Word: tulsa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sometimes the act of forgetting is accomplished through the simple passage of time. Sometimes you have to help it along with a pair of scissors. In the archives of the Tulsa Tribune, a now defunct Oklahoma newspaper, two pages from May 31, 1921, have been clipped away. Researchers believe they contained an inflammatory news story and an editorial--"To Lynch a Negro Tonight"--that egged on the men who set off that year's Tulsa riot, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history. When students of the event went looking for those pages, what they found...
...history of race relations in America, there are quite a few blank spaces. Here are two books determined to fill them in. Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy, by James S. Hirsch (Houghton Mifflin; 358 pages; $25), is a quietly devastating account of Tulsa's two-day convulsion of blood and of the struggle years later to return the riot to living memory through a commission of inquiry. Philip Dray's At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Random House; 528 pages; $35) is a powerful history of a practice so common...
...potential lynching that led to the Tulsa upheaval, in which Greenwood, the city's black neighborhood, was burned to the ground by whites. As author Hirsch points out, that murderous episode was not so much a riot as a racial pogrom--"the liquidation of virtually an entire black community and the institutions that held it together." It started with a white woman charging assault against a shoeshine man who had been alone with her in a department-store elevator. She later withdrew the charge, but not before a mob of whites had gathered outside the jailhouse where...
Eventually there was a wild armed pursuit through the streets of Tulsa as the whites pushed the blacks back into Greenwood. The next morning thousands of whites, including Tulsa police and scores of newly deputized thugs, invaded the neighborhood, looted it house by house and set it afire. In all 1,256 houses burned, as well as churches, a junior high school, a hospital and most of the area's businesses. Estimates of the dead, both black and white, varied from 36 to 300. Black residents were marched at gunpoint out of Greenwood. Six thousand were penned...
Then the serious business of forgetting began. For decades Oklahoma history books made no mention of the riot. Police and state-militia documents disappeared. Tulsa went back to being a city so segregated that for years it used paychecks of different colors for its white and black teachers. In the 1990s a few determined Tulsans, both black and white, succeeded in creating a state-appointed "truth commission." Hirsch, a onetime reporter for the New York Times who interviewed more than 100 people for this book, tells that part of the story with quiet dispassion...