What picture does the word “Oklahoma” conjure up for you?
A wonderful musical celebrating the inauguration of a brand-new state where the cowman and the farmer can be friends and folk don’t claim to be better than anybody else but will be danged if they’re not just as good?
A story of farmers ruined by the earth turning to dust and their migration in an old jalopy to California to be exploited by other farmers and attacked when they attempt to organise for a fair deal?
I imagine I’m not alone in first associating “Oklahoma” with Rodgers, Hammerstein, John Steinbeck and Henry Fonda.
Later I read most of the novels, many essays and both memoirs of Gore Vidal, the grandson of a US Senator for that state. A series of novels trace the story of the United States from their War of Independence for more than two centuries. It depicts historical characters, whatever their current reputations, warts and all .
As a child Gore would walk barefoot and sometimes shirtless, into the US Senate when it was in session to guide the blind Senator into and from the Chamber.(Washington gets hot in the summer and air conditioning belonged to the future). Gore’s own father, Eugene Vidal, established two airlines and was appointed Director of the Bureau of Civil Aviation by FDR. Eugene taught his son to fly a plane at twelve. Senator Gore had thwarted the efforts of oil interests to cheat Native Americans of some of the land they still held in his State. Gore Vidal observed many leading characters over many decades and knew JFK intimately. He appears to
have held no illusions about anybody
But he never wrote about the Massacre, perpetrated on hundreds of black men, women and children, in the Oklahoma town of Tulsa on May 3ist and June 1st 1921.
The oldest surviving witness 107 year old Mrs Ivy Fletcher, testified in the US Congress on Wednesday 19 May 2021 to the attack on a thriving African American community in Greenwood, Tulsa, where houses were robbed and burned and approximately three hundred innocent people murdered, The surviving blacks cleared out. The murderers were never brought to justice nor were the survivors compensated.
It has taken a hundred years for the story to be publicised.
Could such outrages be covered up today?
They could and continue to be so covered up.
Comments are closed.