Open wounds

Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy.
By James S. Hirsch. Houghton
Mifflin, 358 pp., $25.00.

A  photograph of a burning church ignites the cover of James S. Hirsch's book. The church is Mount Zion Baptist, spiritual cornerstone of the African-American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the photograph one of hundreds printed to record an act of racial violence. After a burning cross, a church in flames is perhaps the most indelible image of America's racial history. A burning photograph suggests both that we forget the past and that our haphazard efforts at remembrance sometimes stoke the fire.

This dynamic between the legacy of a destructive past and the sometimes destructive modes of our remembrance is Hirsch's topic. Formerly a reporter for the New York Times, Hirsch devotes the first half of his book to examining the Tulsa race riot of 1921. On the morning of May 31, 1921, the Greenwood section of Tulsa was a thriving symbol of African-American aspiration in the face of Jim Crow segregation. By the evening of June 1, Greenwood was a smoking ruin. Three hundred African-American lives were lost in the racial conflagration.

Hirsch is at his best in chronicling the ways in which black aspirations and white anxiety and rage combined in an explosive brew. By 1921 African-Americans had determined to take hold of their full rights as citizens, and for some, Oklahoma symbolized opportunities unchained from the old orders of the South and East. Ironically, the state was also by this era firmly organized along the lines of the Jim Crow South. According to Hirsch, Oklahoma in the 1920s was one of the Klan's strongest redoubts, with one in every ten Protestant males belonging to a klavern. The Klansmen were "more numerous than organized labor or any single political party."