From Tulsa to Masks: How 'Watchmen' Rewrites American Racial History -

26 February, 2026 Siobhan Marie Day 0 Comments 4 categories

Regina King as Angela Abar / Sister Night in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

When Watchmen premiered on HBO in 2019, it did something rare in mainstream American television: it opened not with spectacle, but with atrocity. The first images audiences saw were not masked vigilantes or alternate-history geopolitics, but the burning of Black Wall Street in 1921 Tulsa.

The Burning of Black Wall Street (1921 Tulsa Race Massacre) in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

For a blog like MoviesToHistory.com, which interrogates the line between dramatization and historical record, Watchmen represents a case study in ethical adaptation. Showrunner Damon Lindelof did not merely adapt the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. He reframed its mythology through the lens of American racial violence — foregrounding a history long excluded from textbooks.

This is not just alternate history. It is corrective history.

Genre Drama Dystopia Superhero Created by Damon Lindelof Based on Watchmen by Alan Moore (uncredited) Dave Gibbons Showrunner Damon Lindelof Starring Regina King Don Johnson Tim Blake Nelson Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Andrew Howard Jacob Ming-Trent Tom Mison Sara Vickers Dylan Schombing Louis Gossett Jr. Jeremy Irons Jean Smart Hong Chau Music by Trent Reznor Atticus Ross Country of origin United States Original language English No. of episodes 9 Production Executive producers Damon Lindelof Tom Spezialy Nicole Kassell Stephen Williams Joseph E. Iberti Producers Karen Wacker John Blair Production locations United States Wales Cinematography Alex Disenhof Xavier Pérez Grobet Gregory Middleton Andrij Parekh Chris Seager Editors David Eisenberg Anna Hauger Henk Van Eeghen Running time 52–67 minutes Production companies White Rabbit Paramount Television DC Entertainment Warner Bros. Television Original release Network HBO Release October 20 – December 15, 2019

Show creator Damon Lindelof arrives for the Los Angeles premiere of the new HBO series "Watchmen" at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood on October 14, 2019. (Photo by Chris Delmas / AFP) (Photo by CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images)

Dave Gibbons, the original illustrator of The Watchmen comics in front of artwork by graffiti artist Chu which depicts a scene from Watchmen, now available on DVD and Blu-ray, at the South Bank Skate Park in London. (Photo by David Parry/PA Images via Getty Images)

Alan Moore attends a book signing at Waterstone's, Piccadilly. (Photo by rune hellestad/Corbis via Getty Images)

Watchmen is a comic book limited series by the British creative team of writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins. It was published monthly by DC Comics in 1986 and 1987 before being collected in a single-volume edition in 1987. Watchmen originated from a story proposal Moore submitted to DC featuring superhero characters that the company had acquired from Charlton Comics. As Moore's proposed story would have left many of the characters unusable for future stories, managing editor Dick Giordano convinced Moore to create original characters instead. Moore used the story as a means of reflecting contemporary anxieties, deconstructing and satirizing the superhero concept, and making political commentary. Watchmen depicts an alternate history in which superheroes emerged in the 1940s and 1960s and their presence changed history so that the United States won the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal was never exposed. In 1985, the country is edging toward World War III with the Soviet Union, freelance costumed vigilantes have been outlawed and most former superheroes are in retirement or working for the government. The story focuses on the protagonists' personal development and moral struggles as an investigation into the murder of a government-sponsored superhero pulls them out of retirement. Gibbons uses a nine-panel grid layout throughout the series and adds recurring symbols such as a blood-stained smiley face. All but the last issue feature supplemental fictional documents that add to the series' backstory and the narrative is intertwined with that of another story, an in-story pirate comic titled Tales of the Black Freighter, which one of the characters reads. Structured at times as a nonlinear narrative, the story skips through space, time, and plot. In the same manner, entire scenes and dialogues have parallels with others through synchronicity, coincidence, and repeated imagery. A commercial success, Watchmen has received critical acclaim both in the comics and mainstream press. Watchmen was recognized in Time's List of the 100 Best Novels as one of the best English language novels published since 1923. In a retrospective review, the BBC's Nicholas Barber described it as "the moment comic books grew up".[1] Moore opposed this idea, stating, "I tend to think that, no, comics hadn't grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they'd ever been. It wasn't comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way."[2] After several attempts to adapt the series into a feature film, director Zack Snyder's Watchmen was released in 2009. An episodic video game, Watchmen: The End Is Nigh, was released to coincide with the film's release. DC Comics published Before Watchmen, a series of nine prequel miniseries, in 2012, and Doomsday Clock, a 12-issue limited series and sequel to the original Watchmen series, from 2017 to 2019 – both without Moore's or Gibbons' involvement. The second series integrated the Watchmen characters within the DC Universe. A standalone sequel, Rorschach by Tom King, was published between October 2020 and September 2021. A television continuation to the original comic, set 34 years after the comic's timeline, was broadcast on HBO from October to December 2019 with Gibbons' involvement. Moore has expressed his displeasure with adaptations and sequels of Watchmen and asked his name not to be used for future works.

The Tulsa race massacre was a two-day-long white supremacist terrorist[12][13] massacre[14] that took place in the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, between May 31 and June 1, 1921. Mobs of white residents, some of whom had been appointed as deputies and armed by city government officials,[15] attacked black residents and destroyed homes and businesses. The event is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.[16][17] The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time, one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as "Black Wall Street."[18] Part of a series on Nadir of American race relations Engraving of a large group of men rioting and fighting A French news illustration of the 1906 Atlanta race massacre Historical background Practices Lynchings Massacres and riots Reactions Related topics vte More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned, many of them for several days.[19][20] The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead.[21] The 2001 Tulsa Reparations Coalition examination of events identified 39 dead, 26 black and 13 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records.[22] The commission reported estimates ranging from 36 up to around 300 dead.[23][24] The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 21-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building.[25] He was arrested and rumors that he was to be lynched spread. The most widely reported and corroborated inciting incident occurred as the group of black men left when an elderly white man approached O. B. Mann, a black man, and demanded that he hand over his pistol. Mann refused, and the old man attempted to disarm him. A gunshot went off, and then, according to the sheriff's reports, "all hell broke loose."[26] The two groups shot at each other until midnight when the group of black men was greatly outnumbered and forced to retreat to Greenwood. At the end of the exchange of gunfire, 12 people were dead, 10 white and 2 black.[24] Alternatively, another eyewitness account was that the shooting began "down the street from the Courthouse" when black business owners came to the defense of a lone black man being attacked by a group of around six white men.[27] It is possible that the eyewitness did not recognize the fact that this incident was occurring as a part of a rolling gunfight that was already underway. As news of the violence spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded.[28] White rioters invaded Greenwood that night and the next morning, killing men and burning and looting stores and homes. Around noon on June 1, the Oklahoma National Guard imposed martial law, ending the massacre.[29][30] About 10,000 black people were left homeless, and the cost of the property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $40.61 million in 2025). By the end of 1922, most of the residents' homes had been rebuilt, but the city and real estate companies refused to compensate them.[31] Many survivors left Tulsa. The massacre was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories for years.[32] In 1997, a bipartisan group in the state legislature authorized the formation of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.[33] The commission's final report, published in 2001, was unable to establish that the city had conspired with the racist mob; however it recommended a program of reparations to survivors and their descendants.[34] The state passed legislation to establish scholarships for the descendants of survivors and develop a park in memory of the victims, which was dedicated in 2010. Schools in Oklahoma have been required to teach students about the massacre since 2002,[35] and in 2020, the massacre officially became a part of the Oklahoma school curriculum.

I. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: The Real Event

Believed to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history, the bloody 1921 outbreak in Tulsa has continued to haunt Oklahomans. During the course of eighteen terrible hours on May 31 and June 1, 1921, more than one thousand homes and businesses were destroyed, while credible estimates of deaths range from fifty to three hundred. By the time the violence ended, the city had been placed under martial law, thousands of Tulsans were being held under armed guard, and the state's second-largest African American community had been burned to the ground. One of a number of similar episodes nationwide, the outbreak occurred during an era of acute racial tensions, characterized by the birth and rapid growth of the so-called second Ku Klux Klan and by the determined efforts of African Americans to resist attacks upon their communities, particularly in the matter of lynching. Such trends were mirrored both statewide and in Tulsa. By early 1921 Tulsa was a modern city with a population of more than one hundred thousand. Most of the city's ten thousand African American residents lived in the Greenwood District, a vibrant neighborhood that was home to two newspapers, several churches, a library branch, and scores of Black-owned businesses. However, Tulsa was also a deeply troubled town. Crime rates were extremely high, and the city had been plagued by vigilantism, including the August 1920 lynching, by a white mob, of a white teenager accused of murder. Newspaper reports confirmed that the Tulsa police had done little to protect the lynching victim, who had been taken from his jail cell at the county courthouse. Eight months later an incident involving Dick Rowland, an African American shoe shiner, and Sarah Page, a white elevator operator, would set the stage for tragedy. While it is still uncertain as to precisely what happened in the Drexel Building on May 30, 1921, the most common explanation is that Rowland stepped on Page's foot as he entered the elevator, causing her to scream. The next day, however, the Tulsa Tribune, the city's afternoon daily newspaper, reported that Rowland, who had been picked up by police, had attempted to rape Page. Moreover, according to eyewitnesses, the Tribune also published a now-lost editorial about the incident, titled "To Lynch Negro Tonight." By early evening there was, once again, lynch talk on the streets of Tulsa. Talk soon turned to action. By 7:30 p.m. hundreds of whites had gathered outside the Tulsa County Courthouse, demanding that the authorities hand over Dick Rowland, but the sheriff refused. At about 9 p.m., after reports of the dire conditions downtown reached Greenwood, a group of approximately twenty-five armed African American men, many of them World War I veterans, went down to the courthouse and offered their services to the authorities to help protect Rowland. The sheriff, however, turned them down, and the men returned to Greenwood. Stunned, and then enraged, members of the white mob then tried to break into the National Guard armory but were turned away by a handful of local guardsmen. At about 10 p.m. a false rumor hit Greenwood that whites were storming the courthouse. This time, a second contingent of African American men, perhaps seventy-five in number, went back to the courthouse and offered their services to the authorities. Once again, they were turned down. As they were leaving, a white man tried to disarm a Black veteran, and a shot was fired. The riot began. Over the next six hours Tulsa was plunged into chaos as angry whites, frustrated over the failed lynching, began to vent their rage at African Americans in general. Furious fighting erupted along the Frisco railroad tracks, where Black defenders were able to hold off members of the white mob. An unarmed African American man was murdered inside a downtown movie theater, while carloads of armed whites began making "drive-by" shootings in Black residential neighborhoods. By midnight fires had been set along the edge of the African American commercial district. In some of the city's all-night cafes, whites began to organize for a dawn invasion of Greenwood. During the early hours of the conflict local authorities did little to stem the growing crisis. Indeed, shortly after the outbreak of gunfire at the courthouse, Tulsa police officers deputized former members of the lynch mob and, according to an eyewitness, instructed them to "get a gun and get a nigger." Local units of the National Guard were mobilized, but they spent most of the night protecting a white neighborhood from a feared, but nonexistent, Black counterattack. Shortly before dawn on June 1, thousands of armed whites had gathered along the fringes of Greenwood. When daybreak came, they poured into the African American district, looting homes and businesses and setting them on fire. Numerous atrocities occurred, including the murder of A. C. Jackson, a renowned Black surgeon, who was shot after he surrendered to a group of whites. At least one machine gun was utilized by the invading whites, and some participants have claimed that airplanes were also used in the attack. Black Tulsans fought hard to protect their homes and businesses, with particularly sharp fighting occurring off of Standpipe Hill. In the end, they were simply outgunned and outnumbered. By the time that additional National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa at approximately 9:15 a.m. on the morning of June 1, most of Greenwood had already been put to the torch. A brief period of martial law was followed by recriminations and legal maneuvering. Even though Dick Rowland was exonerated, an all-white grand jury blamed Black Tulsans for the lawlessness. Despite overwhelming evidence, no whites were ever sent to prison for the murders and arson that occurred. The vast majority of Tulsa's African American population had been made homeless by the event. Yet, despite efforts by the white establishment to force the relocation of the Black community, within days of the violence Black Tulsans had already begun the long and arduous process of rebuilding Greenwood. Thousands, however, were forced to spend the winter of 1921–22 living in tents. The deep scars left by the tragedy remained visible for years. While Greenwood was eventually rebuilt, many families never truly recovered from the disaster. Moreover, for many years the violence became something of a taboo subject, particularly in Tulsa. A state commission was formed in 1997 to investigate. The report recommended that reparations be paid to the remaining Black survivors. A team of scientists and historians uncovered evidence supporting long-held beliefs that unidentified victims had been buried in unmarked grave sites. One of the great tragedies of Oklahoma history, this eruption of bloodshed and destruction in Tulsa has lived on as a potent symbol of the ongoing struggle of Black and white Oklahomans to forge a common destiny out of an often troubled past. Scott Ellsworth

The following is a guest post by Arlene Balkansky. Arlene recently retired from being a librarian in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, and was a regular writer for Headlines and Heroes. One hundred years ago, Greenwood, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, described as Black Wall Street, was destroyed by white mobs in one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history. The number of dead remains unknown, but could be as many as 300, with millions of dollars in property damage. Local newspaper coverage has been linked to an ominous role in the massacre. The Tulsa Tribune, an afternoon paper, published an inflammatory front-page article in its May 31 city edition entitled, “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator.” It stated that Dick Rowland, who was a 19-year-old Black man, had been arrested that morning and “charged with attempting to assault the 17-year-old white elevator girl in the Drexel building early yesterday.” This article had been torn out of the Tribune’s existing archived May 31 edition sometime before microfilming. Its content is confirmed, however, by a duplicate article published in the paper’s June 1 state edition, which was mailed and known to repeat the previous day’s city edition content.

Tulsa’s Greenwood District in 1921 after a white mob razed the predominately Black community. bswise/ Flickr/public domain

In May 31st to June 1st of 1921, white mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma destroyed the prosperous Greenwood District — known as “Black Wall Street.” Sparked by a dubious accusation against a Black teenager, Dick Rowland, white vigilantes gathered outside the courthouse. When armed Black veterans arrived to prevent a lynching, violence erupted.

Smoke billowing over Tulsa, Oklahoma during 1921 race riots

Over the next 24 hours:

As many as 300 Black residents were killed (modern estimates vary).
More than 1,200 homes were burned.
Businesses, churches, and schools were reduced to ash.
Thousands were displaced into internment-style camps.

Eyewitness accounts describe private planes dropping incendiary devices — an act of domestic terrorism against American citizens.

A photographer surveying the damage (15583.B, Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS).

Victims of the destruction living in tents (20280.9, Ella Mahler Collection, OHS).

AFRICAN-AMERICAN MAN BEING DETAINED DURING THE 1921 TULSA RACE RIOT/MASSACRE.

Victims combing the ruins for their possessions (20280.8, Ella Mahler Collection, OHS).

MT. ZION BAPTIST CHURCH ON FIRE DURING THE 1921 TULSA RACE RIOT/MASSACRE.

For decades, the massacre was omitted from curricula, suppressed in civic memory, and minimized in public discourse. Survivors were silenced by shame, threat, and institutional indifference. The official report acknowledging the scale of destruction did not arrive until 2001.

Watchmen forces viewers to confront this event as foundational — not peripheral — to American history.

Established by the Oklahoma Legislature in 1997, the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was a truth commission tasked with creating an official historical record of the Tulsa Race Massacre and recommending reparative actions. Key Findings & Report (2001) After nearly four years of investigation, the commission released its Final Report on February 28, 2001. Major conclusions included: Microsoft Microsoft +3 Official Culpability: The commission found that city and state officials failed to protect the Greenwood community and, in many cases, actively deputized white rioters who participated in the destruction. Casualties: While the 1921 official death toll was 36, the commission estimated that between 100 and 300 people died. Mass Graves: The investigation identified potential unmarked mass grave sites, leading to modern archaeological searches. Oklahoma State University Oklahoma State University +4 Recommended Reparations The commission recommended five specific reparations to the state legislature: Direct cash payments to the 121 then-living survivors and their descendants. Scholarship funds for students affected by the massacre. An economic enterprise zone in the historic Greenwood District. A physical memorial for victims, including the burial of remains found in unmarked graves. Reparations to descendants of massacre victims. Wikipedia Wikipedia +2 Outcome & Legacy While the report succeeded in officially reframing the event from a "riot" to a "massacre," the Oklahoma Legislature declined to fund direct reparations or cash payments. Instead, it passed the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act, which led to the creation of the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park in 2010. In August 2024, Tulsa officials announced a new commission to further study how to implement financial reparations for descendants.

II. Why Tulsa Was Erased

Historical erasure is rarely accidental. It is structural.

After 1921:

Insurance companies refused to pay claims.
City officials attempted to rezone Greenwood to prevent rebuilding.
Newspapers destroyed archives or excised incriminating editorials.
Schools simply did not teach it.

This was narrative control as civic strategy.

The massacre contradicted the mythology of American progress and racial reconciliation. To acknowledge it would mean acknowledging:

State complicity.
Organized white supremacist violence.
The fragility of Black prosperity in Jim Crow America.

Watchmen positions this erasure as the real “conspiracy” at the heart of the American story. Before masked vigilantes, before squid rain and nuclear brinkmanship, there was the deliberate forgetting of racial terror.

By dramatizing Tulsa in its premiere, the series performs an act of cultural restitution.

III. The Hooded Justice Retcon: Rewriting the Canon

Regina King and Jovan Adepo in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

Hooded Justice Hooded Justice Biographical Information Alias Hooded Justice HJ Gender Male Date of Death C. 1955 Affiliation(s) Minutemen Occupation(s) Costumed Adventurer Status Deceased Familial Information Spouse(s) Nelson Gardner (lover) Hooded Justice was a costumed adventurer and the first masked vigilante to appear in the United States. A violent and brutal seeker of justice, he inspired several others to don costumes, masks, and gimmicks, later joining the Minutemen along with them. His real identity was kept secret even from his fellow crimefighters, and remained as such when he vanished in 1955. His real identity is never conclusively revealed but in Hollis Mason's book it is suggested to be circus strongman Rolf Müller

Steven G. Norfleet, Dajour Ashwood, and Alexis Louder in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

Jovan Adepo as Will Reeves/Hooded Justice in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

Jovan Adepo in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

Louis Gossett Jr. as Will Reeves/Hooded Justice in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

One of the show’s boldest interventions is the reimagining of Hooded Justice.

In the original 1986–87 graphic novel, Hooded Justice was a mysterious, possibly fascistic vigilante whose identity remained ambiguous. In the HBO series, he is revealed to be Will Reeves (played by Jevon Adepo), a Black survivor of the Tulsa massacre.

This retcon does several critical things:

It reframes American superhero mythology as rooted in racial trauma.
It exposes how white audiences consumed masked violence without questioning its origins.
It critiques how history credits white figures while obscuring Black agency.

The episode “This Extraordinary Being” functions as a thesis statement: the superhero genre itself is born from the inability of institutions to protect Black citizens.

The hood, originally a tool of intimidation, becomes a reclamation. The noose becomes costume. Terror becomes defiance. This is not nostalgia. It is historiographical intervention.

IV. Policing, Masks, and Surveillance

Tim Blake Nelson and Regina King in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

A scene in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

Tim Blake Nelson as Wade Tillman / Looking Glass in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

Seventh Kavalry in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

Set in an alternate 2019 Tulsa, Watchmen imagines a police force authorized to conceal their identities after a white supremacist terrorist attack by the Seventh Kavalry.

Masked police officers. State-sanctioned anonymity. Expanded surveillance powers.

The visual symmetry is intentional. When law enforcement adopts the aesthetics of vigilantism, legitimacy becomes unstable.

The show interrogates:

Who gets to wear a mask?
When does protection become concealment?
Is secrecy a defense against terrorism — or a gateway to authoritarianism?

Angela Abar, portrayed by Regina King, operates as Sister Night — simultaneously a cop, a vigilante, and a descendant of racial terror. Her identity collapses the binary between state power and extralegal justice.

The series critiques both white supremacist extremism and institutional overreach. In doing so, it situates racial violence within modern debates about surveillance, counterterrorism, and policing reform.

Don Johnson and Frances Fisher in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

V. Afrofuturism and Counter-History

Afrofuturism imagines Black futures unbound by historical constraints while refusing to ignore historical wounds.

Watchmen employs Afrofuturist logic in several ways:

It embeds speculative technology (genetic memory transfer, extradimensional phenomena) within Black historical experience.
It literalizes generational trauma through the “nostalgia” device — memories inherited and re-lived.
It allows a Black woman to occupy narrative centrality in a traditionally white, male superhero canon.

By integrating cosmic mythology with racial history, the series suggests that alternate futures require historical reckoning. In this sense, Watchmen is less about rewriting the past than about revealing it.

VI. Trauma Inheritance and Memory as Resistance

The emotional architecture of the series rests on inheritance. Angela inherits more than memories. She inherits unresolved violence.

The massacre is not backstory; it is bloodstream.

Trauma in Watchmen is both psychological and structural:

Personal trauma (family loss, racial violence).
Institutional trauma (police brutality, extremist infiltration).
Cultural trauma (erased history).

By forcing Angela to relive Will Reeves’s memories, the show argues that unexamined history resurface — often violently.

Regina King and Louis Gossett Jr. in the limited series "Watchmen" (2019) Photo Credit: HBO Networks

This aligns with contemporary scholarship on transgenerational trauma, particularly within communities impacted by systemic oppression. Memory, suppressed or inherited, becomes political.

In this framework, the mask is not concealment. It is a symbol of accumulated survival.

Superheroes as Historical Witnesses

Unlike many adaptations of Moore’s work, the HBO Watchmen does not ask whether power corrupts absolutely.

It asks a more unsettling question: What if the original sin was forgetting?

By anchoring its narrative in the Tulsa Race Massacre, the series reframes American heroism. It argues that masked justice is born not from fantasy, but from institutional failure. That white supremacy is not an aberration, but a throughline. That the past is not past.

For MoviesToHistory.com, this makes Watchmen one of the most significant historical reinterpretations of the modern television era. It does not merely dramatize history. It restores it.

And in doing so, it suggests that before America can imagine new futures, it must unmask the old ones.