A long time ago, the parents of a young boy watched as the world around them became unhinged and exploded. Desperate to save their only child, they placed him in what amounted to a small box with a note that simply reads, “Watch over this boy.” The box then went flying off into the distance, sending the boy away from his home and the prospect of certain death. The child would later grow to adulthood and become planet Earth’s first superhero, as well as a symbol of “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”
On the HBO television series Watchmen, that boy was not named Clark Kent but Will Reeves. He likewise did not arrive in a rocket ship from the planet Krypton but escaped from Tulsa, Oklahoma, over Memorial Day weekend in 1921. As a superhero, he would become known as Hooded Justice as opposed to Superman, while the “Truth, Justice and American Way” that he fought for was more of an ideal than reality in a country where the truth about racism was rarely spoken, justice was not color blind, and the Statue of Liberty was welcoming only if one was white.
Watchmen the television show is a continuation of the Watchmen graphic novel, although one not connected with or endorsed by writer Alan Moore. In 1986, Moore crafted a classic work of literature that simultaneously explored the anxieties of its time period and deconstructed the concept of comic book superheroes. While Moore used the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union as the centerpiece for his narrative, television creator Damon Lindelof set his series thirty years later – in the year 2019 – with systematic racism being the contemporary issue for the HBO show to revolve around.
In the Watchmen graphic novel, Adrian Veidt – the “smartest man on the planet” and former superhero known as Ozymandias – realizes that nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union is inevitable. The financial expense of the Cold War, meanwhile, exhausted funds that could be used to cure the sick, combat homelessness, and ensure a better education for everyone. He thus decides to forestall the inevitable annihilation of the human race by manufacturing a fake alien invasion that wipes out half the population of New York City.
For Veidt, the death of three million people is a small price to pay for world peace, and his plan actually does turn one-time enemies into allies when the United States and Soviet Union realize that there is a greater threat than each other. When he asks the omnipotent Doctor Manhattan – a superhero of the Watchmen Universe whose abilities rival those of a god – if he did the right thing and whether everything would work out in the end, Doctor Manhattan simply replies, “Nothing ever ends.”
In the Watchmen television series, those words apply to racism against blacks as well, despite a Civil War to end slavery and a Civil Rights Movement in the1960s to wipe out inequality. Watchmen thus begins in the year 1921, the city of Tulsa, and what has been called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.” The arrest of a teenage black man for assaulting a teenage white girl resulted in first a riot and then a massacre. Although official records confirm 36 deaths, a 1996 investigation estimated that anywhere from 75 to 300 African Americans lost their lives at the hands of the white citizens of Tulsa.
In 2019, racism still exists in the Tulsa of the Watchmen television series, personified by the white supremacist militia known as the Seventh Kavalry whose members wear masks similar to the graphic novel superhero Rorschach. Rorschach himself was an extremist who believed liberalism begot decadence, a social ill that only he could cure by responding to general violence with violence of his own.
The same sentiment holds true for the Seventh Kavalry. “We’re not racists,” one of them explains. “We’re about restoring balance in those times when our country forgets the principles upon which it was founded. Because the scales have tipped way to far, and it is extremely difficult to be a white man in America right now.”
The same character later says of liberal President Robert Redford, “First, he took our guns. And then he made us say sorry. Over and over again – sorry. Sorry for the alleged sins of those who died decades before we were born. Sorry for the color of our skin.”
While the initial plan of the Seventh Kavalry was to retake the White House and install a president more inclined to their views, that plan changed when they discovered that the abilities of Doctor Manhattan – who can manipulate the laws of physics – could be transferred to one of their own. Why settle for being President of the United States if you could wield the power of a god instead?
It is not just the far right that realizes the potential of Doctor Manhattan’s abilities to further their cause but the far left as well. “If I can take his power, I can fix the world,” another character in Watchmen contends. “Disappear the nukes, end starvation, clean the air – all the things he should have done.”
Caught between these extremes is Angela Abar, an African American member of the Tulsa police force and secretly a masked vigilante known as Sister Night. It turns out that Abar is also the grandchild of a now 105-year-old Will Reeves, the child who escaped the 1921 massacre in Tulsa. Reeves later resettled in New York City and became a police officer. It didn’t take Will Reeves long, however, to realize that racism during the 1930s was just as rampant in the north as it was in the south and transforms himself into the first masked superhero – Hooded Justice.
Hooded Justice is thought to be white by both the media and other superheroes who soon follow in his footsteps. While the superhero group known as the Minutemen – of which Hooded Justice becomes a member – is intent on fighting the more traditional types of supervillains found in comic books, Will Reeves focuses on Cyclops, the white supremacist forerunner of the Seventh Kavalry. Even at the age of 105, he continues his mission, which inevitably takes him to Tulsa and the growing battle about to be waged there.
The Watchmen graphic novel was a landmark achievement in 1986, and was named by Time magazine as one of the greatest works of literature from the twentieth century. Alan Moore, along with artist Dave Gibbons, crafted a multilayer narrative that not only reflected the culture of its times but contained an alternative history that all too easily could have become reality.
The Watchmen television series does the same, using one of the darker moments in the nation’s history – the Tulsa massacre of 1921 – as the catalyst to explore contemporary society and America’s history of racism within the fictional world of masked superheroes. The similarities to the real world within Watchmen, meanwhile, were tragically underscored just seven months after the show’s premier on HBO when African American George Floyd was killed by members of the Minneapolis, Minnesota, police department on May 20, 2020.
At the same time that protests were growing across the country in response, President Donald Trump – who’s first term in office included a concerted effort to roll-back the progressive legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the first African American president – held his initial re-election campaign event in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While the choice of city may have been an unfortunate coincidence, it connected the death of George Floyd to those massacred close to one hundred years earlier nonetheless and made the protests even more meaningful.
The words spoken by Doctor Manhattan at the end of the Watchmen graphic novel pertained to the Cold War of the 1980s but they could just as easily be a prophetic indictment of racism in the America of 2020 as well – “Nothing ever ends.”
Anthony Letizia