Why the Tulsa race massacre went largely uncommemorated for most of the 100 years since

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

When the smoke cleared in June 1921, the toll from the massacre in Tulsa, Okla., was catastrophic — scores of lives lost, homes and businesses burned to the ground, a thriving Black community gutted by a white mob.

The nightmare cried out for attention, as something to be investigated and memorialized, with speeches and statues and anniversary commemorations.

But the horror and violence visited upon Tulsa’s Black community didn’t become part of the American story. Instead, it was pushed down, unremembered and untaught until efforts decades later started bringing it into the light. And even this year, with the 100th anniversary of the massacre being recognized, it’s still an unfamiliar history to many — something historians say has broader repercussions.

“The consequences of that is a sort of a lie that we tell ourselves collectively about who we are as a society, who we have been historically, that’s set some of these things up as aberrations, as exceptions of what we understand society to be rather than endemic or intrinsic parts of American history,” said Joshua Guild, an associate professor of history and African American studies at Princeton University.

-more-

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-the-tulsa-race-massacre-went-largely-uncommemorated-for-most-of-the-100-years-since/ar-AAKx2Qh

[Sneederbunk]

1. Because people expect to be spoonfed their history.

Why bother to read?

[lees1975]

2. Tulsa isn't the only forgotten massacre

Elaine, Arkansas two years earlier, 1919, was an attack on black sharecroppers who were meeting in a church attempting to form a union to share in the prosperity that was occurring around them. What little has been recorded was a mostly false account blaming the blacks for starting a "riot" requiring a mob of white people with weapons to descend on the town and murder more than 100 people, mostly in their homes or on their own property. The truth is finally coming out. The Arkansas legislature's response has been disgraceful.

Springfield, Illinois 1908. Red Summer of 1919 when some Blacks decided to fight back. Rosewood, Florida 1923. Slocum, Texas 1910

It was everywhere.

I taught American History to high school students for over 20 years and had to supplement the standard textbooks which even now barely touch on this issue. Students would ask, as we proceed through the chronological study, how it was that the Black vote never reached anywhere close to a percentage of the total population after Reconstruction ended, until the mid-1960's and even then, not completely. It's only been in the last couple of decades that the information is easier to find.

[Sneederbunk]

3. Wilmington NC 1898.

[uriel1972]

4. "THEY are the criminals, the animals, and the wrong doers

Not US. It is all THEIR fault not ours. Look at what THEY made US do.

Yet even those monstets that perpetrated these crimes against Black men, women, and children knew the true horror of their acts and simply decided individually and collectively, consciously or otherwise to simply make it all disappear.

Yet the past remains, hidden sometimes, even out in the open at others, yet never spoken by the good gentle folk.