I'm very much looking forward to a talk at the University of Tulsa on November 5 in a series named for Buck Colbert Franklin, a long-time Tulsa attorney and father of distinguished historian John Hope Franklin. And, even more to the point of my talk, B.C. Franklin was a survivor of the Tulsa riot of 1921 and then lawyer for other survivors. I'm going to be returning to a topic that interested me a great deal some years ago: the role of African American intellectuals in creating an agenda for the civil rights movement and in pressing those claims. I'm calling this "Reading the Great Constitutional Dream Book." The phrase comes from the eviction scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, where he writes of the elderly couple's eviction and says they had nothing from which they could be evicted, except the great constitutional dream book and even that they were not permitted to read.
I'm interested in the content of that "dream book" -- what were the ideas that African American intellectuals hoped for the Constitution? And why did they hold out hope for the Constitution -- what was it, even as Jim Crow repeatedly dealt them setbacks, that allowed African American intellectuals to place a faith in law? And then how did those ideas, so carefully developed in the pages of African American newspapers and in the pages of periodicals like the NAACP's The Crisis, migrate to formal constitutional law?
Oklahoma plays a surprising role in this. I want to begin by talking about the ideas of anti-lynching that circulated in the Tulsa and Oklahoma City African American communities in the 1910s and early 1920s that were followed by the destructive Tulsa riot in which the African American community of Greenwood was destroyed. In the wake of the riot the Tulsa's African American newspaper, The Tulsa Star, ceased publication -- but the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch continued for decades. It was edited by Roscoe Dunjee, who was also an important figure in the NAACP. Through the agency of Dunjee, the NAACP filed suit to integrate the University of Oklahoma; those two cases (McLaurin v. Oklahoma and Sipuel v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma) reached the United States Supreme Court. There were a host of other cases in the Oklahoma Courts, including a handful regarding a racially restrictive zoning ordinance (passed in the 1930s) and racially restrictive covenants in the "Oak Park" section of Oklahoma City, near the African American section of town.
And I want to talk about B.C. Franklin's role in using the legal system as well -- he filed suit on behalf of some riot victims in the aftermath of the riot, with some success in defeating a new building ordinance that would have made rebuilding prohibitively expensive. And in 1938 he took a defamation case up to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. The Tulsa World had erroneously quoted him as using the N-word; he responded that he did not use it and that his clients would not want an attorney who used it. Unsurprisingly, the Oklahoma Supreme Court denied relief. It concluded that imputing the use of the N-word (and other statements that were written in dialectic) to Mr. Franklin was not libelous. Here's the Oklahoma Supreme Court's opinion.
Anyway, very much looking forward to being back in Tulsa for the first time in many years.
Here's a podcast of my talk And here's a youtube video of my talk.
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