Is the World on Fire?
University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections & University Archives Repository.
On the morning of June 1, 1921, in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, five-year-old George Monroe was playing outside when he smelled smoke. Before George could even wonder what was burning, his mother yelled for him to get inside and hide under the bed. From the window of their house on Exeter Street, she could see a mob of white men coming up the hill. George was the last of the Monroe children to crowd under the bed before four white men carrying torches broke through the front door. One of them came so close to the bed that, without noticing, he stepped on George’s fingers. George was about to cry out when his older sister, Lottie, clamped her hand over his mouth and held it there. Finding no one inside, the white men set the curtains ablaze and went on to another home. When George’s mother felt sure the men were gone, she pulled her children out from under the bed and ran into the street. Outside, the air was now thick with smoke, the house engulfed in flames—all the houses, for as far as George could see, in flames. He turned to Lottie and asked, “Is the world on fire?”
By the next day, Greenwood was a smoldering ruin. What is now known as the Tulsa race massacre had claimed untold dead. More than 800 were hospitalized. Thousands more were marched at gunpoint by the Oklahoma National Guard, ostensibly for their own protection, to the Convention Hall, the Tulsa County Fairgrounds, and McNulty Park, where George’s father was interned. As young George wandered the streets of Greenwood on June 2, everything he had known was gone. His family home was burned to the ground. A rental house that his father had built on Elgin Avenue, next door to the new Mount Zion Baptist Church, had been torched, and the church was a pile of fire-scarred rubble. His father’s skating rink, the family business, was destroyed as well. In the ruins of the rink, George found some pennies that had been so super-heated by the flames that they were warped and turned black. The faint outline of Abraham Lincoln’s profile was still discernible, but the word over his shoulder—liberty—was no longer legible. Eighty years later, George Monroe still kept some of those pennies in a drawer of his new home in North Tulsa. He told a reporter, “I give one to anyone who asks me about it.” Today, five of those pennies are on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. In 2016, Paul Gardullo, the museum’s curator, told an audience in North Tulsa that such keepsakes carry tremendous power. “Small, humble objects like a handful of pennies may not mean much in and of themselves,” he said, “unless you begin to connect them to the very human stories.”
Switchyard, in all of its identities—the magazine you are now holding, the accompanying podcast, the annual festival of ideas, literature, and music in the heart of Tulsa—is an initiative of the University of Tulsa, aimed at connecting the physical world of today with those human stories that bring context and meaning to what we see. Switchyard will invite people to cross the tracks that once divided this city into north and south—arriving not as an armed mob nor as a crowd marched at gunpoint, but as citizens of a reunited community, gathering on common ground and on equal footing. Together, we hope to explore our complicated histories, to seek new points of connection, and to engage the transformative power of art. These are no small tasks in any era, but the challenge is especially daunting in an era that is increasingly defined by open hostility to the honest pursuit of truth. In this inaugural year of Switchyard, we are focusing our attention on attempts to ban, censor, or suppress challenging ideas—new and old. The context of that focus is obvious.
Oklahoma’s House Bill 1775, signed into law by Governor Kevin Stitt in May 2021, enacted new restrictions on what could be taught in the state’s classrooms, specifically denying the existence of systemic racism and forbidding the use of any text or curriculum that would suggest that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of their race or sex” or that such an individual “by virtue of their race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past.” The law, passed amid the uproar over Critical Race Theory and as a backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement, was understood as an attempt to prevent school teachers from talking frankly with students about the racist structures inherent in our country’s founding and the destructive legacy of those systems. Of course, the real concern is: if young people understand injustice, they may ask why their elders have allowed it to continue—or even demand change.
Drawing by Joel Daniel Phillips.
