100 Years and the Hate is Still Strong - Tulsa Race Massacre - Added to the Memorial Day Landscape

One of the greatest cover ups in American History happened 100 years ago today in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As a Black Woman, thoughts of my people’s progression have often crossed my mind. Yet they have been saturated by the stories of the sharecroppers living like indentured servents long after the Emmancipation Proclamation, blinding me to the stories of great wealth produced out of the nothingness of bondage. And today the dis-enfranchisement extends longer and wider than the experience of the former slave as we rush for EBT cards and stimulus check living below the poverty line of rationality. 
On this very day, Decoration Day, what is now known as Memorial Day, the most wealthiest Black community in our nation at the time was burned to the ground by the ancestors of those who rushed the U.S. Capital on January 6th, 2021. This continued holocaust ruptured the lives of Black women, Black children and Black men just trying to live. These racist, hateful, unapologetic ALT right, KKK monsters changed the trajectory of our path. They economically bankrupted us in this one moment, sending a message of what we weren’t allowed to be. We must piece this thing together. We must teach our legacy with accuracy and truth.

On May 31st, 1921 in the Greenwood District of Tulsa Oklahoma, thousands of armed white, terrorist Tulsans mobsters invaded the city, fully executed under the segregated Jim Crow Laws. This completely segregated community was one of the first, filled with Black entrepreneurs, professionals and leaders, elevating us as a people to a status quo that the hateful white faction couldn’t imagine. The town was so successful that it earned the name of the Black Wall Street. It’s founders were descendants of slaves yet they had very few needs of the white establishment that surrounded the area.

And why was Tulsa so wealthy? It was a highly rich oil area. Yet on that Memorial Day, 35 blocks were in ashes, over 10,000 residents displaced and all the Black businesses were looted and destroyed. 
The number of deaths are unknown. Mass graves are still being discovered to this day. The history books haven’t even wasted its ink on the story and America still wonders today why we need a commission for January 6th, for reparations for slavery. APPALLING!