This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. On May 31 and June 1, 1921 angry white supremacists destroyed the Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, killing as many as 300 people, destroying more than 1,000 homes and burning Black businesses. An estimated 8,000 people were left homeless and the victims were never compensated. The incident was hidden from history for decades but is now recognized as the single worst episode of racial violence in the United States.
Women who survived Boko Haram kidnapping as girls graduate collegePer press release, the bulk of the history we know about the events came from an eyewitness account a woman wrote and published a year later. Mary Parrish was reading in her home when the Tulsa race massacre began on the evening of May 31, 1921. Parrish’s daughter, Florence Mary, called the young journalist and teacher to the window. “Mother,” she said, “I see men with guns.” The two eventually fled into the night under a hail of bullets and unwittingly became eyewitnesses to one of the greatest race tragedies in American history.The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, publishing in May from Trinity University Press for a wide audience for the first time, is Parrish’s first-person account, along with the recollections of dozens of others, compiled immediately following the tragedy. Spurred by word that a young Black man was about to be lynched for stepping on a white woman’s foot, a three-day riot erupted that saw the death of hundreds of Black Oklahomans and the destruction of the Greenwood district, a prosperous, primarily Black area known as Black Wall Street.
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