Review: The Tulsa Massacre, Remembered by Those Who Survived
“Goin’ Back to T-Town,” the 1993 PBS documentary about the mass murder
of a city’s Black residents and the destruction of their community, returns.
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A scene from “Goin’ Back to T-Town,” the documentary
about the Tulsa massacre of 1921.
A scene from “Goin’ Back to T-Town,” the documentary about the Tulsa
massacre of 1921.Credit...Greenwood Cultural Center
Mike Hale <https://www.nytimes.com/by/mike-hale>
ByMike Hale <https://www.nytimes.com/by/mike-hale>
* NYT, Feb. 7, 2021
PBS has reached into its vault and retrieved “Goin’ Back to T-Town,” a
1993 “American Experience” documentary whose broadcastMonday night
<https://www.pbs.org/video/trailer-goin-back-to-t-town-american-experience/>is
doubly timely. It marks the 100th anniversary later this year ofthe
Tulsa massacre
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/tulsa-massacre-graves-excavation.html>,
the deadly and massively destructive race riot that remained little
known when the film was made but latelyhas re-emerged
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/opinion/tulsa-race-massacre-mass-grave.html?searchResultPosition=2>as
a supremely ugly scar on the American conscience.
It also honors the career of the veteranBlack filmmaker Sam Pollard
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/movies/sam-pollard-mlk-fbi.html?searchResultPosition=1>,
who produced the movie with his wife, Joyce Vaughn. After working under
the radar for nearly 50 years, he’s currently being celebrated for a new
documentary “MLK/FBI.” His latest project, “Black Art: In the Absence of
Light,” premieres Tuesday on HBO.
Working with a team that included Black artists like the writer Carmen
Fields, the cinematographer Robert Shepard (“Freedom Riders” (2011),
“Eyes on the Prize”) and the actor Ossie Davis as narrator, Pollard and
Vaughn tell their story concisely and elegantly, in the traditional
chiaroscuro-interview style of PBS history documentaries, but with a twist.
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Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/arts/television/review-tulsa-massacre-remembered.html?searchResultPosition=1#after-story-ad-1>
No outside historians or experts appear — the film rides entirely on the
voices and faces of about 15 Black residents of Tulsa, Okla., some of
whom were eyewitnesses to the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, when a
white mob burned to the ground the 35-square block Greenwood
neighborhood andkilled up to 300 Black Tulsans
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/us/tulsa-greenwood-massacre.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article>.
(One of the interview subjects,John Hope Franklin,
<https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29applebome.html?searchResultPosition=3>who
moved to Tulsa shortly after the massacre, went on to become a leading
scholar of slavery and American racial injustice.) It’s an approach that
couldn’t be duplicated now, when nearly all the survivors of the
massacre have died.
ImageTulsa on fire in 1921, after a white mob laid waste to its thriving
Greenwood district, a commercial area developed by leaders of the
city’s Black population. Hundreds were killed by the white mob and
thousands left homeless.
Tulsa on fire in 1921, after a white mob laid waste to its thriving
Greenwood district, a commercial area developed by leaders of the city’s
Black population. Hundreds were killed by the white mob and thousands
left homeless.Credit...Library of Congress
The film may subvert the expectations of a contemporary audience in a
more fundamental way as well. The violence itself, vividly depicted in
recent dramas like“Watchmen”
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/arts/television/watchmen-finale.html?searchResultPosition=2>and
“Lovecraft Country,” is not the dramatic focus of “Goin’ Back to
T-Town.” The film’s account of it, from the accidental contact of a
Black man and a teenage white girl to montages of smoking ruins and
corpses lying in the street, occupies about 10 anguishing but subdued
minutes halfway through.
Pollard and Vaughn are telling a larger story. It begins with an
inspiring, deceptively cheerful account of the growth of Greenwood, the
largest of a number of all-Black communities in Oklahoma. “The whole
shootin’ match was there,” one survivor recalls, and the camera scans a
business directory listing Black hotels, insurance agencies and “The
Williams Grocery, for race pride.” By 1921 the 11,000 Black residents of
Tulsa could live safely inside an enclave with 15 grocery stores, four
drugstores, two cinemas and two public schools of their own. But the Ku
Klux Klan was nearby — just four blocks away “on Main and Easton,” a
resident recalls.
And the film spends its second half on the post-massacre history of
Greenwood, which was rebuilt and remained a Black neighborhood without
regaining its former prosperity. It’s a sad and complicated story, in
which the parallel society created by Black residents and businesspeople
was doubly cursed: first a seemingly inevitable victim of racist
resentment and violence, and then, after national battles against
segregation were won in the 1950s and 60s, a victim of depopulation and
economic blight. “We got integration — and suffocation and degradation
and all the other ’ations you would like to have,” a longtime resident says.
The tone of “Goin’ Back to T-Town” is elegiac, and its chorus of mostly
elderly witnesses is impeccably dignified — they’re clearly carrying out
a duty, and their anger and pain, while right on the surface, are never
indulged. The film ends with their memories, and a last rush of images,
of a halcyon time of nothing but normal life: football games, shopping,
dinners out. Unsaid but manifest is how unequal that separate life
always was, and how fleeting and fragile the happiness it brought.
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Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/arts/television/review-tulsa-massacre-remembered.html?searchResultPosition=1&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending#after-pp_edpick>
Mike Hale is a television critic. He also writes about online video,
film and media. He came to The Times in 1995 and worked as an editor in
Sports, Arts & Leisure and Weekend Arts before becoming a critic in
2009.@mikehalenyt <https://twitter.com/mikehalenyt>•Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/mikehalenyc>
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