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Thursday, June 1, 2023

The Tulsa Race Massacre: Why We Didn't Learn About It

I'm a college history major, taught American history and government to high school students for the better part of 20 years, and at one point, I had a collection of over 1,000 volumes written on the Civil War, World War 2 and on each of the presidencies.  I can't remember ever getting a grade lower than an A- in a social studies class from elementary school to graduate school.  That's not bragging, that's just making the point that I love this subject and have thoroughly immersed myself in studying it.  

There are always new things to learn, nuances of history that are different than the standard textbook fare that is produced for students, which, in my personal opinion, is a nauseating, boring, politically strong-armed mass of spoiled pablum that is rapidly becoming the enemy of democracy, or at least, is no longer providing the kind of informed electorate necessary to maintain it.  With state legislatures further censoring and dumbing down the curriculum in many states, it's no wonder students are so ignorant of their history, and that bigotry is so rampant.  

No Mention Made of the Tulsa Race Massacre, or of any Major Pogrom Against African Americans

Geographically, the elementary and high school I attended sat virtually in the center of what was once the Apache nation.  Though when I was in school, most Apache students attended high schools on their reservations in East Central Arizona, some of my classmates were native Americans, belonging to several of the Apache tribes.  

They sat through history classes mostly in silence.  They did their work, read the assigned texts, took notes, but rarely participated in the discussions.  The perspective in our textbook was "whites are good, Indians are bad."  Other than exchanging looks in class, the Apache students never said much.  Fortunately, our history teacher had been around long enough to know better, and he took us on a couple of field trips I will never forget.  One was to the museum of the Amerind Foundation, 15 miles from our school campus, which included looking at exhibits and presentations by staff who were truthful, honest and factual.  The other was to pay a visit to Nino Cochise, the grandson of the legendary tribal chief K'uu-ch'ish, known as Cochise, who gave talks on Apache history and legend.  He was, at that time, spending his days talking to tourists in a nearby community's visitor center, but when he spoke to us, he was serious, noting some of his fellow tribespeople in the room, and he didn't hold anything back.  

That's the kind of history teacher we need.  He inspired me.  

But, our history curriculum, governed by state objective standards, only briefly touched on post-Civil War Reconstruction, and the whole, long, ugly history of the struggle for equality by African American descendants of former slaves.  It might be described as a "brief mention."  The last chapter in the textbook was the Nixon Administration and the Vietnam War.  Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Medgar Evers were mentioned.  The gist of the story was that there was a struggle, protests, marches, speeches, the Washington march and presto!  Civil Rights were achieved for African Americans in 1964. 

One Book in a College Library

So it was not until I was in college that I ever even heard about the Tulsa Race Massacre, or any of the other pogroms, and yes, I'll use that word, in American history aimed at African Americans.  Even then, information was not easy to find, and in the college library, there was only one book on African American history that I could find to gain some kind of understanding of what happened.  One book, in a college library, on what was the worst tyranny in American history characterizes the whole attitude toward this subject, especially in light of what is going on today in places as diverse as Florida and Montana.  

This, this is exactly why we have Critical Race Theory.  

More Than Just an "Embarassment," the Tulsa Race Massacre was an Example of the Worst That Humans are Capable of Doing 

Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mid-sized oil boom city in north east Oklahoma, geographically the hub of Indian Territory, where Andrew Jackson moved the remaining Native Americans from the southern states to grab up their land, wants to present itself as a God-fearing, law abiding, idyllic mid-American paradise.  Most of the white citizens who lived there in 1921 were descendants of those who had rushed in to Indian Territory in 1889, to claim land that had once been assigned to Native American tribes, or who followed them.  In a miasma of bigotry, racism and ignorance, violence erupted when African American citizens attempted to protect each other from becoming victims of violence.  

And because it was Oklahoma, the 1920's, and African Americans were more or less still very powerless, information about it was suppressed.  Tulsa lost most of what was a prosperous community of citizens contributing to the economy of the city.  Justice was never served.  Who wants to talk about a pogrom taking place anywhere in the United States, especially a place like Tulsa, Oklahoma?  

No doubt most of the perpetrators of the violence were seated in their church pew the following Sunday.  

As I said before, this is exactly why we have Critical Race Theory.  Efforts to eliminate historical accounts like this from the curriculum of elementary and high schools in this country is unconscionable, ignorant and flat out wrong and the "anti-woke" attitude exhibited by politicians is anti-American, wrong, and is suppression of the truth with the clear intention of affecting the direction of American politics.  

Every school child in the city of Tulsa should be required to participate in an annual field trip to the Greenwood Cultural Center-Tulsa  The textbooks I've used in history classes have chapters in the chronological layout of American history that cover the Tulsa Race Massacre, along with similar pogroms which took place all over the country, in their appropriate time slot, but these textbooks are being censored in many states.  

It's Not Minimizing the Holocaust to Teach About American Racial Repression and Violence

What has happened to African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and virtually all Americans who are not of white, European ancestry (and even some of those have experienced violence depending on their nationality) is no different than what the Jews in Germany and occupied Europe experienced during the Holocaust.  The concentration and scale of the violence and murder is different, but terror is terror, tyranny is tyranny.  History must be honest.  

Americans don't want to compare themselves to the Germans under Nazi rule.  In fact, revisionists exist in all corners of academia, re-inventing historical accounts and creating an anti-Hitler perspective that didn't really exist in the United States prior to Pearl Harbor.  For those students who wonder why more Jews didn't see the handwriting on the wall, and emigrate to America when things were getting bad in Europe, it is a shock to be disabused in discovering that American embassy and consulate officials in European countries actually put up all kinds of blockades in the face of Jews trying to come here, forcing the few European havens to close their doors when, as they claimed, "the lifeboat is full."  

That attitude is clearly present in our history.  It is exactly why there has been little mention of the Tulsa Race Massacre, or other events intended to terrorize, and murder, Americans because of their race.  In every way, that attitude is anti-American and anti-Christian.  It needs to be decisively cut out of this country, by the political defeat of those who continue to promote their "anti-woke" agenda, because that's just a code word for what is nothing more than evil bigotry.  


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