Long undisturbed rocks of the American legacy have been overturned in recent years, and with each one, more of the racism that is deeply embedded in the US’s soil is exposed for all of us to confront.
For many Americans, 1 June marked the overturning of one more such rock. A hundred years ago, a white mob violently leveled the thriving ‘Black Wall Street’ community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An estimated 300 people were killed. Well over 1,200 buildings were destroyed, some by fire bombs from private planes. One estimate puts the cost of the damage at more than $200m in today’s dollars.
Yet this cataclysmic moment in American history – in which victims were not compensated and perpetrators were not punished – was so efficiently buried that decades later even some Black Tulsa residents were surprised to learn this happened. And it was not until 100 years later that a US president, Joe Biden, actually went to the scene of the horror to pay homage to its victims and call the evil out for what it was.
