On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. The department’s investigation determined that the attack was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” While it conceded that “no avenue of prosecution now exists for these crimes,” the department hailed the findings as the “federal government’s first thorough reckoning with this devastating event,” which “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”
“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in announcing the report. “This report breaks that silence through a rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”
Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
These jarringly discordant actions were, of course, separated by a transfer of power: the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who swiftly moved to issue pardons, commute prison sentences and request case dismissals for all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes on Jan. 6, including seditious conspiracy and assaulting police officers. That sweeping clemency order — “Fuck it, release ’em all,” Trump said, according to Axios — prompted a wave of outrage, and criticism even from some Republicans. “I’ve always said that when you pardon people who attack police officers, you’re sending the wrong signal to the public at large,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.
The removal of the database happened more quietly, but it is worthy of notice in its own right. It signals the Trump administration’s intention to not only spare the president’s supporters any further consequences for their role in the riot, but to erase the event from the record — to cast it into the fog of confusion and forgetting in which the Greenwood massacre had existed for so long.
As some have noted, this push to whitewash recent history carries a disconcerting echo of countless autocratic regimes, from the Chinese Communist Party’s memory-holing of the Tiananmen Square massacre to the Argentine military junta’s “disappearing” of dissidents in the 1970s. It comes at the same time as the administration is also seeking to whitewash the teaching of American history, more generally: Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 29 titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” that threatens to withhold federal funds from schools that teach that the country is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory” and instructs the government to “prioritize federal resources, consistent with applicable law, to promote patriotic education.” One wonders: Would teaching the Tulsa massacre be allowed?
But the removal of the database is troubling for another reason, too: It undermines our ability to consider the events of Jan. 6 in all their complexity and particularity.
I was made aware of that complexity when I spent several days after the riot immersing myself in the more than 500 smartphone videos that participants had shared on the Parler social-media app, for an essay accompanying ProPublica’s compilation of the video trove. What struck me perhaps more than anything else about the videos was the sheer diversity of the motivations, profiles and actions that they put on display. Yes, seen from afar, the mob seemed to assume the unity of purpose of a single, organized mass bent on destruction.
But seen in the close-up of the videos, heterogeneity emerged. There were young women with puffy jackets and pompom hats, middle-aged women who could have been coming straight from a business lunch, young men furtively removing their black tactical gear under the cover of a tree to pull on red MAGA sweatshirts to pass as mere Trump supporters. There were people viciously attacking police officers and denigrating them (“You should be ashamed, fucking pansies”), others pleading with them not to (“Do not throw shit at the police!” “Do not hurt the cops!”) and still others thanking the cops who were arriving on the scene (“Back the blue! We love you!”). There were people smashing in windows and others decrying them for doing so (“Oh, God no. Stop! Stop!” “What the fuck is wrong with him?” “He’s Antifa!”) There were people who, in a matter of moments, swung from being pitchfork-carrying marauders to wide-eyed tourists, as they deferentially asked a Capitol police officer for directions or swung their cameras up to capture the inside of the dome. (“This is the state Capitol,” an awestruck man says to his young female companion.)
This was the great, necessary undertaking of the four-year effort by the Department of Justice: to draw distinctions for the sake of allocating individual accountability. By poring over countless such videos and other evidence, investigators zeroed in on the hundreds of people who could be identified as engaging in and instigating the most violence. There was Daniel Rodriguez, who could be seen on camera driving a stun gun into the neck of Officer Michael Fanone; he was sentenced to more than 12 years. There was Thomas Webster, a former New York City police officer and member of the Marine Corps who swung a metal flagpole at an officer; he got 10 years. There was Peter Schwartz, a Pennsylvania welder who attacked the police with a chair and chemical spray; he got 14 years.
Inevitably, some of the outcomes were ripe for second-guessing. Kerstin Kohlenberg, the former U.S. correspondent for Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper, reported recently on the case of Stephen Randolph, a 34-year-old Kentucky man who received an eight-year sentence for his role in pushing over one of the metal security barriers on the Capitol grounds, injuring a police officer in the process; others in the same group received much milder sentences. Trump and his allies could have chosen to comb through cases and pardon only the defendants who they could argue had been painted with too broad a brush.
But that’s not what Trump did. Instead, he himself took up the broadest brush possible and wiped it all clear. In doing so, he let the defendants off the hook. But in another sense, with the mass pardon and deletion of the database, he deprived all of the Jan. 6 participants of individual agency, of individuality, period. In a sense, he rendered them just what the most ardent castigation on the other side had cast them as from the outset: a mindless mob.
As chance has it, at the end of Trump’s first week in office, I was in Tulsa. I went to the Greenwood Rising museum, which tells the story of the rise of the neighborhood and its sudden destruction. It is a powerful presentation despite the dearth of documentation of the violence: snatches of oral history from survivors play over a video simulation of gunfire and arson; before and after photos capture the near-total obliteration of the neighborhood’s prospering commercial core by first the attack and later urban renewal.
One of the museum’s central preoccupations is the attempt by Tulsa authorities and leading white denizens to downplay the massacre, by framing it as a “Negro uprising”; only a couple decades afterward, the museum notes, many in Tulsa were barely aware it happened at all. This cover-up came with lasting consequences for Greenwood survivors, who were denied insurance claims for their destroyed homes, not to mention any form of civic restitution.
Even now, many Black residents of Tulsa are left wondering why the reckoning represented by the Department of Justice investigation is not joined by substantive reparations of any sort. The last two living survivors of the massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, said in a statement responding to the report, “The DOJ confirms the government’s role in the slaughter of our Greenwood neighbors but refuses to hold the institutions accountable under federal law.” Still, they said, “We are relieved to see one of the biggest coverups in American history come crashing down.”
And now, back in Washington, the federal government has embarked on an entirely new cover-up of another day of enormous violence. The erasure will not be nearly as successful this time around. There are, after all, all those videos, which live on ProPublica’s website, among other places, while much of the deleted database can be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. (And ProPublica is one of 10 media organizations that have jointly sued the federal government, seeking to obtain 14,000 hours of Jan. 6 surveillance footage.)
But for the time being, at least, those seeking to preserve the record of one of the darkest days in recent U.S. history will be doing so, like the survivors of Greenwood and other outbursts of violence around the world, in direct opposition to their own government.
Alex Mierjeski and Agnel Philip contributed research.