My heart is certainly bleeding for Tulsa, Oklahoma, right now. My heart is rent by an increasingly sure conviction that a conflagration is on its way to a former home that has its own deep and abiding place there. Just like the Greenwood Massacre, the threat is still White Supremacy as Donald Trump; and elements of his supporters openly organize the coming destruction.
I haven’t lived in Oklahoma since 1993 and moved from Tulsa to Oklahoma city in 1981. I had grown up 400 miles away in the West County suburbs of St. Louis, but Tulsa is where I met and married my wife, received a college degree, received a law degree, first became a partner in a law firm, tried my first court cases and bought my first home.
When I was an undergraduate student in the 1960s, I rehearsed daily, performed frequently and toured annually with the university’s top chorale group. Sometimes, we joined for performances with choirs at Black churches in Tulsa. So, since I was a teenager, I’ve known the history of the Greenwood Massacre from these teach-in experiences that, among other things, also taught me and the rest of our white-as-fuck college choir a lot about putting on a better show.
I’ve been retired for a while, now, and most of us lose friends over the years, as I certainly have. Nevertheless, there remain many people in Tulsa, OK whom I still hold very dear. I hope and expect them to remain safe and far away from whatever species of disaster Trump’s rally at the BOK Center turns out to be.
I don’t know how bad this will be, but I know it won’t be good, because Trump is signaling that only violence in the streets will satisfy him. So my heart bleeds and my knuckles turn white as we wait for the storm.