Riot and Redemption

The Tulsa Riot of 1921 is not a likely subject for juvenile fiction. Rightly described as “the worst riot in American history,” it was an almost military-style attack by white Tulsans on the African American community of Greenwood.

The white mob used such WWI technology as machine guns and airplanes (for dropping sticks of dynamite) on the prosperous black neighborhood. Although a handful of black WWI vets fought back, turning their mustering-out weapons against the invaders, they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers and advanced weaponry. The white mob completely destroyed some 35 blocks, including the business district on Archer Street, which was known nationally as “the Black Wall Street.” No whites were ever indicted, and the citizenry of Tulsa, black and white alike, kept so quiet about the horrific events that the Tulsa Riot was essentially forgotten until the 1990s, when a series of local newspaper reports awakened both memory and conscience.

In the hands of Pat Moore Carr ’54, the story of the riot—and the individuals it shattered—makes for a compelling, heartbreaking read, as intriguing for adults as for its target audience. Carr doesn’t pull any punches, but neither does she revel in gross detail. Readers of all ages come away from If We Must Die feeling braced by a clear-eyed encounter with truth.

The novel begins with the arrival in Tulsa, just months before the riot, of 17 year-old Berneen O’Brien, who is of black Irish descent. Her mother has just died, and Berneen is coming to stay with her only relative, Uncle Quinn, an embittered WWI veteran. Her uncle’s grim behavior is surprising enough to the remarkably strong-minded Berneen, but the unease she feels around him pales beside the shock she receives when she shows up for her first day of work at Liberty Elementary School. (She’d applied for the job from her native Wyoming and been accepted via the mail.) The school principal, Nelson Flowers, is black. So are her fellow teachers. When the children show up the next day, they are all black as well. Berneen is even more stunned when she realizes that everyone, including the tough-minded, literally battle-scarred war veteran Flowers, thinks that she is black too, because of her olive skin and dark curly hair.

Berneen can’t bring herself to tell anyone the truth: not about herself to her colleagues or about her job to her uncle, a confirmed racist and Klan member. So author Carr has Berneen reverse the “passing” phenomena, in which light-skinned African Americans present themselves as white. Instead Berneen passes as black, and soon finds herself in the hearty embrace of African American culture, which for Berneen contrasts very favorably with the “colorless” world of white Tulsan society. She plans to begin rooming in Greenwood with a fellow teacher as soon as the school year ends.

But much more than classes ends on May 31. When the mob attacks, Greenwood’s prosperity and its sense of self-confidence are finished as well. Carr shows the night unfold through the eyes of Berneen as she accompanies a fellow teacher and the pistol-bearing Principal Flowers through the burning streets. When Flowers is seriously injured, Berneen commandeers a car, and summoning all the haughty characteristics that she hates about the white world, bluffs her way through the mob and delivers the wounded principal to her astonished uncle’s house. Berneen is deeply relieved when her uncle calls a doctor rather than the police.

In a very moving passage, the two men, Quinn and Flowers, begin sharing memories of the terrible battle of the Argonne. Quinn has always suffered from not being to talk to anyone who would understand what he went through in France. Now the Klan member is shocked to find himself sharing with a black man the most powerful memories of his life.

Carr doesn’t sugarcoat history for her younger readers, but in this powerful encounter between the hater and the hated, she redeems both the past and humanity itself.

—David Theis