May 31: Black Wall Street Burns, Big Ben Rings for the First Time, The Song the BBC Wouldn't Play

May 31 is a date that understands the relationship between power and what it chooses to silence or destroy. In Tulsa in 1921, white mobs aided by local authorities destroyed the most prosperous Black neighborhood in America and killed hundreds of people, and the city then spent decades burying the event under official silence. In London in 1859, a bell was hung in a clock tower and began marking time in a voice so distinctive that it eventually became inseparable from the idea of Britain itself. And in 1977, a national broadcaster banned a three-minute song because it said plainly what a portion of the country was thinking, and the ban made the song more powerful than airplay ever could have. Three different relationships between authority and expression — one that burned, one that endured, one that backfired spectacularly.

Black Wall Street

On the night of May 31 and into June 1, 1921, white mobs — some of them deputized by local authorities, some armed from the National Guard armory — descended on the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and systematically destroyed it. Greenwood was, by the standards of any American city in 1921, a remarkable community: thirty-five square blocks of Black-owned businesses, law offices, hotels, theaters, hospitals, schools, and churches that had been built by Black Tulsans who had been excluded from the white commercial district and had responded by building their own. Booker T. Washington had called it "Black Wall Street." Its destruction — which included arson, shooting, and the bombing of the district from private aircraft in what may represent the first aerial attack on American civilians — killed an estimated 100 to 300 Black Tulsans, injured hundreds more, and left approximately 10,000 people homeless. More than 1,200 homes were burned. The entire Greenwood District was leveled in under sixteen hours.

The immediate cause of the massacre was the arrest of Dick Rowland, a young Black shoe shiner, on May 30 after an altercation with Sarah Page, a white elevator operator, whose precise nature remains disputed — most historians believe he stumbled and grabbed her arm; the charge of assault was eventually dropped. A newspaper headline inflamed the situation, a white mob gathered at the courthouse threatening to lynch Rowland, armed Black Tulsans arrived to protect him, shots were fired, and what followed was not a riot but an organized assault on a community. The Tulsa Race Massacre was then systematically suppressed: city officials destroyed records, insurance claims were denied, survivors were discouraged from speaking, and the event was omitted from Oklahoma history textbooks for decades. It was not widely known outside Oklahoma until the 1990s, when a state commission began investigating and documenting what had occurred. In 2021, on the centennial of the massacre, President Biden became the first sitting president to visit Greenwood and acknowledge the event's full horror. Reparations for survivors and descendants have been debated and not resolved. The community that was destroyed in less than a day took generations to begin rebuilding, and has never been fully restored.

The Bell

On May 31, 1859, the bell known as Big Ben first rang out from the clock tower of the newly rebuilt Palace of Westminster in London — a deep, resonant E note that would come to be one of the most recognized sounds in the world. The bell's popular name almost certainly refers to Sir Benjamin Hall, the Chief Commissioner of Works who oversaw its installation, though some historians attribute it to the boxing champion Benjamin Caunt. The tower that houses it was known simply as the Clock Tower until 2012, when it was renamed the Elizabeth Tower to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. The bell itself weighs approximately thirteen and a half tons and had already been cracked and recast once before it was hung — its predecessor had cracked during testing, and the replacement bell developed its own crack in September 1859, just months after being installed, which accounts for the slightly impure tone that has characterized its chime ever since and that many consider part of its distinctive character.

What Big Ben became over the 165 years since its first stroke is something that no clock tower designer plans for: a sound so embedded in a nation's sense of itself that its temporary silencing during renovation work in 2017 prompted national debate and genuine public grief. The BBC has used the bell's chimes to introduce its radio news broadcasts since 1923, creating an association between the bell and the reliable delivery of information — and, during the Blitz, between the bell's survival and Britain's own — that has given it a cultural weight disproportionate to its function as a timekeeper. It rang on D-Day. It rang on V-E Day. It rang in the new millennium. When the restoration scaffolding came down in 2022 and the bell resumed its full schedule, it was greeted with coverage that treated its return as a genuine occasion. A cracked bell in a renamed tower, first rung on May 31, 1859, has become the sound of an entire civilization taking stock of where it is in time.

Anarchy in the U.K.

On May 31, 1977, the BBC banned "God Save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols from its radio playlists, citing the song's lyrics as "gross bad taste" — a phrase that acknowledged what the song actually was rather than finding a more diplomatic excuse. The ban came with the song at number two on the UK singles charts, released to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee celebrations, and it ensured the song became one of the most discussed and most sought-after recordings in the country. The single climbed to number one by most independent measurements — the official chart, controlled by the British Market Research Bureau, listed it at number two, a placement that many in the music industry and press suspected was the result of deliberate manipulation to prevent a song called "God Save the Queen" from topping the charts during Jubilee week. The BBC's ban, combined with the chart controversy, made "God Save the Queen" into a story about censorship as much as a song about monarchy.

Punk rock in 1977 was the sound of a generation that had grown up in postwar Britain's declining industrial cities, watched unemployment rise and opportunities contract, and found in the music industry's comfort with its own conventions a convenient target. The Sex Pistols — managed by Malcolm McLaren with a theatricality that understood provocation as a form of argument — articulated that disillusionment with a directness that polite British culture was not prepared to accommodate. The song's lyrics expressed contempt for the monarchy as an institution and for the official narrative of national celebration that Jubilee week represented; the BBC's ban expressed the establishment's instinct that some speech was better suppressed than answered. The instinct backfired. "God Save the Queen" became the defining document of the punk era, and the BBC's intervention gave it a significance that no amount of airplay could have manufactured. The establishment's discomfort with the song was, in the end, the best argument the song had ever made for itself.