Tulsa Race Massacre centennial

[dougo]

100 years ago, a white mob burned down 35 blocks of a wealthy Black neighborhood in Tulsa, OK and murdered dozens or hundreds of Black citizens. I was never taught about the Tulsa Race Massacre in school, and in fact I never heard of it until 2019 when it was portrayed in the Watchmen show on HBO. It was also portrayed in last year's Lovecraft Country (also on HBO) and it's heavily alluded to in the recent Amazon Prime series The Underground Railroad. I highly recommend all three shows, with their nuanced depiction of atrocity and resilience.

Amazingly, there are three survivors who are still alive today! Viola Fletcher, Lessie Benningfield Randle, and Hughes Van Ellis: inspiring centenarians.

Comments

[ruthling]

I also had to learn about this via Lovecraft Country and Watchmen. Thanks for posting!

[bitty]

It's an interesting reflection. I also didn't learn about this until Watchmen. But my k-12 social studies classes pretty much never cracked the 20th century. There was a year of current events, and we covered both world wars in European history and via English class (Anne Frank), but pretty much every year was a rehash of the Pilgrims onward, never making it much past the Civil War. We didn't study the civil rights movement, either, or Vietnam. Much too recent.

While I suspect most (I'd like to say not all, because there are some teachers I really respect) of my teachers wouldn't have covered it had we made it that far (certainly wasn't in the textbooks), I have no way of knowing.

(The one year that included current events was so vastly different from all my other social studies classes, and I am the better for it. I bet he would have discussed it had it been topical. But this was the 80s, so it was more about Iran-Contra and less about the civil rights movement.)