Today -100: June 3, 1921: Of white man’s countries, and ghost mommies

French forces, with tanks, intervene in the fight in Upper Silesia between Germans and Poles. Intervene against the Germans, obviously.

Authorities in Tulsa are claiming just 30 dead in the massacre. The emerging official narrative largely blames Tulsa police for losing control of the situation and not dispersing or shooting the black people who converged on the court house to prevent a lynching. That’s the crux of an address to a mass meeting – which I’m gonna guess was entirely white – by Adj. Gen. Charles Barrett, who’s in charge of martial law in the city. Barrett has banned funerals for those killed in the riot. Insurance companies are claiming that their policies don’t cover mob violence.

The NYT explains the racial “friction” in Oklahoma: “During the war Southern negroes flocked to the border State and found profitable employment. There has not been so much for them to do of late, and many of them are loafing on the streets. Not only the idle, shiftless and disorderly have worn out their welcome. It has become a common saying that ‘Oklahoma is a white man’s country.’” Presumably the NYT agrees with this, since it is evidently up to white people to decide when black people are “welcome” and up to black people to vanish back where they came from when the economy has less use for them. To continue: “When they had plenty of money to spend the negroes bought automobiles, lived high and claimed social privileges that the whites were not inclined to allow them. Drafted for service in France and praised for their patriotism, they naturally had a better opinion of themselves. All these things contributed to fan the flame of racial antagonism. .. the rough element among the whites was ripe for a rising to teach the negroes their place.” That “rising” was an attempt by blacks to organize to prevent a fucking lynching. And again, it is up to the white people to decide the “place” of black people; the only “racial antagonism” on evidence is white resentment of black people claiming social privileges (otherwise known as equal rights) and having a better opinion of themselves than white people have of them.

Soghomon Tehlirian, the Armenian on trial in Berlin for assassinating former Ottoman Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha in March, says he dreamed of the ghost of his mother ordering him to kill Pasha in retribution for the Armenian genocide, in which she and the rest of his family was killed.

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