkan Press on Valentine’s Day. See barrysfriedman.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2022

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