“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. If you go out and make good things happen, you fill the world with hope. And in doing so, you will fill yourself with hope.”
Barack Obama
These next two days mark the centennial of one of the worst racial massacres in U.S. history. The cataclysm began with a story that played out several times throughout the 20th century: a young White woman claimed a Black man had assaulted her. That launched an angry White mob in the pre-dawn hours of May 31, 2021. And the result was a bloodbath that swept up an entire community; taking more than 300 lives; leaving a legacy of trauma, animosity and pain.
Only within recent years have the details of those events seen the light of truth. The world of 1921 is considerably different than the world of 2021.
Despite the horrors of those days, we really have come a long way in race relations; that is the understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to be a community. And we can only move forward. The angry White gangs of 1921 Tulsa obliterated hundreds of innocent lives. They destroyed an entire community. But they couldn’t destroy an entire people.
Chief Writing Wolf 