Sisters, Brothers, and Kin,
“Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” How many of us heard this from parents and teachers as we were growing up? They may have thought they were giving us good advice, but experience reveals what a bum steer this really is. The stories we tell—what scholars call “narratives”—have great power, shaping our expectations and our assessment of others and even of ourselves.
From our very start seven years ago at the East Side Freedom Library, we have said that we want to be a place where our neighbors, particularly those who have long been silenced, can tell their stories. We have organized events and programs where they—you—have used poetry, music, dance, theater, and storytelling to share your experiences and your ideas with diverse audiences. This continues to be an important part of our work.
But the last fifteen months have taught us that this is not enough. The inequities and injustices revealed by the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd have raised our awareness that long-accepted dominant narratives need to be challenged. We recall that our choice of the name for this project—the East Side Freedom Library—was not only to recall Freedom Summer, Freedom Rides, Freedom Schools, indeed, the freedom movement which has percolated throughout American history. We also wanted to contest the ways the word freedom has been claimed by those who would emphasize freedom from collectively-decided rules and codes of behavior in contrast to the freedom to participate in community and national life.
The retelling of the story of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 has been a stunning example of changing the narrative. For decades, in Tulsa and in textbooks and schools across not just the South but the entire country, this horrific story was simply left out, overlooked, and rendered a non-event. The freedom movement of the 1960s impacted research, writing, and teaching about African American history, and the Tulsa events drew some scholarly attention. But these events became labeled a race riot, as were many other violent and brutal incidents in our history. As Sheila Smith McKoy argued in her book, WHEN WHITES RIOT: WRITING RACE AND VIOLENCE IN AMERICAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), the word riot has typically invoked images of “black bodies out of control.” Thus, even when the dust has been swept off certain disturbing events, the dominant narrative has shaped how it is taught, how it is remembered, and how it is accorded meaning.
When President Biden spoke in Tulsa on June 1 at a gathering that commemorated these events, he said “This was not a riot, this was a massacre.” His framing of these historic events followed the language used in the new documentary films which have aired in the past month on PBS, CNN, and the History Channel, and these films have been informed by the scholarship of a new generation of scholars. ESFL is thrilled to be hosting one of these scholars, Professor Karlos Hill, chairperson of the African American Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma, on June 22, as part of our “History Revealed” series in partnership with the Ramsey County Historical Society. Many of our programs this month are intended to change the narrative as we have inherited it.
But you won’t catch us patting ourselves on the back, because there is too much to be done. Even as Tulsans gathered this May to discuss the meaning of the events of Memorial Day 1921 and the meaning of its erasure from the dominant narrative of local history for nearly 100 years, Oklahoma’s Governor signed a bill passed by the state legislature which outlaws the teaching of “critical race theory.” Legislatures in more than a dozen other states, including our neighbors in Wisconsin, are debating similar laws.
There is much work to be done, and we hope you will join us in taking it on.
Love and Solidarity,
Beth Cleary and Peter Rachleff