Chattanooga Times Free Press

Teaching the truth about Tulsa tragedy

My mother witnessed a terrible event when she was a child. She saw white men and Black men in the street shooting shotguns and roman candles at each other; white men attacking Blacks with axes and farm tools. She was 6, standing in her uncle’s pharmacy in Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 1, 1921. She saw the race massacre on Greenwood Avenue. And she saw Black families a few days later walking along the Frisco railroad tracks at the back of her family farm, carrying their belongings with them. She only spoke of this experience once, during the urban riots in the 1960s. She clearly carried the trauma of witnessing it as a burden. Yet, I was never taught that such an event had happened.

Five generations of Black people throughout the country have been burdened with the trauma of the burning of the Black Wall Street, while I was protected from being a “brainwashed and resentful (white) student.” This is not an academic theory; it is an historical fact witnessed by my mother but hidden by policies and laws that banned teaching about such events, enforced by threat of punishment, or worse. Why do we consider teaching the truth a crime?

Betty D. Morris

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2021-06-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://edition.timesfreepress.com/article/282535841315160

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