First morning in Tulsa, we passed officially into the South:  at a local diner, we were asked, “you want grits with that?”  Yes, we had entered the Grits Zone.  (They were, to be sure, gritty).

Three years ago, when my writing partner Kristen and I drove to Oklahoma for the first time, I remember crossing into both the “y’all” zone and the “hon” zone right after we crossed the border into the Panhandle.  I liked being “y’all” all by myself, and being “hon” to all the females.

But things got serious.  I had joined Kristen to cover the 15 year commemoration of the Oklahoma City terror bombing in 1995,  along on my own a simple quest:  to find out if Oklahoma was really in the South—as opposed to West or Midwest.  I quickly found that most Oklahomans I spoke to jumped to self-identify as Southerners.  When I learned about segregation in the 1950’s from Kristen’s aunt, I thought I had made some ah-hah discovery—even though OK was never in the Confederacy, it endured all the same conflicts and changes as the Deep South did during the Civil Rights era.

Now I realize how naïve I was.  There was never any mystery or controversy about Oklahoma’s Southern status.  When it became a state in 1907, Oklahoma’s first law was to create legal racial segregation—Jim Crow.

Yesterday, looking over the ruins of Tulsa’s Greenwood district, where the empty streets, the steps and driveways to nowhere still evoke the 1921 Greenwood Race War as if it happened yesterday.  To my travel partner George, it was like a Civil War battlefield without grave markers or monuments—or explanations, a ghostly blank.  In fact, many of the black victims of the white mobs were buried in unmarked graves.

Greenwood cements Oklahoma’s tragic place in the South’s racial nightmare.  The Confederate Flag, which had no connection to the state’s true history (having become a state more than forty years after the end of the Civil War) flew over the state capitol until the 1970’s—the same era when the taboo to discuss the Race War on Greenwood by both whites and blacks began to lift.

Prosperous, well-educated, African-American Greenwood neighborhood was destroyed by raging white mobs—thousands of houses burned to the ground or strafed from the air (by Sinclair Oil -provided planes), hundreds killed or injured, and a whole community driven from their homes.  Many took refuge in the surrounding woods, only to be confronted by white strangers bearing guns.

Greenwood prospered again after the 1921 attacks, the former residents rebuilding without access to loans or insurance compensation. ( Julius Pegues of the Franklin Hope Center told us many of the residents were skilled builders.) But the neighborhood revived only to be destroyed again by 1960’s “urban renewal” and is now just a small remnant of itself, squeezed under a freeway overhead and a minor league ballpark on its flank.

Even though a brilliant new monument (by Denver sculptor Ed Dwight) and a cultural center stand today to educate and commemorate the vanished community, and many studies and books are devoted to Greenwood’s history, it remains unknown to many Americans, and even most Oklahomans.  It’s as if the “largest civil disturbance in our country,” that attack on Americans by Americans in America, is still a secret history for most of us.

The completely emptied Greenwood streets we wandered are explained away by some locals as victims of the freeway construction and decline of black household fortunes in the 1960’s.   Footsteps from Greenwood dead zone, though, a whiter neighborhood named Brady Heights is reviving and gentrifying with Tulsa’s official blessing, even though it’s bisected by two freeways.

Brady Heights is named for Tate Brady, a Ku Klux Klan member who participated in the white mob that destroyed Greenwood.

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We left Tulsa to search for two of Oklahoma’s once thriving “All-Black Towns,” where Southern blacks fleeing sharecropping penury and prejudice hoped to stake claims in Oklahoma’s 1880s land run.  They succeeded until racist officials decided all-Black communities posed a political threat and imposed Jim Crow even before statehood.  Today many of the towns are ghosts. (Is this a ghost story?)

We found Red Bird, a dispersed crossroads today, and Tullahassee, the oldest town, where collapsing buildings indicate past grandeur, stone churches and even a college.  Seven stray kittens greeted us on an abandoned main street, and cast-off sofas decorated a side street.