Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [11]
In 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the site of one of the country’s bloodiest race riots. Seventy-five people, mostly black, were killed as a prosperous section of town known as the Greenwood District was bombarded from the air. Accounts of these violent events vary. Some sources suggest that it all started when a mob gathered to lynch a black youth who had been accused of attempting to rape a white woman. Others suggest that this was only an excuse to destroy the source of affluence for blacks in Tulsa. Prior to the riots the Greenwood District had been dubbed the Black Wall Street. Over the three days of unrest blacks were rounded up and held in a camp at the fairgrounds, only to be released in the custody of a white person for the purpose of reporting to work. Few contemporaneous accounts of the riot exist, but modern accounts indicate that in addition to the seventy-five people who were killed, hundreds more were injured and thousands were left homeless. By 1923, two years after the Tulsa race riot, the population of Oklahoma was approximately 2 million, of which 103,000 were reportedly members of the Ku Klux Klan. Little of the story of the race riot in Tulsa is documented. The course material in the required Oklahoma history class I took in junior high school never mentioned it or the black townships as part of the state history.
This was not the Oklahoma that the Hills or Elliotts had heard about when they decided to leave North Carolina and Arkansas for better opportunities for their children. But it was the Oklahoma they got. They stayed on and, as blacks throughout the country did, learned to deal with the hardships.
My parents’ early lives were remarkably similar to my grandparents’. My mother, like hers, gave birth to thirteen children. And the rural and racially segregated conditions under which each raised her children were much the same. Yet there were differences as well. Erma Hill was born in 1911 in Arkansas, moving to Oklahoma at age three. She was thirteen years old when her parents left Wewoka and moved to Lone Tree, where she lives today. The timing of my mother’s life places her on the bridge between the slavery into which her father was born and the civil rights era during which many of her children came of age.
When my parents met in the 1920s at an interschool spelling bee, they were children. And they married only two years later. “I thought marrying was the thing to do,” my mother remarks with some regret. “I often say I was getting married when I should have been getting an education.”
At a time when children were defined by who their family or “people” were, my mother was the daughter of a deacon/farmer who had helped to bring life back into the floundering Lone Tree Baptist Church. My father, on the other hand, was the son of a farmer with a reputation for philandering who leased rather than owned large acreage worked by sharecroppers.
Just before my mother’s seventeenth birthday they gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Elreatha. Following soon after was their first son, Albert, Jr., “June.” “I only wanted to have two children,” my mother once confided in me. But in 1931 there was little available reliable birth control. My mother became pregnant with her third child, my brother Alfred, or “Bubba” as we called him. At the time, my parents were living with my father’s family along with my father’s brother and his wife, my Aunt Sadie. “I refused to have another baby in my in-laws’ home.” My father found a small house and moved them to a plot of land within a few miles of his parents. The children came like clockwork, every two years. Two boys, Winston and Billy, were the fourth and fifth children. Then came my sister Doris, my mother’s second daughter. When the next child, Allen, was born, my parents’ small household was full with five boys and two girls. With the births of Joyce and Carlene, in the next four years, there