‘I work with the dead. But this can help the living’: the anthropologist investigating the Tulsa race massacre
Steve Rose
Phoebe Stubblefield’s parents were born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She spent summers there as a child. Yet she did not hear about the Tulsa race massacre until she was nearly 30. The event in 1921, which was shrouded in secrecy for decades, was one of the worst episodes of racist violence in US history; hundreds of people were killed in the racially motivated attack on a peaceful, prosperous Black community.
Neither the Black community who bore the brunt of it nor their white neighbours who perpetrated it spoke publicly of the massacre. Indeed, for the next 75 years, there was no official recognition that it had even occurred. Like many of those connected to the incident, Stubblefield’s family barely mentioned it. She remembers her mother’s response when she first brought it up: “She said: ‘Oh yeah, your Aunt Anna lost her house.’ That was the complete family history regarding the Tulsa race massacre. And I was like: ‘Who’s Aunt Anna?’”