A DUTY TO KNOW-TULSA 1921

I love history and daily I am drawn down deer trails in the woods of information. For example, yesterday, I discovered that THREE presidents were assassinated within a 40 year period at the end of the Civil War. Now, the Civil War isn't one of my areas of more than polite acquaintance, so, of course I knew about Abraham Lincoln but I did not know about Garfield or McKinley. Having followed up on that trail, it appears that their murderers were more of the mentally unstable individual type than the political type. But perhpas ALL murderers are inherently mentally unstable or they wouldn't be drawn to do such a crime.

I like to know things but I also believe there are things we should all know in order to better understand our world. Frequently in subject areas such as environmentalism and health, you will find columns with titles such as "What you can do to help." Since 1619 Project, which I admired, I have been trying to increase my awareness of African American History, by which I mean ALL AMERCICAN history with this major component added into the mix from which it has been absent for most of my life. It is my duty to KNOW and it is one of the things we can all do. Just as I spent my entire adulthood trying to balance history with the addition of Women's History, I now try to make the balance with the addition of the history of our Africann AMerican neighbors and feelow citizens. I have read a lot of books, most recently CASTE by ISabel Wilkerson, which I think I reviewed here in the blog. And on my living room table is JUNETEENTH, by Annette Gordon Reed, who is an author with whom I have been familiar sine I read her book exposing the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Himmings nnd her family's long time in the shadows of the Jefferson family's refusal to accept their genetic relationship. One of the intersections between slavery and women's history, to my way of thinking, has been the male control of sexual access to women. It is rarely discussed that the whites who bought, sold and owned Africans, took widespread advantage of their control to rape the women. What was even more shocking to me was that they used the products of their rape, their own offspring, as more chattel to be sold. Rape and the selling of their own children - two heinous crimes white history has kept hidden.

Genocide and massacre are two other subject often left out of the patruarcgak white male history. You may have heard of the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of the citizens of Greenwood, known at the time as the Black Wall Street. If not, simply, as was so often the case in the start of a genocidal attack, a young African American shoeshine boy was accused of assaulting a white woman in an elevator. The boy said he bumped into her when the elevator lurched. He was arrested and taken to the jail in the courthouse, where a mob quickly formed with the intention of lynching him. African American World War I veterans determined to stop a lynching gathered, armed to defend the courthouse from the vigilante mob. Next the mob descended on Greenwood the affluent business and residential section and machine gunned anyone in the streets while airplanes dropped incendiary devices onto the rooftops of the homes and businesses. More than 300 people were murdered and the entire district was burned to the ground. Mass graves are currently being exhumed in hopes of identifying exactly who was killed for the sake of the descendants.

If you want to learn more THE GROUNDBREAKING: An American City and its Search for Justice by Scott Ellsworth is available, as is the book I am planning to read now, JUNETEENTH. If anyone couldn't do anything more, at least becoming aware of these tragedies and their effects on our fellow citizens is a step in the right direction. Juneteenth, by the way is the date when enslaved African Americans in Texas learned they had been emancipated.

Happy Trails - Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com \