When did she know she was white? Daughter’s question triggered 1967 memory

Some readers might remember that I was ambushed by my daughter in the infancy of her now-successful podcast producing career. She thrust a mic under my nose and asked me when I knew I was white.

I was immediately on the defensive. I’m older, more experienced, lived through school desegregation, have made decisions based on what I think is right…and had no idea how to answer her question.

We were a large Catholic family in a mixed-race parish in north Tulsa. In December 1967, like many people at that tumultuous time, we participated in the white flight to the other side of downtown. Our first house was two miles from the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and we’d never heard of it, even 46 years later. None of our Black neighbors talked about it with us.

We ranged in age from 4 to 15, me in the middle, a month from turning 10. I had friends I was sorry to leave, both in school and in the neighborhood. I was aware of race, but in a very personal sense: We were the Murphys — the white family on the street.

We moved and life resumed. What didn’t come with the change was a set of talking points, a mediated Q&A discussion, a vocabulary to help us understand what we were doing, and most notable, no idea of what options our (former) neighbors would have if they wanted to make a move like ours.

What’s clear to me now, after being a parent for more than 32 years, is that this decision was made by Mom and Dad, period. They didn’t consult us. No matter how much we discuss it now that they’re gone, the final consensus seems to be that they made the decision based on what they thought would be best for their kids.

Indisputable statistics exist which illustrate how cities, banks and businesses systematically denied people of color from acquiring wealth in the form of owning property. To accomplish this, one has to qualify for loans and have jobs to pay the monthly bills. Many banks intentionally kept Black families from attaining these goals.

Not that this information was publicly available to my parents. Knowing my mother, had these practices not been buried deep in policies and codes known only to certain circles, she would at least have had a chance to wrestle with and consider a moral instead of just an economic decision. She was the family accountant, her full-size checkbook stamped “North Side State Bank,” proof that we were there for the long run. Until we weren’t.

By the 1980s, the stories of the 1921 Greenwood massacre got legs and details became known to a wider audience, though it had been well known to Black families in Tulsa for generations. It was shocking news to Mom. Years later, she rounded up whichever visiting grandkids she could find, took them to the house on North Main and knocked on the door. The same Black family who bought the house in 1967 still lived there and invited everyone in.

Maybe the answer to my daughter’s question is that I should have known I was white on December 15, 1967, when we left the neighborhood. Until then it was just my childhood, with my school, sisters, neighbors and friends right there. After all the other white families left, however, the message my parents clearly received was to take advantage of our ability to move wherever we wanted to.

So we fled five miles, and a world away, because we could.

Reach Ellen at murphysister04@gmail.com