July 23, 2014 · 8:04 pm

Unlike father, states don’t always know — or do — best

Every time someone waxes poetic about the virtues of state and local government, especially in Oklahoma, I am reminded of three words.

County.

Commissioner.

Scandal.

In the early 1980s, some 230 current and former county commissioners and county contractors were convicted or pleaded guilty in a kickback scheme that remains the largest public official scandal in the nation’s history. The practice was so engrained some of the convicted seemed to think that county commissioners got their name because they worked on commission. “I swear I never took more than my 10 percent,” one of them is supposed to have said.

Far be it from me to defend the federal government. It’s big, it’s bulky, it’s clumsy and it’s not terribly efficient. Just today Sen. Tom Coburn chastised a federal agency that seems to have run out of things to do around 1988. And I don’t think anyone will argue the unhealthy influence of money in Washington, D.C. But, as national governments go, ours is not too bad. Afghanistan, any one?

The idea that local and state governments are inherently superior is just not borne out. State governments are at least as likely to give us bad government as the folks in Washington. State governments have given us Jim Crow, regressive taxes, lapdog regulators and corruption on an epic scale. Incompetence, greed and plain stupidity are as likely to show up in city hall as in Congress, and local schools boards, left to their own devices, have been known to go soft on algebra and hard on coaches who don’t play the right kids.

Lately I’ve heard many politicians say we Oklahomans would not dare damage our own water or land because, you know, it’s ours. I’ve wanted to ask if they’ve ever heard of the Dust Bowl or Tar Creek, or how the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board, which cleans up old oil and gas well sites, came to be.

In a perfect world, local and state governments would be better than national governments. They’re smaller, more agile and more knowledgeable about the people they govern.

But this is not a perfect world. In the real world, bad government is everywhere.

And so is good.

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July 17, 2014 · 8:33 pm

Greenwood and Deep Deuce

The best thing about being a reporter and writer is the challenge of constant learning on a broad, almost limitless scope. Subjects today included federal water policy, the vote on a 2008 immigration bill, the state’s drug laws and the date what is now U.S. 169 linked Owasso to Tulsa. I also had occasion to check the spelling of Trixie Belden, dig up the Oklahoma National Guard’s after-action reports following the Tulsa Race Riot and glance over a poll on wind power in Oklahoma.

Anita Arnold is the one who really took me to school today, though. We had two lengthy phone conversations today related to a piece I’m writing for Oklahoma Today about Oklahoma City’s Deep Deuce and Tulsa’s Greenwood district, the historic black neighborhoods in the state’s two largest cities. I’m fairly familiar with Greenwood and its history but know considerably less about Deep Deuce.

Anita is the executive director of BLAC, Inc., an Oklahoma City organization originally founded more than forty years ago to promote music and arts in the public schools, and particularly Douglass, the city’s historically black high school. We talked — or rather, Anita talked and I listened — about the great musicians Deep Deuce turned out in its glory days.

Although now Deep Deuce is applied to an area north of Bricktown east of downtown Oklahoma City,  it was, strictly speaking, only the 300 block of NE Second Street. In that one block was crammed the business district that was for decades the beating heart of black Oklahoma City. Here Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing first made music and Ralph Ellison dreamed of becoming a composer and conductor, unaware his path led instead to acclaim as a writer.

Deep Deuce, like Greenwood, has had something of a revival in recent years after decades of decline. Also like Greenwood, this reawakening is not without controversy and even resentment. There is a feeling among some  African Americans have been pushed aside, that outside money is capitalizing on their heritage.

The irony is not lost on them.

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July 13, 2014 · 8:00 pm

Drugs wars and the Tulsa race riot

Drugs wars and the Tulsa race riot.

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July 13, 2014 · 7:59 pm

Drugs wars and the Tulsa race riot

One of the things I’ve wondered for many years is whether drugs could have played a role in Tulsa’s 1921 race riot.

Drugs, and especially opiates, were a serious problem, even in those days. At least as far back as 1907, before statehood, police raided an opium den in what was then a town of seven thousand. By 1921, morphine and cocaine addiction had become a serious problem.

In January, federal agents raided a soft drink stand adjacent to McNulty Park — the stadium which would serve briefly after the riot as a holding area for black Tulsans — operated by one Irma “The Midget” Harisson. When a search of the premises failed to turn up the expected contraband, one of the agents grabbed the four-foot, six-inch Harisson by the ankles, turned her upside down, and shook her until cocaine capsules fell from her clothes.

Over the next several months, two doctors were sent to federal prison for illegally selling morphine and cocaine; two men were arrested in Tulsa and charged with possession of one thousand grains of morphine; a double amputee working in a shoe-shine parlor was found with five morphine and three cocaine capsules; a man named J.L. Love was fined $500 and sentenced to a year in prison for morphine possession; and two men were apprehended at the train station with a valise full of “liquid morphine.”

In May, police caught two drug dealers by making a buy with a marked silver dollar.

In the immediate aftermath of the May 31-June 1 Tulsa riot and for years afterward, official blame fell mostly on armed blacked men who went to the county courthouse to defend a prisoner they believed was about to be lynched. A confrontation ensued, shots were fired and riot was on.

Several of those men were described, by both whites and blacks, as dope peddlers and drug users. Today that claim is generally dismissed and in all likelihood rightfully so. But the fact it would be accepted as plausible suggests the extent of the drug problem in Tulsa at the time.

After the riot, police reported white drug dealers did indeed enjoy a windfall from the riot. One of the buildings destroyed in the fires that engulfed much of the black neighborhoods, they said, had been a well-known den, and Officer Henry Carmichael reported white dealers were “unusually active” since their black competitors had been temporarily put out of business.

Certainly, the riot was not about drugs, and I wouldn’t want anyone to make too much of this. But, as I said, I have long wondered if just may the riot did provide an opportunity for underworld characters to settle scores or get rid of competition.

I guess it’s just one of those things we’ll never know.

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Filed under History

July 10, 2014 · 9:08 pm

Of flintlocks and atom bombs

Considerable time and energy is spent in this country speculating about what the founders of this great nation would do or think or say if they were alive today. It is an interesting exercise and not without merit, but more often than we care to admit a futile one.

The thirteen colonies had a total of population of about 2.5 million, spread out over 375,000 square miles in 1776. Today we have more than 315 million people on 3.7 million square miles. In size, we’ve grown 10-fold; in population,  126-fold.

Technologically, we live in a world that we can barely imagine, never mind what George Washington or James Madison might have envisioned. They lived in a time of flintlock muskets and quill pens; we in an era of atom bombs and iPads.

Washington warned us to beware of foreign entanglements, good advice for a small, weak, young nation far removed from the center of the political and economic universe, much harder for a large, wealthy country from which the rest of the world takes its cues.

The concept of limited government and self-sufficiency is one thing when people are spread thinly across a seemingly endless continent with no one to answer to except themselves, something else when we are elbow-to-elbow, each of our actions infringing in some way large or small on our neighbor. We all hate rules and regulations, but the world is also a different place than it was 248 years ago, or even 50 or 100 years ago.

What would the founders say? Another trap of this line of thinking is that the founders disagreed as much as we do today. From Alexander Hamilton to Patrick Henry, they’re opinions stretched the limits of political thinking. One thing that probably can be said is that they talked, they discussed, they searched for commonalities to keep the ship of state afloat. They had ideals, but they were not necessarily idealists. Their biggest disagreements were, at their roots, economic.

It is proper to look to the founders for advice and insight. But it is also proper to recognize the world has changed, and so have we.

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