Buck Colbert Franklin

The morning of 1 June 1921. Thirty-five city blocks of the Greenwood district of Tulsa are smoking. The night before, a mob deputised by the city has burned what the country's Black press had called the wealthiest concentration of Black-owned commerce in America. Estimates of the dead range from thirty-six in the contemporary record to three hundred in the accounting reopened eighty years later. The survivors are detained under guard at fairgrounds and ballparks. A lawyer who arrived in Tulsa earlier that same year, and whose own office is among the burned, pitches a tent on the smoking lot and begins to draft a brief.

Buck Colbert Franklin (1879 – 1960) — born 6 May 1879 near Homer, in what was then the Chickasaw Nation of Indian Territory; son of David Franklin, a man who had escaped slavery and fought for the Union Army, and Millie Colbert Franklin, raised in the Choctaw tradition; admitted to the Oklahoma Bar in December 1907 after apprenticing with Black lawyers in Ardmore and completing a correspondence course at the Sprague School of Law in Detroit; relocated his family to Tulsa in early 1921 weeks before the destruction of Greenwood; defended displaced Black residents against the city's post-massacre fire ordinance and won; father of the historian John Hope Franklin; author of a typed 1931 eyewitness manuscript of the massacre, The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims, which lay in private family storage for eighty-four years before its 2015 acquisition by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Franklin's most consequential contribution was not the manuscript that surfaced eighty-four years after he wrote it; it was the brief he filed in the weeks after the massacre. Tulsa's response to the destruction of Greenwood was an ordinance, passed by the City Commission on 7 June 1921, requiring fireproof construction in any rebuilding of the district. The ordinance was facially about safety and substantively about land. Black residents who had lost everything could not afford fireproof construction; the city, and the speculators arranged around it, could then purchase the cleared blocks at industrial prices and convert the country's most prosperous Black commercial corridor into rail yards. Franklin practiced from a tent on the cleared lot of his former office, drafted the litigation, took it through the Oklahoma courts, and in September 1921 the ordinance was struck down on due-process grounds. The right to rebuild was preserved. The cleared land remained the residents' to reclaim.

He kept practicing, and he kept writing. The manuscript of 22 August 1931, ten typed pages on yellowed legal paper folded in thirds, does not catalogue the famous casualty figures; it tells the story of three specific killings he witnessed himself, including the long erosion of a single survivor's life over the ten years following. His son, John Hope Franklin, became the historian who placed the long Black American century into the mainstream of American letters — From Slavery to Freedom, the chairmanship of a presidential race initiative, a National Humanities Medal. The autobiographical record exists because the son edited the father's papers into My Life and An Era, published in 1997. The 1931 manuscript itself remained in private family storage until 2015, when it was recovered, purchased from a private seller by a civic group of Tulsans, and donated to the Smithsonian with the Franklin family's support.

The archive holds the typed pages, the Oklahoma court rulings of September 1921, the city records of the rescinded ordinance, the photographs of Greenwood before and after, the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission report that re-opened the official accounting eighty years late. What it does not hold are the conversations between Franklin and his clients in the tent on the cleared lot, the calculations of how to defend a community while living inside its loss, the silences of the surviving years that he chose to mark in writing only once, in 1931, and then to fold and to keep. The archive does not replace those silences; it makes the case that the silences happened, and that the choice to break them — even a single time, even on yellowed paper folded in thirds and held for eighty-four years — has consequences a state apparatus cannot prevent. The two-source rule, family corroboration, IPFS-pinned attestation: mechanisms built precisely for the case of a manuscript that almost did not survive.

Heritage Voices arrives next Sunday.

This issue’s emblem is Sankofa — “se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi”: it is not taboo to go back for what you forgot.
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