History, as written, tends to be executed upon black people rather than by them. Brought to the United States as slaves, freed by Abraham Lincoln, oppressed under Jim Crow—in schoolbook constructions, blacks are the supporting players in America’s ultimate redemption arc. An anti-segregation activist such as Rosa Parks is reduced to a humble seamstress who was too tired to give up her seat on the bus.
HBO’s “Watchmen” risks falling into this trap, by placing one of the deadliest atrocities ever perpetrated against black Americans at the center of a comic-book franchise full of brooding white men in masks. The series opens with the true events of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which white rioters burned down the entire black neighborhood of Greenwood and killed as many as three hundred people. The brutal and breathtaking spectacle of this “Watchmen” episode, conveyed through the eyes of a small boy running for his life from a neighborhood movie theatre, has the familiar beats of black victimhood. A woman is shot from behind and collapses in the middle of the road. Two black bodies are dragged behind a speeding car, clouds of dirt billowing in their wake. Armed Ku Klux Klan members roam the streets. It’s an adrenaline shot of vicious racism, at the expense of mostly anonymous victims.
As layers of mystery are peeled back in later episodes, though, “Watchmen” (whose Season 1 finale airs on Sunday) reveals itself to be a show about black people who have the ability to mold history in ways their ancestors could not. Though grounded in deeply sensitive past events, the series shares its most keen insights in the throes of its superhero conceit. Alan Moore’s original 1986 graphic novel followed white costumed adventurers who use P.R. campaigns, military contracts, and vast personal fortunes to turn themselves into superheroes in the public imagination. The show, however, upends some foundational “Watchmen” myths, by reorienting our vantage around three black heroes.
The standout episode of the season, “This Extraordinary Being,” travels back to the nineteen-thirties to cast the first costumed crusader in the “Watchmen” universe as a Tulsa Race Massacre survivor. Will Reeves, the young boy who grew up idolizing black gunslingers in Greenwood’s movie theatre, becomes one of the few black cops in the N.Y.P.D. After a near-lynching by his fellow officers, he dons a hood, a noose, and the whiteface makeup necessary for the public to ascribe honor to his vigilante antics. “If you want to stay a hero,” his wife, June, advises as they devise his costume, “townsfolk gonna need to think one of their own is under it.” By night, he is Hooded Justice, the legendary, anonymous crimefighter who inspired future heroes. By day, his black skin becomes the perfect secret identity. If he has a superpower, it’s the ability to leverage both the invisibility and hypervisibility that black people often experience.
In the present day, Reeves’s granddaughter Angela Abar lives a double life as a masked cop and a costumed crusader named Sister Night, flitting between police work and vigilantism as she sees fit. She’s deeply suspicious of Reeves when he becomes the primary suspect in the murder of Tulsa’s police chief. Later, she comes to understand her grandfather’s motivations after taking a psychoactive drug that lets her relive his memories as Hooded Justice. Abar and Reeves share similar childhood traumas and a roiling anger that’s often vented by pummelling white supremacists. These violent scenes can feel thrillingly transgressive, a pushback against centuries of depictions of blacks as docile victims of racism. But they also use comic-book caricature to hint at a truth that Hollywood might shy away from depicting in a more realistic setting; read the archives of Tulsa’s black newspaper from the years before the massacre and you’ll find plenty of calls for armed resistance to white lynch mobs.
Dr. Manhattan, the radioactive blue super soldier at the center of the original “Watchmen” comic, ultimately serves as the bridge between Abar and Reeves. Though born a white German-American, Dr. Manhattan spends a decade hiding in Tulsa as Abar’s black husband, Cal. Like Hooded Justice, he uses blackness as a shield of anonymity in a world transfixed by white heroes. But because he agrees to give up his powers and memories to save his relationship, blackness also robs him of his ability to alter history with the snap of his fingers. “The future is uncertain,” he admits not long after turning into Cal, “and my ability to influence events is limited.”
Many of the narratives swirling around the three heroes—the ones that don’t involve them directly—turn out to be distortions of “Watchmen” canon. In the show-within-a-show “American Hero Story,” Hooded Justice is portrayed as a square-jawed white brawler pulled straight from Action Comics. The fiction that Dr. Manhattan lives on Mars as a blue demigod is perpetuated by a paid hotline service that people can use to send him prayers. The villains that Sister Night is fighting, members of a mysterious white-supremacist group named Seventh Cavalry, draw their inspiration from Rorschach, the original “Watchmen” antihero, whose racist musings have turned him into a martyr for the alt-right.
Though the new “Watchmen” expertly subverts expectations set up by the original comics, the show seems less confident inhabiting the world of Tulsa itself. There are vague allusions to a reparations program instituted for massacre victims and a couple of quick exposition dumps about Greenwood’s past glory. The city itself only really comes to life, terrifyingly, in the opening scenes. But what “Watchmen” nails, more than details of Greenwood’s history, is the way that history itself is so susceptible to manipulation, distortion, and erasure. In the real world, the massacre was initially national news, landing on the front page of the Times and prompting promises of recompense by embarrassed white Tulsans. But, unlike on the TV show, justice was never served in Greenwood. No white rioters were punished for their actions. Insurance companies and the city government refused to compensate black Tulsans for their lost property. Lawsuits stalled out in the courts. Many Tulsans, both white and black, stopped talking about what happened. A brutal invasion became a victimless crime, then a repressed memory, then a hazy urban legend that few people had even heard about.
But some of the people who remembered—black people on the outskirts of recorded history—never stopped talking about it. Massacre survivors such as Bill Williams and Mabel Little recounted their memories of the event in memoirs or interviews with journalists. In the nineteen-nineties, two black Oklahoma state legislators, Maxine Horner and Don Ross, spearheaded the creation of the Greenwood Cultural Center, which serves as a community gathering place, memorial to survivors, and archive of firsthand accounts of the attack. More recently, the city of Tulsa has reopened a search for long-rumored mass graves of massacre victims, using oral histories from residents as a guide for where to look.
Black people have always derived power from their ancestral stories, from their ability to speak a truth that immediately complicates or contradicts an American myth. The reason we know what happened in Greenwood at all—the reason that the massacre is tangible enough for Hollywood to re-create in a glitzy prestige cable show—is because folks in Tulsa kept talking about their memories, even when the conspiracy of silence was deafening. So it’s fitting that this new iteration of “Watchmen” turned out to be a story about a black family shaping and sharing history. After he regains his powers (and his famous blue skin), in the penultimate episode of the season, Dr. Manhattan mediates a conversation across time, between Abar in the present day and Reeves ten years prior. Together, the three of them determine that the sheriff is a closeted Klansman, with the robes in his closet to prove it. “Watchmen” offers some vital lessons about Tulsa’s past, even if the full history of the neighborhood still deserves a more thorough onscreen retelling. Where the show shines most is in how it conditions viewers to second-guess any story that is presented to them as a definitive historical account.
