In the collection of photographs by Tulsa-based photographer Joseph Rushmore, we are presented with images showing the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the mass burial sites of its victims, and an image of a quiet protest demanding reparations for the event. Those images, which evoke the trauma, struggle, and continued hope of a ravaged Black community, sit alongside those of the 2021 January 6th Capitol Riot in Washington, D.C. Notions of patriotism, however, distorted: MAGA-inflected fascism, and the challenging of an always and already compromised American democracy, are clearly conveyed by Rushmore.
This collection may seem to represent an unexpected juxtaposition, however, the images represent two events that are the result of a similar phenomenon, which is the white anxiety over the American (racial) social order. Moreover, this anxiety was responded to by the very term and act that names both events: riot.
Mob violence and riots have long been recognized forms of extralegal white justice in the United States. Indeed, they were a peculiar exercising of white political action throughout the early twentieth century. Preceding the 1921 Tulsa race riot—later named massacre—that I discuss in my book Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa, white riots broke out in Evansville, Indiana, in 1903; Atlanta in 1906; Springfield, Illinois, in 1908; East St. Louis in 1917; and Macon, Mississippi, and Chicago in 1919.Footnote1 On most of these occasions the impetus behind these white attacks on Black communities was the perceived threat of these communities to white economic and political power. It was the threat of Black participation in the US political and economic system that drove whites to violence.
This was no different in Tulsa, where the Black community of Greenwood, with its too close proximity to the white downtown area of Tulsa, represented the white city’s inability to develop as it saw fit. White engagement in public violence, then, should be seen as a revolt against a perceived threat to their power, when that power is being legitimately challenged.
The United States Capitol Riot on January 6, 2021, is therefore an apt example of the belligerent violence of so-called self-defense of a political order thought to be under siege. Perpetrated by a mostly white mob, or at the very least a mob that invested in the white American values advocated by President Donald Trump, the events at the Capitol constituted a riot in the most genuine sense of the word.
So while the two scenes reflected in these images tell of incidents that are distanced by time, and, on first impression, context, they tell a singular story of the durable and enduring presence of violent forms that order American society. And while both represent what appear to have been “events” of riotous violence, we should do well to fully acknowledge that they are the mere consequences of what Ida B. Wells noted as the “school of practice” that was the American penchant for violent social order following emancipation, where “with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue.”Footnote2
Indeed, we should look beyond the spectacular qualities of the two days in May 1921 in which the Black district of Greenwood was razed, and that day in January 2021 in which Donald Trump’s supporters seized the Capitol as drawing on the deep and sustained reserve of violence.
Directly relevant to the twinned riots presented here by Rushmore, anthropologist Deborah Thomas writes that violence truly functions as “no single riot, no massacre, no extremely violent event that appeared as an aberration from everyday life, no one occurrence that resulted in a new reckoning of time … dividing that which happened before the event from that which happened after.”Footnote3 And so these two riots, a century apart, represent two points on a continuum of social ordering by which it is made apparent that there has always been a vulnerability to our sense of the world, and the actual systems that make it possible.
Seen in the frenzied and frenetic activity of the Capitol riot and in the quiet consequence of the Tulsa massacre, the repertoire of American social order is clearly invoked in Rushmore’s photos. The white manufacturing of violence and the response of Black life in its wake are here represented by the events at the Capitol and in the images of Tulsa.
Indeed, on the occasion of each of these riots, the mythology of a secured American democracy in which many Americans thought they lived was seen to be no more impervious to the thrust of violence in 2021 than the all-Black district of Greenwood was in 1921. While different historical moments, and representing different vantages and degrees of trauma and violence, these two riots represent the fulfillment of the only promise offered by America: violence.
Violence, in these instances, shows its place as a central part of the American project, its history, and its continuation. By recognizing and admitting to the terms of American violence and its injury that underpin our social and political present and its past, we can determine the possibility of repair for both reimagining the American project and its capacity for a justice-oriented future. We start by first acknowledging, as put by historian N. D. B. Connolly, that American development “required an awful lot of violence.”Footnote4
At least this is where I have started as a member of the California Reparations Task Force, where I have made it known that there is a direct relationship between the violent dispossession of Black California communities and the state’s economic development. This tense but necessary relationship between violence and the development of American freedom and progress has formed the longstanding and chronic issues of discrimination and injustice in the United States, which will continue to draw upon the repertoire of violence, that will see more riots still serving to remind us of the fragility of the project of American democracy.
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Jovan Scott Lewis
Jovan Scott Lewis is an associate professor and chair of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Governor appointee to the California State Reparations Task Force. He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (2022). Lewis studies racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and reparations as means of understanding the historical constitution of Black communities.
Notes
1 Jovan Scott Lewis, Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).
2 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, Project Gutenberg, 2005, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14977.
3 Deborah A. Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 110.
4 N. D. B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 52.