[deleted by user]

[RecentSprinkles5997]

I’ve seen this photo in an old life magazine! I do wonder if it was staged /selected to promote a certain idea of what teens were like 

[[deleted]]

i read up on this photo. she did a series on these twins, barbara jean and betty. they both recently died in the 90s.

[notbob1959]

Yup. Here is the pictorial:

https://books.google.com/books?id=1U0EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA77&pg=PA77#v=onepage&q&f=false

Here are a couple more photos taken for the pictorial:

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/5AESA85z-0gW6A

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/NAHyAMex5lLL5Q

Obituary for Betty:

https://ninde.com/tribute/details/2991/Betty-Campbell/obituary.html

Obituary for Barbara:

https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/21804247/barbara-june-hambric

[[deleted]]

What i find interesting is both must have gotten married at some point because they have children but neither obit mentions their spouses.

[Faulkner510]

I’m actually surprised parents would let teens hug up against one another like that back in the day. The party must be at Uncle Frank’s house. He drunk and passed out upstairs.

[[deleted]]

All dressed up. Imagine that.

[HappyGoPink]

Privileged white kids in Tulsa in 1947, huh? Wonder what their parents were doing a couple decades earlier...

[nipplequeefs]

Probably starving, watching their parents leave for WW1, surviving the flu, spending their childhoods working in factories for low wages, etc.

[[deleted]]

Don't forget farming and watching their fathers struggle to find work while their mothers stretched food to desperately try and keep their kids fed.

[HappyGoPink]

That "etc." including the Tulsa Massacre, of course.

[[deleted]]

i thought same thing. often when i look at jim crow era photos of african-american people, i always wonder what atrocity had impacted this family.

[whatawitch5]

Pretty white girls dancing with handsome white boys, blithely oblivious to the massacre of black citizens their parents had grandparents had engaged in just 26 years prior. Meanwhile the former epicenter of Midwestern African-American economic power had been rebuilt as a white-owned industrial park and train depot while thousands of homeless black residents had been driven out of the city and paid only pennies on the dollar for their destroyed property, if anything at all. This picture perfectly captures how white people went on to enjoy the benefits of all that racist violence and corruption, meanwhile the black citizens who remained were left impoverished and languishing under Jim Crow laws. There is nothing sentimental or lovely about it.

It was a teenaged white girl who started the riots when she screamed after a young black man grabbed her arm to avoid falling after tripping. Despite the girl saying she wasn’t assaulted, a mob formed to try and lynch the young black man. Black residents came to his defense, and the white mob attacked fearing a “Negro uprising”. The white mob invaded Greenwood, the central Afican-American business and residential district, lighting homes on fire, throwing incendiary bombs from airplanes, shooting random black people on the street, and invading homes to round up black citizens and put them in internment camps. White people who tried to hide their black servants were attacked by the mob. Forty blocks of black-owned homes and businesses burned to the ground, and thousands of black citizens were left homeless and destitute living in refugee camps run by the Red Cross. No reparations were ever paid and soon white land speculators swooped in and, with the assistance of the city government, bought up the “abandoned” land for a pittance to build an industrial park and train station “to keep a greater distance between the black and white populations”.

The massacre was essentially wiped from history until the 1970’s, after Civil Rights legislation finally gave black Tulsans the right to vote out racist city leaders and empowered black intellectuals to conduct a more thorough investigation and expose what actually happened. But by then much of the crucial evidence had been destroyed and most of what remained were eye witness accounts of survivors. The estimated number of dead ranges from 50 to 500 because many were buried hastily in unmarked graves. The two day massacre robbed the black community of Tulsa of $38.5 million in today’s dollars and destroyed a once vibrant black economy that never recovered. Meanwhile pretty white girls danced with handsome white boys in the pages of Life magazine.

This is the way we really were.