Until recently, few Americans knew about the Tulsa race massacre 100 years ago, when a white mob burned down a prosperous 35-block Black neighborhood called Greenwood, using not only torches but firebombs dropped from airplanes. Three hundred people were killed, and 1,256 houses and 191 businesses destroyed. Thousands were left homeless among the smoldering ruins.
I first learned about this act of racist terrorism a number of years ago, when I was teaching a journalism course; a student from Tulsa wrote her final paper on the horrific events of the late spring, 1921, that leveled a successful community whose main thoroughfare was known as “Black Wall Street.” I was shocked—not only by the details of hatred, slaughter, and destruction but also about the silence that had kept one of the worst episodes of racial violence in the 20th century out of our history books. Now, with the centenary of the massacre, we are finally beginning to learn a truth that should never have been hidden.
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