Word: tulsa
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Hayes, who comes to Harvard from a similar post at the University of Tulsa, began working Feb. 1 with coaches and athletes to develop strength and conditioning policies for each varsity squad...
...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...
...bill affirming that whites were responsible for the riot. But it did not provide reparations to a group of elderly black survivors, a redress that had set off years of controversy. (Each of them received instead a gold-plated medal with the state seal.) The archives of the Tulsa Tribune are still incomplete. But thanks to the commission--and Hirsch's book--the crimes that were covered up are now back in the collective memory...