The city of Tulsa unveiled a $105 million ‘apology plan’ based on a faulty history of the 1921 race riot.

T he city of Tulsa, Okla., recently joined the lengthy list of metropoli that are considering paying reparations to African Americans.

The city recently unveiled a $105 million “apology plan,” targeting not only surviving victims of what’s been known for decades as the 1921 Tulsa race riot — and is now being called the Tulsa race massacre — but also their descendants. The plan centers on a centi-million-dollar charitable trust, and includes $60 million to rehabilitate buildings in Tulsa’s Greenwood District, $24 million for “housing and home ownership for descendants of the massacre,” and $21 million for a “legacy fund” focused on paying for black-only college scholarships and acquiring land for black business concerns. The mayor of Tulsa, Monroe Nichols, also signed off on a decree making each June 1 the official city holiday of Tulsa Race Massacre Observation Day.

This specific case helps illustrate some general trends. First, notably, the State of Oklahoma never countenanced legal slavery — the place did not become a state until 1907, and the large majority of “enslaved persons” to occupy the Indian Territory before that belonged to Cherokee Indians and other beautiful people of color. As in several other modern situations, blacks are being compensated for something largely unrelated to the Atlantic slave trade. And, second — if I may speak frankly — we see here the trend toward an emphasis on, and even exaggeration of, negative historical events that is currently ripping U.S. race relations to shreds.

The story of what’s currently called the Tulsa race massacre has, to put it mildly, grown since I was a schoolboy. Some might say that it has grown beyond any resemblance to actual documented history. The hit HBO show Watchmen recently opened with an allegedly historical depiction of a warplane dropping premade firebombs, during this long-ago fracas in cowboy country. Skilled scientists are currently searching for a hidden “mass grave” in Tulsa. Published estimates of the riot’s death toll now range up to 300 — split across the two warring factions but concentrated among blacks.

So far as I can tell, almost none of this is based in proven fact. When I was but a wee lad, the historical event was taught as a “riot.” According to a comprehensive and more than fair report released by the State of Oklahoma in 2001, which reviewed all contemporary “autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records,” the verified death toll stands at 39 — 26 African Americans and 13 whites. Reports of aircraft being used effectively in the fighting — recall that manned airplanes were invented in 1903 — are, to put it politely, “not confirmed.” And so on.

The actual Tulsa race riot appears to have begun — like many a modern racial crisis — with a stupid mutual-fault fight. During an ugly confrontation outside the municipal courthouse between armed posses of black and Caucasian men — there to “monitor” the condition of a black man accused of raping a white girl — a black male and a white male confronted one another, and shots were fired. The running gun battle that followed produced the death toll given above, and did in fact result in the destruction of much of the lovely and historically black Greenwood neighborhood. There is never reason to lie about or minimize real history.

But it’s important to note, in the context of a reparations plan, that the district was rather rapidly rebuilt — becoming significantly more prosperous than it was before. By 1942, Tulsa Greenwood “boasted 242 Black-owned and Black-operated business establishments” — roughly twice as many as had been located there prior to the fighting. Both blacks and some whites contributed monies to rebuild Greenwood, and the actual decline of the area seems to trace squarely to the forced integration and high crime rates of 1960s America.

In the interest of honesty, it should also be noted that “Black Wall Street” was a complimentary label applied to Tulsa Greenwood by African-American racial patriots and business boosters, not anything resembling a factual description. The businesses of the area, which never included any stock exchange or a national bank, were hotels, nice restaurants, beauty salons, and so forth. Impressive to be sure, but no true rival for New York City’s Wall Street and its massive chunk of New York’s $2.3 trillion annual GDP.

As noted, exaggeration even of real and genuinely negative historical events is currently an ongoing problem throughout the West. In Canada — America’s Hat — we recently witnessed the astounding claim that the “probable burials” of 200–215 young Native children had been located on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The immediate reaction to this news was international in scope, and almost hysterical.

Then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered all Canadian flags to be flown at half mast, at least on public grounds, for months. The pope gave an on-the-record speech, in the regalia of his office, that harshly criticized Canada’s past. Even the United Nations treated the apparent discovery of the bodies of Indian children — murdered by white Christian teachers and priests (?) — as fully confirmed, and called it a very “large-scale” violation of human rights law.

But, as I once put it in a lengthy book outlining hate crime hoaxes, then it happened. Historically, Canadian boarding schools could indeed be harsh and heavy-handed at times — just as there really was brutal fighting in Tulsa — but it was gradually revealed that essentially none of the horrific initial “mass graves” narrative was true. What the initial investigator of the Kamloops site, a young anthropologist named Sarah Beaulieu, had identified as “bodies” were in fact simply “depressions and abnormalities in the soil of an apple orchard near [a] school.”

It now appears almost certain that most — or all — of these abnormalities in the earth are simply tree roots, “metal or stones,” or the results of a disruptive long-ago sewer line that was dug through the orchard and then forgotten. Years after the initial story dropped, and following several small-scale digs by Canadian Indian tribes, well-known Canadian academic Jacques Rouillard is able to state frankly that “not one body has been found.”

The reaction to the initial false Canadian news, when hundreds of Catholic churches were set ablaze across Canada, combined with a quick read of the Tulsa reparations proposal, leads me to an interesting and darkly amusing point. If reparations are possible for bad things other than slavery, what are We Taxpayers owed for the recent riots in our country?

This is often and intentionally forgotten today, but the 2020–21 George Floyd riots caused an estimated $2 billion in damage (for which insurance pay-outs have never fully compensated) and killed several dozen people. The nationwide rioting followed a decade or so of the same thing on a more local scale: the Ferguson riots near St. Louis, the Freddie Gray memorial riots in Baltimore, the Breanna Taylor violence in Louisville, and more.

Much of this violence was very specifically targeted. The Canadian arsonists focused on attacking Catholicism and Catholic churches, while the Black Lives Matter fighters targeted police, conservatives, and sometimes whites and Asians. That latter group — between Covid-19’s Chinese origins and perceptions of Asian Americans as holding a semi-privileged role as shopkeepers and the like — faced so much violent abuse that #StopAsianHate became a hash-tag-popular civil rights movement for more than a year. The website is still up . . . and taking donations.

All of this raises a real and obvious query: If riots or domestic insurgencies can generate hefty reparations payments, why limit those to black citizens who were injured 104 years ago? Like many other situations, as noted by this author, this one invokes what may be the most vexing and important question in the whole reparations debate.

That is: On the matter of payments, Who’s next?