How HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ Recreated the Harrowing 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

HBO’s Watchmen opens with one of the most disturbing atrocities in American history: the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre (also called the Tulsa race riot and the Greenwood Massacre).

In 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, a young Black man was accused of raping a young white woman. When he was taken into custody, white residents mobbed the jail, sparking rumors that he had been lynched. This sparked a deadly confrontation between enraged Black residents of Greenwood, an affluent Black Tulsa neighborhood nicknamed “Black Wall Street.” After which, thousands of angry white people, including members of law enforcement and the KKK, invaded Greenwood, killing mercilessly, looting with abandon, and literally firebombing the neighborhood from above.

Watchmen’s opening sequence follows this horrific event through the eyes of a young Black boy. His family dies trying to shepherd him to safety, and as the city burns in the distance, we see him escape with an infant and nothing but a piece of paper his father gave him, upon which is scrawled, “WATCH OVER THIS BOY.”

We know why executive producers Damon Lindelof and Nicole Kassell chose to kick off their adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel with this haunting recreation of this grisly real life event. During the show’s panel at Summer TCA — the very first time Watchmen had been presented to journalists — Lindelof explained that he had first learned about what happened in Tulsa when he read “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

“That was the first time that I heard about Black Wall Street and what happened in Tulsa in ’21, and was sort of ashamed and confused, and embarrassed that I had never heard about it before,” Lindelof said. “When I started thinking about what Watchmen was going to be, trying to think about in the original source material the book was highly political. It was about what was happening in American culture at the time even though it was being presented by two British artists. What, in 2019, is the equivalent of the nuclear standoff between the Russians and the United States? It just felt like it was undeniably race and policing in America.”

So Lindelof wanted to educate people about what befell the neighborhood of Greenwood in 1921 and he wanted to use the event as a catalyst to set the stage for the show’s overall political agenda. However, it’s one thing to understand why Watchmen had to start with the Tulsa Massacre, and it’s another thing to understand how Watchmen pulled it off.

In an interview with Decider, director Nicole Kassell stressed how very important it was to her and the Watchmen team to be as truthful to the events as possible. “It was incredibly challenging to direct just emotionally, and physically, so an incredible amount of pre-production went into that,” Kassell said, going on to describe the vast amounts of research she and her team put into the sequence.

The first thing Kassell did when she was hired was to go to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and to visit the Greenwood neighborhood. She walked those streets and spoke to locals, and of course, studied the historic events. Specifically, Lindelof gave Kassell a book by Tim Madigan called The Burning, which details the Greenwood Massacre from a historic perspective.

“I pulled out the moments that struck me, and my team did as well, and so we kind of made a short list of the vignettes that you see. That wasn’t in the script originally, that kind of detail,” Kassell said, explaining how she came up with her “beat sheet” of horrific scenarios that the young boy we follow must encounter. “I kind of imagined it in real time: this is the journey of this boy and his parents from this theater, down the street, around the corner, and into a garage.”

Before Kassell shot the sequence, her assistant director insisted they choreograph each vignette with the background actors responsible for those moments. This kind of extra rehearsal is rare in television, but Kassell said, “It was so invaluable, because it prepared people both, again, physically and emotionally.”

The physical and emotional challenge of filming the Tulsa Massacre was compounded by the eerie coincidence that the day they shot everything happened to be the 97th anniversary of the event. Kassell said that they actually had a priest come in the morning to bless the set, and she requested that Lindelof do something more.

“I asked Damon to write a letter to the cast and crew on behalf of us, just to honor and thank people for what we were asking them to do because it was enormously challenging and upsetting, whether you were playing a victim or a perpetrator,” she said.

“So it was very, very profound, but we took it on with the most reverence and gravity everyone can,” Kassell said.

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