On May 31, 1921, Buck Colbert Franklin peered up at the Tulsa, Oklahoma, sky and saw planes dropping turpentine bombs onto the roofs of nearby homes and businesses. On the street around him, he watched Black women, men, and children being felled by the guns of their white neighbors. Under the guise of extracting retribution for a Black teenager’s supposed assault on a white woman a day before, white Tulsans strategically destroyed the physical manifestations of their Black neighbors’ success.
Franklin’s account of the Tulsa Massacre is now famous, after being rediscovered through the event’s depiction in HBO’s Watchmen and Lovecraft Country. These shows used the massacre to draw a parallel between racial violence of the past and present. With the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre this year, a look at Franklin’s life offers a way into thinking and teaching about this event.
The father of famed historian and former AHA president John Hope Franklin, Buck Colbert Franklin, better known as B.C., was more than a bystander to the Tulsa Massacre. Rather, Franklin’s life is a testament to the triracial history of the region and representative of how integrating Black and Native history often provides a richer, broader historical narrative.
The son of a mother of mixed Choctaw and Black ancestry and a Black father who witnessed his own father buy his freedom from his Chickasaw enslaver, Franklin inhabited a world of intertwined Black and Native history from birth. The family’s upward mobility was made possible due to his father’s ability to settle on Indian land. Franklin embodied the prosperity that made Tulsa’s Black community so notable and the deeper Black-Native history that made it possible.
The western landscape where he grew up accommodated a spectrum of freedoms for Black people. Indian Territory (part of modern-day Oklahoma) was a space of enslavement from the time that the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations arrived with Black women and men in bondage, after being forcibly displaced from their southeastern homelands in the late 1820s and early 1830s. After the Civil War, treaties between the United States and these five nations forced them to emancipate, enfranchise, and provide land to people they had formerly enslaved. Thereafter, the Black and mixed-race people whose lives and legacies were linked to these Native polities lived a life unthinkable for most other newly freed people of African descent.