'The Burning' almost can't help but be gripping--the subject matter is naturally captivating, and Madigan does an excellent job of placing you THERE time and time again through the eyes of various participants, both black and white. It's a very complete account, and Madigan finds a nice balance between being well-researched and all historical-ish and filling in color or details in his narrative to keep the story alive. While there are a few heroes and villains, Madigan avoids painting his characters in bold 'good guy' / 'bad guy' stereotypes. The reader is left not simply reviling white supremacists and feeling morally superior to past generations, but questioning the dark side of our humanity and hating ignorance and self-righteousness, whatever their specifics.
The book begins a little off-kilter as he sets up various approaches and backgrounds to the events to come, and I wonder if he didn't write various sections here and later in the work at different times, then simply paste them together without necessarily working them into a single consistent flow. It is at times briefly disorienting. And while the compilation of SO many first-hand experiences by different people is wonderful in terms of completeness, it occasionally feels like overkill. If this were a work of fiction, such thoroughness would be wallowing. Being as it's history, and a piece of history not yet often written about in detail, this is easily forgiven. As commented on by previous reviewers, the informal way Madigan cites sources at the end of the book is troubling, but hardly qualifies of evidence of his placing emotion over substance.
Overall, a must-read for anyone interested in Oklahoma (both of you), race relations or civil rights, sociology, or American history. While the nature of the event leaves some of Madigan's details open to future challenge, his painting of this horrific episode will not easily be forgotten.
Do you remember that Firesign Theatre album: "Everything You Know is Wrong"? Once in awhile you read a book about an event in history that makes you wonder how you failed to hear about it earlier. "Why didn't anyone ever tell me about this?" you ask yourself, trying to pull something from the recesses of your memory to bridge the gap and harmonize the cognitive dissonance you feel, having learned that the world is a stranger place than you had suspected.
In the '60's we associated "race riot" with violence and unrest in the black community, images of blacks breaking windows, setting fires, throwing rocks, etc. Well, yes, Virginia, it's true, there was a time when "race riot" not only did not refer to violent behavior by blacks, but it referred to a series of events which involved, as The Clash might say: "White Riot", the white majority running amok, burning down houses, looting, killing innocent blacks, and, what seems most significant, destroying signs of black economic achievement (spell that i-n-d-e-p-e-n-d-e-n-c-e ) and social advancement.
A stack of books which have come out in the last 3 or 4 years can help you patch the holes in your education, books dealing with early 20th-century riots in places like Tulsa, Florida, and New Orleans. What is perhaps most disturbing about the revelations in these books is the fact that the violence is carried out not only in full view of the local autorities, but with the cooperation and assistance of local and even national government. Talk about being up against it! Why are these important? Isn't this just mean-spirited muckraking? No. They raise questions relevant to a current legal issue, namely the payment of reparations to blacks. The first-hand accounts provided by Madigan vividly establish the severity and duration of the damages suffered by the victims - only a handful of whom survived at the time of publication - at the hands of the whites - whose surviving numbers are never known, since the participants have tended not to reveal themselves for obvious reasons. It raises questions about whether, for insurance purposes, the events should have been defined, not as a riot, but as a government action or an act of war, an invasion by a hostile army. Indeed, Greenwood resembled a war zone in some respects; read the book if you don't believe me.
Accounts differ between this and other books regarding how the events in front of the courthouse that evening of May 31, 1921 evolved into the conflagration that turned several city blocks of houses into smoking empty lots. The apparent turning point was a confrontation between a black WWI veteran who owned a grocery and an elderly white man who apparently was not too clear-headed, and acted as though he was living in pre-war (Civil, that is) days. Within a matter of seconds, scores of shots were fired, everyone hit the ground, then ran to his own side of town to re-arm, re-load, and reconnoiter.
Those couple seconds after the flurry of shots, when it became silent again, and everyone looked around at the dead and wounded, suddenly realizing that something big had happened, something bigger might (or might not?) happen, constitute one of the most dramatic event descriptions I've ever read in a history book. It calls to mind Ken Burns talking about making a recording of Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, and telling about editing the sound, coming to the very moment before Lincoln is shot, and stopping the tape. Everyone in the editing room sat looking at each other, thinking about the tremendous import of that brief moment, that pause as time gets ready to draw another breath, when things could go one way or the other, and that makes all the difference.
I can imagine being on that courthouse square with the 500 or so people just at that moment when the shooting stops, smoke hovering all around, and they all look at each other, frightened, suspicious: "Can we just walk away?" Each wonders what will happen next... And being human, they dread. Everyone runs for a gun, a knife, a club. They all pile into cars and head off to organize an army. The two sides have now engaged, battle lines been drawn, and all without anyone saying anything. That's history. What will you do if you're there next time? That's why we read history.
One of the more memorable of many events in the book is the grisly murder of a blind elderly black man, who had only stumps for legs. He used old catcher mitts on his hands to propel himself from place to place on a wheeled platform and supported himself by selling pencils and singing songs on downtown Tulsa streets.
At around 8:00 A.M. on June 1, he was apprehended by a group of three or four whites, who tied one end of a rope to the longer of his two leg stumps and the other end to the rear bumper of their car. The old man's pleas for mercy followed by cries of pain as he bounced to and fro on the harsh bricks and steel rails of Main Street were to no avail.
Not one to be inconsistent, the Tulsa Tribune endorsed the riot--saying the blacks got what was coming to them ("the angry white man's reprisal for the wrong inflicted on them by the inferior race") and offering no apology to the police commissioner or mayor "for having pled with them to clean up the cesspools," otherwise referred to by the newspaper as "Niggertown."
The city fathers did little to help the blacks rebuild their homes and businesses and refused offers of help coming from outside Tulsa. Something like one-thousand blacks spent the winter of 1921-22 living in tents provided by the Red Cross. A number of blacks, not surprisingly, left Tulsa for good.
As mentioned by a previous reviewer, a map of (old) Tulsa would have been nice as an aid to the reader in tracing the mob's movement from one end of Greenwood (the black district) to the other.
In the author's note prior to the prologue, the author states he has "taken the license of approximating dialogue for the purpose of maintaining the narrative." Although this aspect is a bit of downer, a reader without access to official records would be hard-pressed to separate the envisioned dialogue from the actual. Regardless, the central message in this book is clear, consistent, and relevant.
