B.C. Franklin and the Lawyer Who Argued in a Tent
Near Tulsa, Oklahoma
Buck Colbert Franklin was a lawyer. He had an office in Greenwood in May of nineteen twenty-one. When the massacre came, his office burned with everything else.
He moved his practice into a tent in the ruins of Greenwood and kept working. Within weeks of the massacre, Franklin filed an injunction against the city of Tulsa and the Tulsa fire marshal, arguing that a new city ordinance passed in the aftermath of the burning was designed not to prevent future fire but to prevent Black Tulsans from rebuilding on their own land. The ordinance required new structures in the burned area to be fireproof, a standard that, at the prices available in nineteen twenty-one, only wealthy builders could meet. Franklin argued it was an unconstitutional taking of property and an effort to displace Greenwood permanently.
He won the injunction. It was a narrow, procedural victory, but it was enough to block the ordinance long enough for rebuilding to begin. Greenwood's residents, most of whom had been interned at the fairgrounds in the days after the massacre, came back and started over before the city could close the legal window.
Franklin wrote a memoir describing what he witnessed and what he did. For decades, the memoir was unknown outside his immediate family. In two thousand fifteen, the Smithsonian Magazine published a piece about a handwritten account Franklin had left, accompanied by a watercolor painting he had made of the smoke over Greenwood from his vantage point during the burning. He had been watching his livelihood disappear and taking notes at the same time.
His son John Hope Franklin became one of the most distinguished historians of American race relations of the twentieth century, a professor at Duke and later the University of Chicago, whose book From Slavery to Freedom remained the standard text in African American history for decades. The father argued in a tent. The son wrote the history of why.
