Trump supporters, protesters face off outside Oklahoma rally

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Protesters fill Boulder Ave. after Tulsa Police fired pepper balls at them after President Donald Trump's campaign rally at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Saturday, June 20, 2020.(Mike Simons/Tulsa World via AP)


TULSA, Okla. (AP) — President Donald Trump’s supporters faced off with protesters shouting “Black Lives Matter” Saturday in Tulsa as the president took the stage for his first campaign rally in months amid public health concerns about the coronavirus and fears that the event could lead to violence in the wake of killings of Black people by police.

Hundreds of demonstrators flooded the city’s downtown streets and blocked traffic at times, but police reported just a handful of arrests. Many of the marchers chanted, and some occasionally got into shouting matches with Trump supporters, who outnumbered them and yelled, “All lives matter.”

Later in the evening, a group of armed men began following the protesters. When the protesters blocked an intersection, a man wearing a Trump shirt got out of a truck and spattered them with pepper spray.

When demonstrators approached a National Guard bus that got separated from its caravan, Tulsa police officers fired pepper balls to push back the crowd, said Tulsa police spokesperson Capt. Richard Meulenberg. Officers soon left the area as it cleared.

The Trump faithful gathered inside the 19,000-seat BOK Center for what was believed to be the largest indoor event in the country since restrictions to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus began in March. Many of the president’s supporters weren’t wearing masks, despite the recommendation of public health officials. Some had been camped near the venue since early in the week.

Turnout at the rally was lower than the campaign predicted, with a large swath of standing room on the stadium floor and empty seats in the balconies. Trump had been scheduled to appear at a rally outside of the stadium within a perimeter of tall metal barriers, but that event was abruptly canceled.

Trump campaign officials said protesters prevented the president’s supporters from entering the stadium. Three Associated Press journalists reporting in Tulsa for several hours leading up to the president’s speaking did not see protesters block entry to the area where the rally was held.

While Trump spoke onstage, protesters carried a papier-mache representation of him with a pig snout. Some in the multiracial group wore Black Lives Matter shirts, others sported rainbow-colored armbands, and many covered their mouths and noses with masks. At one point, several people stopped to dance to gospel singer Kirk Franklin’s song “Revolution.”

The protesters blocked traffic in at least one intersection. Some Black leaders in Tulsa had said they were worried the visit could lead to violence. It came amid protests over racial injustice and policing across the U.S. and in a city that has a long history of racial tension. Officials had said they expected some 100,000 people downtown.

A woman who was arrested on live television was seen sitting cross-legged on the ground in peaceful protest when officers pulled her away by the arms and later put her in handcuffs. She said her name was Sheila Buck and that she was from Tulsa.



Police said in a news release the officers tried for several minutes to talk Buck into leaving and that she was taken into custody for obstruction after the Trump campaign asked police to remove her from the area.

Buck was wearing a T-shirt that said “I Can’t Breathe” — the dying words of George Floyd, whose death has inspired a global push for racial justice. She said she had a ticket to the Trump rally and was told she was being arrested for trespassing. She said she was not part of any organized group.


Several blocks away from the BOK Center was a festival-like atmosphere, with food vendors serving hot dogs and cold drinks and sidewalks lined with people selling various Trump regalia.

There was also an undercurrent of tension near the entrance to the secured area, where Trump supporters and opponents squared off. Several downtown businesses boarded up their windows as well to avoid any potential damage.

Kieran Mullen, 60, a college professor from Norman, Oklahoma, held a sign that read “Black Lives Matter” and “Dump Trump.”

“I just thought it was important for people to see there are Oklahomans that have a different point of view,” Mullen said of his state, which overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016.

Brian Bernard, 54, a retired information technology worker from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sported a Trump 2020 hat as he took a break from riding his bicycle around downtown. Next to him was a woman selling Trump T-shirts and hats, flying a “Keep America Great Again” flag. Her shirt said, “Impeach this,” with an image of Trump extending his middle fingers

“Since the media won’t do it, it’s up to us to show our support,” said Bernard, who drove nine hours to Tulsa for his second Trump rally.

Bernard said he wasn’t concerned about catching the coronavirus at the event and doesn’t believe it’s “anything worse than the flu.”

Across the street, armed, uniformed highway patrol troopers milled about a staging area in a bank parking lot with dozens of uniformed National Guard troops.

Tulsa has seen cases of COVID-19 spike in the past week, and the local health department director asked that the rally be postponed. But Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said it would be safe. The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Friday denied a request that everyone attending the indoor rally wear a mask, and few in the crowd outside Saturday were wearing them.

The Trump campaign said six staff members helping prepare for the event tested positive for COVID-19. They were following “quarantine procedures” and wouldn’t attend the rally, said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director.

Inside the barriers, the campaign was handing out masks and said hand sanitizer also would be distributed and that participants would undergo a temperature check. But there was no requirement that participants use the masks.

Teams of people wearing goggles, masks, gloves and blue gowns were checking the temperatures of those entering the rally area. Those who entered the secured area were given disposable masks, which most people wore as they went through the temperature check. Some took them off after the check.

The rally originally was planned for Friday, but was moved after complaints that it coincided with Juneteenth, which marks the end of slavery in the U.S., and in a city that was the site of a 1921 race-related massacre, when a white mob attacked Black people, leaving as many as 300 people dead.

Stitt joined Vice President Mike Pence for a meeting Saturday with Black leaders from Tulsa’s Greenwood District, the area once known as “Black Wall Street” where the 1921 attack occurred. Stitt initially invited Trump to tour the area, but said, “We talked to the African American community and they said it would not be a good idea, so we asked the president not to do that.”


Associated Press reporters Ellen Knickmeyer in Tulsa, Ken Miller in Oklahoma City, Sara Burnett in Chicago, Adam Kealoha Causey in Dallas and Grant Schulte in Omaha, Nebraska, contributed to this report.

Trump's Tulsa rally evokes a tragic 1921 example of the systemic racism he won't face

Ellis Cose, Opinion columnist, USA TODAY Opinion•June 16, 2020


Tulsa race massacre of 1921: The painful past of 'Black Wall Street


It’s possible President Donald Trump’s reason for scheduling his let’s-forget-COVID-19 rally in Tulsa had nothing to do with stirring up racial mischief. It’s possible that the event, as Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt suggested, was conceived simply to celebrate the (certainly premature) reopening of the state. It’s even possible that the originally announced date (June 19, or Juneteenth — a day commemorating the emancipation of America’s formerly enslaved) was chosen for some reason other than insulting African Americans.

But even approaching this matter with a mind as open as humanly possible, it’s difficult to see how any sane person ever thought the Tulsa rally was a good idea. Indeed, in changing the date (supposedly at the suggestion of Black allies who worried a Juneteenth rally might be seen as tactless), Trump essentially admitted the scheme was half-baked and tone-deaf from the beginning.

At a time when a racially diverse coalition is demanding a new approach to both policing and race, one would think the last thing on Trump’s to-do list would be a rally evoking one of the worst pogroms in American history. That only would make sense if Trump had decided to add his voice to the millions protesting the justice system’s treatment of African Americans — if Trump, in other words, was on the side demanding an end to racism.

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Tulsa riot illustrates systemic racism

Yes, I can hear you laughing. This is the same Donald Trump who, since the death of George Floyd, has devoted his time to justifying the status quo — or worse. He has ranted about “domestic terror” (which seems to be his definition of lawful protest) while threatening to unleash “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers” on American citizens. When not tweeting such nonsense, he and his team crusade against the term “systemic racism,” claiming it does not exist in American law enforcement — or presumably in American life.

There is a certain irony in the Trump administration making that argument at the very moment we are focused on the 1921 riot that serves as a textbook example of how systemic racism works.

An African American church burns in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The state commission appointed to study the riot in Tulsa issued a report in 2001 noting that beginning the evening of May 31, 1921, a “mob destroyed 35-square-blocks of the African American Community.” It was “a tragic, infamous moment in Oklahoma and the nation’s history” and the worst "civil disturbance since the Civil War.” A precise death toll was impossible to come by, but the commission put the number at somewhere between 38 and “well into the hundreds.”

Like so much racial craziness in America, the Tulsa riot was ignited by an interaction between a young African American man and a young white woman. Dick Rowland worked as a shoeshine boy near the building where Sarah Page was an elevator girl. Rowland apparently came into the building to use its “coloreds only” bathroom. He may have tripped as he entered the elevator and grabbed Page’s arm to steady himself. For whatever reason, Page screamed.

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The next morning, Rowland was arrested. The Tulsa Tribune ran a front-page story headlined, “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” and might have run an additional article headlined, “To Lynch Negro Tonight.” Details on the second article are unclear, as all copies mysteriously vanished from the Tribune’s archives. What is clear is that white mobs gathered at the courthouse. Armed African Americans showed up to observe them. A shot was fired and chaos ensued. When the smoke cleared, a vibrant community reputed to be the most prosperous in Black America was no more.

The Associated Press blamed “agitation by a few irresponsible negroes” goaded on by “negro radicals.” 

Mobs targeted successful Blacks

That summer, the American Civil Liberties Union reprinted a pamphlet, "Lynching and Debt Slavery," authored by William Pickens, field secretary of the NAACP. Pickens argued that white Southerners were determined to keep African Americans in economic bondage. Mob violence erupted, he wrote, when whites suspected Blacks of trying to escape that system. Consequently, said Pickens, “when race riots break out, especially in the South, the prosperous and well-to-do colored men … are the ones most likely to be forced to leave the community. They may be compelled to abandon all their property posthaste to get away with their lives.”

As a well-to-do African American community, Tulsa’s so-called Black Wall Street was a glittering affront to white Southerners. It was a quiet repudiation of the revered Ku Klux Klan.

Why are there no Black Donald Trumps? Part of the answer lies in places such as Tulsa.
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In 2018, New York Times reporters looked into the origins of Trump’s wealth. They concluded that his father gave him $413 million in today's dollars, which enabled the son to screw up in business, cheat on his taxes and end up a rich man: a bonafide American success story.

No Black American of Trump's generation has such a story. The mobs made sure no one would. If you wish to understand institutional racism, read the story of Tulsa, then read the story of Trump. It is not that difficult a concept to grasp, unless you have no intention of getting it. Unless you have no regard for history and no appetite for facts.

Trump, of course, is famously intolerant of facts. He seems to view them the way he once viewed the coronavirus — something troublesome that one day “like a miracle … will disappear."

Ellis Cose, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is the author of "Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU’s 100-Year Fight for Rights in America" and "The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America," both due out this year. Follow him on Twitter: @EllisCose

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump Tulsa rally evokes one of the worst pogroms in American history

‘The foundation of the wealth’: Why Black Wall Street boomed


BY ELLEN KNICKMEYER ASSOCIATED PRESS
JUNE 01, 2021

In this Monday, June 15, 2020 photo, Kristi Williams speaks during an interview at her home in Tulsa, Okla. Unlike Black Americans across the country after slavery, Williams' ancestors and thousands of other Black members of slave-owning Indian nations freed after the war “had land,” says Williams, a Tulsa community activist. “They had opportunity to build a house on that land, farm that land, and they were wealthy with their crops." (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki) SUE OGROCKI AP

TULSA, OKLA.

In a century-old family story about a teenage aunt who liked to drive her luxury car down the trolley tracks of Tulsa, Kristi Williams still savors a tiny, lingering taste of how different life could have been for all Black Americans after slavery.

On Monday, Tulsans commemorated the 100th anniversary of a two-day assault by armed white men on Tulsa's prosperous Black community of Greenwood, known around the country as Black Wall Street, calling attention to an era of deadly mob assaults on Black communities that official history long suppressed.

But Williams, and other descendants of the freed Black people enslaved by Native American nations who once owned much of the land under Tulsa, say there's another part of Black Wall Street's history that more Americans need to know about.

It's one that has important lessons for contemporary racial issues in the United States, including the long debated matter of reparations, descendants and historians say.

That bit of the story: where much of the seed money that made Black Wall Street boom came from.

Unlike Black Americans across the country after slavery, Williams' ancestors and thousands of other Black members of slave-owning Native American nations freed after the war “had land,” says Williams, a Tulsa community activist. “They had opportunity to build a house on that land, farm that land, and they were wealthy with their crops."

"And that was huge — a great opportunity and you’re thinking this is going to last for generations to come. I can leave my children this land, and they can leave their children this land,” recounts Williams, whose ancestor went from enslaved laborer to judge of the Muscogee Creek tribal Supreme Court after slavery.

In fact, Alaina E. Roberts, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, writes in her book "I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land,” the freed slaves of five Native American nations “became the only people of African descent in the world to receive what might be viewed as reparations for their enslavement on a large scale.”

Why that happened in the territory that became Oklahoma, and not the rest of the slaveholding South: The U.S. government enforced stricter terms for reconstruction on the slave-owning American Indian nations that had fully or partially allied with the Confederacy than it had on Southern states.

While U.S. officials quickly broke Gen. William T. Sherman's famous Special Field Order No. 15 providing 40 acres for each formerly enslaved family after the Civil War, U.S. treaties compelled five slave-owning tribes — the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Muscogee Creek and Seminoles — to share tribal land and other resources and rights with freed Black people who had been enslaved.

By 1860, about 14% of the total population of that tribal territory of the future state of Oklahoma were Black people enslaved by tribal members. After the Civil War, the Black tribal Freedmen held millions of acres in common with other tribal members and later in large individual allotments.

The difference that made is “incalculable,” Roberts said in an interview. “Allotments really gave them an upward mobility that other Black people did not have in most of the United States.”

The financial stability allowed Black Native American Freedmen to start businesses, farms and ranches, and helped give rise to Black Wall Street and thriving Black communities in the future state of Oklahoma. The prosperity of those communities — many long since vanished —“attracted Black African Americans from the South, built them up as a Black mecca,” Roberts says. Black Wall Street alone had roughly 200 businesses.

Meeting the Black tribal Freedmen in the thriving Black city of Boley in 1905, Booker T. Washington wrote admiringly of a community “which shall demonstrate the right of the negro, not merely as an individual, but as a race, to have a worthy and permanent place in the civilization that the American people are creating.”

And while some tribes reputedly gave their Black members some of the worst, rockiest, unfarmable land, that was often just where drillers struck oil starting in the first years of the 20th century, before statehood changed Indian Territory to Oklahoma in 1907. For a time it made the area around Tulsa the world's biggest oil producer.

For Eli Grayson, another descendant of Muscogee Creek Black Freedmen, any history that tries to tell the story of Black Wall Street without telling the story of the Black Indian Freedmen and their land is a flop.

“They're missing the point of what caused the wealth, the foundation of the wealth,” Grayson says.

The oil wealth, besides helping put the bustle and boom in Tulsa's Black-owned Greenwood business district, gave rise to fortunes for a few Freedpeople that made headlines around the United States. That included 11-year-old Sarah Rector, a Muscogee Creek girl hailed as “the richest colored girl in the world” by newspapers of the time. Her oil fortune drew attention from Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois, who intervened to check that Rector's white guardian wasn't pillaging her money.

The wealth from the tribal allotment also gave rise to Williams' family story of great-aunt Janie, “who learned to drive by going behind the trolley lines” in Tulsa, with her parents in the car, Williams' uncle, 67-year-old Samuel Morgan, recounted, laughing.

"It was real fashionable, because it was one of the cars that had four windows that rolled all the way up,” Morgan said.

Little of that Black wealth remains today.

In May 1921, 100 years ago this month, Aunt Janie, then a teenager, had to flee Greenwood's Dreamland movie theater as the white mob burned Black Wall Street to the ground, killing scores or hundreds — no one knows — and leaving Greenwood an empty ruin populated by charred corpses.

Black Freedmen and many other American Indian citizens rapidly lost land and money to unscrupulous or careless white guardians that were imposed upon them, to property taxes, white scams, accidents, racist policies and laws, business mistakes or bad luck. For Aunt Janie, all the family knows today is a vague tale of the oil wells on her land catching fire.

Williams, Grayson and other Black Indian Freedmen descendants today drive past the spots in Tulsa that family history says used to belong to them: 51st Street. The grounds of Oral Roberts University. Mingo Park.

That's yet another lesson Tulsa's Greenwood has for the rest of the United States, says William A. Darity Jr., a leading scholar and writer on reparations at Duke University.


If freed Black people had gotten reparations after the Civil War, Darity said, assaults like the Tulsa Race Massacre show they would have needed years of U.S. troop deployments to protect them — given the angry resentment of white people at seeing money in Black hands.

Tribe in Oklahoma sues city of Tulsa for continuing to ticket Native American drivers

SEAN MURPHY
November 15, 2023 

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The Muscogee (Creek) Nation filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the city of Tulsa, arguing Tulsa police are continuing to ticket Native American drivers within the tribe's reservation boundaries despite a recent federal appeals court ruling that they lacked jurisdiction to do so.

The tribe filed the lawsuit in federal court in Tulsa against the city, Mayor G.T. Bynum, Chief of Police Wendell Franklin and City Attorney Jack Blair.

The litigation is just the latest clash in Oklahoma over tribal sovereignty since the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 2020 ruling, dubbed McGirt, that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation's sprawling reservation, which includes much of Tulsa, remains intact. That ruling has since been expanded by lower courts to include several other Native American reservations covering essentially the eastern half of the state.

Since that ruling, Tulsa began referring felony and criminal misdemeanor offenses by Native Americans within Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s boundaries to the tribe for prosecution, but has declined to refer traffic offenses, according to the lawsuit.

“Tulsa’s prosecution of Indians for conduct occurring within the Creek Reservation constitutes an ongoing violation of federal law and irreparably harms the Nation’s sovereignty by subjecting Indians within the Creek Reservation to laws and a criminal justice system other than the laws and system maintained by the Nation,” the suit states.

A spokesperson for Mayor Bynum said he is eager to work with tribal partners to resolve the issues and that the litigation is unnecessary.

“This latest lawsuit is a duplication of several lawsuits that are already pending in state and federal courts to decide these issues,” Bynum spokesperson Michelle Brooke said in a statement. She declined to comment further.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in June that the city lacks the jurisdiction to prosecute Native Americans within tribal jurisdiction, siding with a Choctaw Nation citizen who was cited for speeding in 2018.

"We will not stand by and watch the City disregard our sovereignty and our own laws by requiring Muscogee and other tribal citizens to respond to citations in Tulsa city court because of the City’s make-believe legal theories,” Principal Chief David Hill said in a statement.

Experts on tribal law say there is an easy solution — for Tulsa to enter into prosecution agreements with various tribal nations like many cities and towns in eastern Oklahoma already have.

Under the agreements with municipalities, the portion of the revenue from tickets that is typically remitted to the state of Oklahoma is instead sent to the tribal nation whose reservation the city or town is located in. The rest of the money can be retained by the city or town.

Other municipalities within the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s boundaries have referred 1,083 traffic citations to the tribe for prosecution, but not Tulsa, according to the tribe's lawsuit.

Latest search for Tulsa Race Massacre victims comes to end


In this image provided by the city of Tulsa, Okla., crews work on an excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery searching for victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on Oct. 26, 2022, in Tulsa. The latest search for remains of victims of the massacre ended Friday, Nov. 18, with 32 additional caskets discovered and eight sets of remains exhumed, according to the city. 

(City of Tulsa via AP, File) 


KEN MILLER
Sat, November 19, 2022
The latest search for remains of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has ended with 32 additional caskets discovered and eight sets of remains exhumed, according to the city.

The excavation and exhumations at Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery that began Oct. 26 ended Friday and the remains were sent to a nearby lab for analysis and DNA collection.

Searchers sought unmarked graves of people who were probably male, in plain caskets with signs of gunshot trauma — criteria for further investigation that were based on newspaper reports at the time, said forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield.

Two sets of the 66 remains found in the past two years have been confirmed to have gunshot wounds, according to Stubblefield, though none have been identified or confirmed to be victims of the massacre.

DNA taken from 14 sets of the nearly three dozen remains found last year were sent to Intermountain Forensics in Salt Lake City for further study. DNA from teeth and thigh bones, known as femurs, will be extracted from the eight recently exhumed remains and also sent to Intermountain Forensics, Stubblefield said.

State archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck said 62 of the 66 burials found thus far were in unmarked graves.

Investigators are looking for a possible mass grave of victims of the 1921 massacre at the hands of a white mob that descended on the Black section of Tulsa — Greenwood. More than 1,000 homes were burned, hundreds more were looted and destroyed and a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street was destroyed.

Most historians who have studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300. Historians say many of the victims were buried in unmarked graves, their locations never recorded and rumors have persisted for decades of mass graves in the area.

Stackelbeck said the remains meeting the criteria for possible massacre victims and exhumed thus far are not in a mass grave, but instead interspersed in the search area.

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said he considers the entire cemetery to be a mass grave.

“Is there a mass grave where there are people lined up in a row like we thought might be? That is not the case,” Bynum said. “Is Oaklawn Cemetery still a mass grave? Yes.”

Investigators have recommended additional scanning of a nearby park and adjacent homeless camp, where oral histories have indicated massacre victims were buried.

Bynum said the city will decide the next step after reviewing the next report from researchers that is expected sometime next year.

All the exhumed remains will be reburied, at least temporarily, at Oaklawn, where the previous reburial was closed to the public, drawing protests from about two dozen people who said they are descendants of massacre victims and should have been allowed to attend.

The massacre wiped out generational wealth, and victims were never compensated, but a pending lawsuit seeks reparations for the three remaining known survivors. They are each now more than 100 years old.

Trump stirs anger with plans for Juneteenth rally in Tulsa, site of huge massacre of African Americans

Trump stirs anger with plans for Juneteenth rally in Tulsa, site of huge massacre of African Americans


Courtney Subramanian, USA TODAY•June 11, 2020

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s decision to hold his first rally in three months in Tulsa, the location of one of the worst massacres of African Americans in U.S. history, has triggered controversy as he wrestles with criticism over his handling of nationwide protests against police brutality and racism.

Trump plans to visit Oklahoma on June 19 for the first of several big campaign events. It will be his first rally since an event in Charlotte, North Carolina, on March 2. The trip comes after weeks of protests over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who was pinned to the ground for nearly nine minutes under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.

Trump put his large campaign rallies on hiatus for a few months while much of the country was locked down amid the coronavirus pandemic.

June 19, or Juneteenth, is also known as Emancipation Day and commemorates the date in 1865 when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger traveled to Galveston, Texas, to inform residents that President Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves and that slave owners had to comply with the Emancipation Proclamation.

This month, Tulsa marked a grim date – the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre in which a white mob ravaged a thriving African-American business community in the Greenwood District known as the "Black Wall Street." Estimates suggest as many as 300 people were killed, and scores of homes and businesses were destroyed.

Alicia Andrews, chair of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, said Trump was "thumbing his nose at the real issue of racial inequity."

"There's a man's words, and then there are his actions," she said. "Him coming here on that date, without making any outreach to the community, and saying it's for unity, it is a slap in the face."

Protesters walk from the Capitol to the White House during a march against police brutality and racism June 6. Demonstrations have been held across the USA after the death of George Floyd on May 25 while being arrested in Minneapolis.Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, tweeted Thursday that holding the rally in Tulsa was "overt racism from the highest office in the land."

Trump's campaign said the timing and location of the rally were deliberate, and his team views it as a chance to tout his "record of success for black Americans."

Trump faces rising criticism, including from Republicans, for his response to the growing Black Lives Matter movement – three words etched in yellow paint on a street outside the White House.

In the wake of Floyd's death and the outrage that followed, Trump has said little about racial inequality, focusing instead on restoring "law and order" in American streets and lambasting protesters as "thugs" and looters.

Members of Trump's own administration, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, distanced themselves from a decision to forcefully clear a park outside the White House of peaceful protesters so Trump could walk to nearby St. John's Church and hold up a Bible before television cameras. Milley said Thursday he had made a "mistake" in accompanying Trump on the walk

Mechelle Brown, program coordinator and tour guide for the Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa, said the organization had not heard from the president or the Trump campaign about his planned visit and does not expect to.

"The community doesn't feel that Trump is genuinely interested in the history of the Greenwood district," Brown said, "and that his visit to Tulsa during Juneteenth, as we are commemorating the 99-year anniversary of the massacre, is insulting."

Brown said the black community in Tulsa was "incredibly anxious" about the rally.

"You have people who are proudly waving their Confederate flag against the backdrop of African Americans and others – white allies – who are continuing to protest George Floyd's death and police brutality," she said. "We just see the potential of there being a clash."

Senior Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson said in a statement that Trump's visit was entirely appropriate.

“As the party of Lincoln, Republicans are proud of the history of Juneteenth, which is the anniversary of the last reading of the Emancipation Proclamation," she said. "President Trump has built a record of success for Black Americans, including unprecedented low unemployment prior to the global pandemic, all-time high funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and criminal justice reform."

A USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll released this week suggested the walk across Lafayette Square was a defining moment for the president. Nearly nine of 10 Americans heard about the incident in which police used smoke canisters, pepper spray and other irritants to clear peaceful protesters. Two-thirds of Americans, 63%, oppose the show of force, , and almost half, 44%, say they "strongly" oppose it.

The USA TODAY/Ipsos poll also found that 60% of Americans say they trust the Black Lives Matter movement to promote justice and equal treatment for people of all races – compared with 38% who say they trust Trump. Fifty-one percent say they trust presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

More: How police pushed aside protesters before Trump's controversial church photo

A Trump rally with rebel flags (a symbol of slavery and racism) in Tulsa, OK (the place of #TulsaMassacre) on Juneteenth (a day of emancipation recognition) is more than a slap in the face to African Americans; it is overt racism from the highest office in the land. #RejectRacism
— Congressman Al Green (@RepAlGreen) June 11, 2020

The president expressed vehement opposition to renaming military bases that bear the names of Confederate generals after top military officials suggested they were open to discussing changes. Trump argued that the bases are part of "a Great American heritage."

The Trump administration frequently touts its record for helping African Americans when confronted with questions about racial injustice but has offered little detail on plans to address systemic racism and police brutality. The White House said Trump is looking at several unspecified proposals on criminal justice while congressional Democrats are working to pass sweeping legislation to combat police brutality and racial bias. Sen. Tim Scott, the only African American Republican in the Senate, leads the GOP effort.

What is Juneteenth? We explain the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery

Trump's decision to revive his rallies comes nearly 100 days before some begin casting their ballots and is aimed at boosting his momentum as polls show him lagging against Biden, nationally and in battleground states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.

"The Trump campaign wants to hit reset on the last few weeks," said Alex Conant, a GOP consultant who served as Marco Rubio’s communication director in 2016.

"Trump's actions during this tense time have endeared him with his base but turned off a lot of independent voters," Conant said.

Biden leads Trump in national polls by 8 percentage points, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average.

USA TODAY Poll: Forceful clearing of Lafayette Square protest was defining moment for president and protests

The controversies over Trump's response to the Floyd protests echo the backlash he faced over his comments in 2017 about a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally was organized to protest the proposed removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Trump refused to disavow white nationalists after a protester was killed, claiming there were fine people on "both sides."

The challenge for Trump in Tulsa will be his message and the audience before him at the downtown BOK Center, Conant said. His rallies tend to attract overwhelmingly white audiences, and Conant said even if the president offers a message of unity, the optics of the event could overshadow that.

"He can have a very broad and uniting message that's completely undone by optics surrounding the event," he said.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., welcomed Trump's visit.

"I think if anyone's going to celebrate Juneteenth, they'd be Republicans because it happens to be a Republican president that declared emancipation," he said. "I do think the president should spend some time talking on racial issues. It's an appropriate day. I think it's an appropriate place to be able to talk about it."

Andrews, the chair of Oklahoma's Democratic Party, doesn't expect a unifying message.

"He refuses to have a meaningful conversation on racial inequality, and his visit on June 19th is worse than insensitive, it's mean-spirited," she said. "Whenever our nation has been at a crossroads, he has not spoken up for unity. He actually stokes the fire of disunity."

Contributing: Joel Shannon, Susan Page and Sarah Elbeshbishi

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump stirs controversy with Juneteenth campaign rally in Tulsa

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=TULSA

BLACK STAKEHOLDER CAPITALI$M

Black Economic Consciousness: Using the Greenwood District model as the blueprint

Opinion: O.W. Gurley’s investments in Greenwood's Black Wall Street is an economic model of community determination, economic power, and resilience

Dr. Lakeysha Hallmon
May 31, 2021

The “Black Wall Street” sign is seen during the Juneteenth celebration in the Greenwood District on June 19, 2020 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Photo by Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)

When O.W. Gurley, a wealthy African American from Arkansas, moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and purchased over 40 acres of land, he committed to selling said land to Black people only. His investments would become an economic model of community determination, economic power, and resilience known now to us as Black Wall Street.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Black dollar circulated 19 to 36 times, staying in the community for almost a year. Black prosperity was a lived experience for thousands of Black Oklahomans, many transplants, seeking refuge and liberation from the suffocating grip of the South.

When I saw the 2018 film Black Panther, I saw a futuristic version of those all-Black American towns that embodied the core principles of Black Wall Street — wealth circulation and creating an economic system that was for us, by us. However, Black Wall Street was not solely derived from imagination. It was an economically thriving community, built from necessity and sheer determination.

Historian Hannibal Johnson describes the experience for Black residents in many cities across the country as one where we “were shut out of the mainstream economy.” The Greenwood District, comprising 35 blocks, was derived from a vision to intentionally create pathways for economic stability and acceleration for the Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Vision and intentionality led Greenwood District to become one the most successful — and until recently — lesser-known Black enclaves in America’s history.

Greenwood District also known as “Black Wall Street.”

 (Photo: Black Wall Street Times)

I first learned of Black Wall Street during my matriculation at Tougaloo College, a private HBCU in Jackson, Mississippi. I remember sitting in Dr. William Woods‘s African American history class. He, the quintessential HBCU professor, shared his genius, often with a book in hand that he never opened. With gentle candor, he painted the colorful history of this prosperous district in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I can still see how his voice lifted Black banks, Black theaters, Black insurance agencies, Black beauty salons, and Black ownership from the ashes of a massacre and made them come to life for a class of hungry and deprived minds.

Yet, as Dr. Woods’s lectures reminded us, America’s history has proven that as Black communities ascend, peril is imminent and wholly devastating.

On May 30, 1921, I imagine the day started like many days before. It was Spring. Birds chirped. Rudbeckias, irises, and peonies were in full bloom. Business owners opened their shops. Fathers read The Tulsa Star. Handshakes, head nods, loved ones were kissed, boys ragging on each other, children running up and down the street, mothers calling do not mess up your school clothes, shoes being shined, and babies coming into a world innocent and unaware were born.

Wikimedia: Tulsa Race Riot

America is filled with juxtaposition.

Also on May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland would be accused of assaulting a white woman on an elevator. Within the next 48 hours, led by a bigoted white mob, one of the most horrific massacres in America’s history would take place. Hundreds of Black people killed, flames dancing across family photos as thousands of homes burned to the ground. Hundreds of businesses were destroyed as hate ripped a community and an economy apart. The final insult –erasure from American history books.

The consistent under-told narrative in America’s history entails the horrific aftermaths of white resentment when white American’s economic power is threatened. As detailed in The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, whether it be Tulsa, Oklahoma, Durham or Wilmington, North Carolina, when Black people have done the impossible act of pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps, we have been bombed, our dreams have been burned. Policies have been written to create seemingly impassable barriers and oppressive infrastructure has been built to dismantle our progression. We find ourselves endeavoring, always yet again striving to create legacies from trauma and ashes.

Read More: 100 years after Tulsa Massacre, fight remains for insurance companies to pay up

Dr. Maya Angelou once said, “the more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.” Knowing my history led to my current work as the CEO and founder of the Village Market. Black Wall Street is my blueprint. I am driven by O.W. Gurley’s prolific example of collective consciousness and upward mobility.

Without hard numbers, based on the economic strength of the Greenwood District, it is still evident that the greater money circulation in a community, advances economic mobility and opportunities for land, commercial, business, homeownership and wealth creation within a community. 

Home construction continues at a housing development where building had been dramatically slowed during the recession on December 22, 2009 in Santa Clarita, California. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Black ecosystem building is not a thing of the past. It’s what Black Americans should presently lean into and many are. Establishing a community-driven model that is focused on boosting the Black economy has facilitated the exchange of $5.3 million from the Village Market directly to Black businesses. As businesses shuttered during the pandemic, the Village Market opened a collective retail space, the Village Retail, that houses over 30 rotating Black-owned businesses in one of the most successful shopping districts in Atlanta.

It’s thriving. It’s thriving because it’s built intentionally for the advancement of Black businesses with verticals in place that directly connect the businesses to tangible resources, provide access to industry leaders, and open knowledge sharing by way of our retail readiness academy and our ELEVATE program. During the pandemic, businesses have witnessed a surge in sales and an increase in social engagement.

One company indicates that before joining Village Retail, their average sales were between $300 to $500 per month. Being featured in the retail store, the sales skyrocketed by 3761.7%, with an average monthly sales of $11,585 in November and December. In 2021, the monthly sales average so far is $7,804, still a significant increase from prior sales before participation in Village Retail (2501.3%).

Weathered Not Worn data indicates, 175% increase in sales and Love Ground shares that their website page views have also increased by 65.7%. We are positioning Black businesses directly to a larger ecosystem of consumers. More importantly, Black businesses experience the safety of a beloved community that only aspires for collective success.

Intentionally building and buying Black are two important ways to ensure Black communities survive. Community land trust and community ownership models such as the Guild and organizations like Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative and RICE are pathways to build community wealth and preserve historic Black neighborhoods. Establishing funds such as the Fearless Fund and Collab Capital ensures that Black founders receive the capital they need to scale their businesses. Shared ownership models are another way to create wealth, establish ownership and determine what happens within a community.

Tracey Pickett, founder and CEO of Hairbrella and Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner of Collab Capital, and I partnered to purchase a commercial property in Castleberry District, which is a historic Black community in Atlanta. Moving Black communities from surviving to thriving, takes collective ingenuity, collaboration, and the willingness to strategically build in tandem.

What I know to be true, vision is often rooted in our ancestors who whisper to us in dream states, telling us what to build and how to build. Always in my dreams, I see shared prosperity, and us building like O.W. Gurley did — intentionally together.



Dr. Lakeysha Hallmon is a transformational leader, speaker, educator and the Founder and CEO of The Village Market, an Atlanta based business dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs by connecting them to engaged consumers, impactful resources and investors. A leader in bringing national exposure to black-owned businesses, The Village Market reaches small businesses in 21 states and 4 countries and has an official partnership with The Bahamas.

SEE PROUDHON ON PEOPLES BANKING 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36744742-proudhon-and-his-bank-of-the-people

For Black Tulsans, Trump's visit evokes painful legacy of 1921 massacre

Ernest Scheyder, Reuters•June 19, 2020

For Black Tulsans, Trump's visit evokes painful legacy of 1921 massacre

By Ernest Scheyder

TULSA, Okla. (Reuters) - Thirteen jars filled with ash and dirt and bone rest in the basement of Tulsa's Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church, an unsettled repose for the victims of a nearly century-old massacre that still haunts the Black residents of Oklahoma's second-largest city.

There are no graves for Eliza Talbot, Ed Adams or 11 others. Their bodies were lost, along with hundreds, when a white mob killed and burned its way through the city's Greenwood neighborhood in 1921, at the time one of the largest and wealthiest Black communities in the United States.

To the dismay of community leaders https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump/in-tulsa-fears-that-trump-rally-may-worsen-racial-unrest-spread-of-coronavirus-idUSKBN23O1GO and residents, and just weeks after a May 31 vigil to mark the massacre's 99th anniversary, President Donald Trump plans his first campaign rally since March mere blocks away from Greenwood on Saturday.

The rally will occur a day after Juneteenth https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-juneteenth-factbox/factbox-what-is-juneteenth-idUSKBN23N3A0, which commemorates when a Union general went to Texas in 1865 and announced the Emancipation Proclamation had freed enslaved people, more than two years after it was issued in 1863.

"Trump's presence will cast a huge shadow over these events," said Rev. Robert Turner of the Vernon A.M.E. church, which was rebuilt after it was burned down during the 1921 attack.

"The president is supported by racists, by neo-Confederates. I fear this rally will attract all those people to our city."

Trump, who has said his supporters "love Black people," moved the rally to June 20 from its original Juneteenth date, tweeting that the change was "out of respect for ... this important occasion and all that it represents."

The rally also coincides with protests against police brutality and racism across the United States and globally, after the May killing of George Floyd https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests/george-floyd-hailed-as-cornerstone-of-a-movement-at-funeral-family-calls-for-justice-idUSKBN23G1JQ by a white police officer who knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Floyd's death has added to the disquiet among Black residents in Tulsa, which saw its own demonstrations in 2017 after a white police officer was acquitted of manslaughter for shooting a Black man during a routine traffic stop.

"I do look at Trump's visit as a slap in the face, a form of disrespect," said Rev. Mareo Johnson, who runs the Tulsa Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapter.

'SACRED GROUND'

In Greenwood, which was cut in half by a highway in the late 1960s, Black residents say they still struggle with the massacre’s enduring scars.

The district's main thoroughfare, Greenwood Avenue, once boasted the largest Black-owned hotel in the United States as well as Black-owned banks, medical practices, law offices and libraries.

It is now lined with a handful of small retail shops and a restaurant, and abuts a minor league baseball team's field. Tulsa's north side, home to most of its African-American residents, has no traditional grocery stores or much retail shopping, further isolating the residents.

"Greenwood today is confined like a holding zone," said Cleo Harris Jr. who owns Black Wall Street T-shirts and Souvenirs shop on Greenwood Avenue. "The dividing of Greenwood by this highway was white America's way to contain us. Black people are still considered less than."

Greenwood's concentration of wealth in the early 20th century led to the area becoming known as "Black Wall Street." African-Americans made up roughly 12% of Tulsa’s 72,000 population in 1920, as Greenwood’s success and the Oklahoma oil boom attracted other Black Americans.

"Greenwood used to be the mecca of Black opportunity and Black economy. This is sacred ground," said community activist Kristi Williams, whose great aunt survived the massacre.

"This was the place to be for newly-free Africans to re-establish themselves. There are bones in the land that keep us connected to this place."

The massacre began after a local Black youth was arrested for allegedly assaulting a white girl. The allegations were never proven.

White rioters tore through Greenwood, destroying 23 churches, more than 2,000 Black-owned businesses and homes, and 36 square blocks of the neighborhood, according to the Greenwood Cultural Center.

About 300 people died and more than 6,000 survivors and Black Tulsa residents were sent to internment camps and held, according to a Human Rights Watch report in May that called for reparations.

For decades it was not clear where many bodies were buried, but recent archeological work points to a mass grave near the Arkansas River. Dig work at the site was halted this spring due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Tulsa never paid restitution to the victims and insurance companies refused to pay out, citing riot clauses in contracts. No one was charged in the murders. While survivors returned to Greenwood, it never regained its former status.

Some Black Tulsans are hoping to use Trump’s visit to spotlight racial inequity and push for reparations for victims of the 1921 disaster, either through money, scholarships to local colleges or returning land taken from victims.

"I want to channel all this pain and anger into change for our community," said activist Williams.

(Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; editing by Amran Abocar and Grant McCool)

The 'TikTok grandma' who started the prank targeting Trump's Tulsa rally has only been a Democrat for one year and voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2016

Rachel E. Greenspan Jun 23, 2020

The noticeably scarce attendance at Trump's Tulsa rally, after the campaign bragged about the expected turnout, has been credited to an Iowa woman. Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images; @MaryJoLaupp/TikTok

After low attendance was observed at President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign rally in Tulsa on Saturday, TikTok teens and K-pop stands took a victory lap, claiming that their prank flooding the event with false ticket requests led to the campaign's inflated expectations.

Mary Jo Laupp, the newly-dubbed "TikTok grandma" with volunteer experience on Pete Buttigieg's Democratic nomination campaign, started the trend. 

Laupp, who only became a Democrat in 2019 to caucus for Buttigieg and says she's "voted all over the place," will soon begin volunteer work with a grassroots group supporting Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. 

Many have praised TikTok teens and K-pop stans for seemingly inflating the Trump campaign's expected attendance for a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma Saturday. But it was a grandmother from Iowa who originated the idea for claiming the event's free tickets as a massive trolling effort.

Ahead of the rally, Trump's 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale said on Twitter that the campaign had received more than one million ticket requests for the free event, which would admit guests on a first-come, first-serve basis.

But the nearly 20,000-person Bank of Oklahoma (BOK) Center was noticeably empty on Saturday, with at least one-third of the venue's seats empty, The New York Times reported. The campaign had constructed a second stage outside of the arena, which Trump and Vice President Mike Pence could have used to directly speak to an overflow of attendees. That idea was dashed when the real number of attendees proved to be much lower than projected.

Mary Jo Laupp, who's been dubbed the "TikTok grandma" and previously volunteered for Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign, appeared to be one of the first TikTok users to spread the idea. She said she knew the best way to bother Trump would be to have empty seats at his first-rally, which Tulsa's public health head called the "perfect storm of potential over-the-top disease transmission," referencing the possible spread of COVID-19.

In a June 11 TikTok video, Laupp explained that people could book the free tickets for the rally, originally planned for June 19, with no intention of going, because holding the rally in Tulsa, the site of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, on Juneteenth, was "a slap in the face to the Black community." The campaign later acquiesced to outrage over the Juneteenth rally and postponed it to the following day, Saturday.

"I recommend all of those of us that want to see this 19,000-seat auditorium barely filled or completely empty go reserve tickets now, and leave him standing there alone on the stage," Laupp, 51, said in her original video. Thousands of people on TikTok followed the call, each claiming to have reserved their two free spots at the rally with their cell phone numbers or with Google Voice-created numbers.

TikTok users largely took credit for the underwhelming turnout, claiming they reserved free tickets online in an effort to irk Trump and reduce the crowds following Laupp's video, though the actual effect that the reservations had on real turnout is unclear. Anonymous Trump campaign officials told The New York Times that many of the reservations to the event were trolls, which theoretically would have led to inflated attendance expectations, though the campaign claims they took those into account in their estimates.

Mary Jo Laupp was a lifelong independent voter who voted for Gary Johnson in 2016, until Pete Buttigieg changed her mind.

Mary Jo Laupp poses with Pete Buttigieg in Iowa in November 2019. Courtesy of Mary Jo Laupp
Laupp only registered as a Democrat last year after lifelong independent voter status, during which she "voted all over the place."

"I've never been an official member of a political party," she told Insider. But then, in 2019, she decided to register so that she'd be able to caucus for Buttigieg in Iowa. "That's what pushed me to make that decision," she said. While she has no plans to leave the Democratic party, Laupp did say she has never voted a straight-party ticket, and probably won't in November. In the 2016 election, she said she voted for Gary Johnson.

Since her newly viral moment, Laupp confirmed to Insider that she will be supporting Joe Biden in the 2020 election, and is collaborating with a grassroots organization called Biden's Digital Coalition to support the campaign. (The group is not officially affiliated with Biden's campaign, which has its own digital team.)

While many TikTokers spreading the ticket-claiming prank said they wanted to make the president angry, Laupp said she did this not to harm Trump, but on behalf of her friends in the Black community who dealt with the trauma of the rally being held in Tulsa close to Juneteeth.

"This was always about, for me, the location and the date," she said, adding that Black Wall Street, the site of the 1921 massacre, is close to the BOK Center, where "an entire neighborhood was wiped out because of racism."

When asked for her opinion on Trump, Laupp said, "I think there are times that he says things without thinking carefully first."

"I think he is trying to be president in a way a CEO would run a company," she continued. "America's not a company."

The popularization of the trend has also been largely credited to the K-pop fandom community, which has been a huge source of activism during worldwide racism and police brutality protests sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd. Laupp, a musician who has always worked with local high schoolers, has been impressed with the activism of teens, particularly on TikTok during the Black Lives Matter protests.

"It's important for them to see that the older generations are supporting the material because they hear so much about how useless they are, how lazy they are, how entitled they feel. And that's not what I'm seeing out of that [generation] at all," she said.

Read more:
TikTok teens say they tanked Trump's comeback rally in Tulsa by reserving thousands of tickets then not showing up

Trump officials are anonymously admitting that TikTokers and K-pop fans likely helped tank his Tulsa rally, despite vigorously denying it in public

K-pop stans have been heralded as digital heroes for fighting racists online, but Black fans are still getting left out of the conversation

Teens on TikTok are trying to 'save Barron Trump' from the White House and have started a petition with thousands of signatures

Racial discrimination has cost American economy trillions. Tulsa, massacres just a start.

Marcus Anthony Hunter
Sun, May 30, 2021

Houses on fire after the Tulsa massacre

Racism is costly.

In fact, a recent Citigroup report estimated that racial discrimination has cost the American economy $16 trillion. Most notably, the report identifies a substantial $13 trillion loss in potential business revenue because of racial discrimination in lending to Black entrepreneurs and Black businesses. Although these figures are estimates for the last two decades, they point to a repeated pattern of costly preventable violence – financial and physical – against non-white people in America.

When a Black community in America is destroyed, America's progress is destroyed.


More in Reparations: Nearly two dozen Black massacres in American history. Reparations? Rarely.

For Black America, the economic losses are very direct. The wage gap, for example, puts the highest average earnings for Black men at more than $20,000 less than it is for white men.

But economic struggles in the Black community trickle down in ways that are less obvious, but certainly not less meaningful, to non-Black members of society. A close in the wealth gap over the past 20 years would have meant $2.7 trillion more spent on cars, clothes and other goods, services and investments that would have supported jobs for everyone.

Indeed, 100 years later, the story of the Tulsa massacre remains relevant for identifying racism’s true and lasting costs. The lessons and events of this horrific episode provide powerful insights into how acknowledging the effects, costs and destruction of systemic racism is key to healing and repairing the nation today.

Born of the ingenuity of Black migrants, Tulsa's Greenwood community was a bustling and dynamic Black financial district in the heartland of the American Southwest. Before the massacre, that approximately 35-block Black Wall Street community was worth $1 million (the equivalent of $15 million today).

Rather than bask in the glory of the success of Black Wall Street, white leaders, businessmen and residents guided by fear, hatred and a readily believed racist trope that turned out to be, by most accounts, untrue – that a Black male, in this case a 19-year-old, had attacked a white 17-year-old female – saw to it that a mosaic of terror befell the neighborhood by spring 1921.

White mobs looted hundreds of homes and burned down others. Some Black families escaped, but an estimated 300 members of the community were killed. Fires burned from the night of May 31 well into the next day. Little to no property, bank accounts, keepsakes or family heirlooms survived, generating a pattern of loss, death and trauma that endures today.

An African American photographer looking at the ruins of the Midway Hotel in Tulsa.

So how do we get beyond these traumatic losses?

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., are among those calling for a national Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission that will, at the least, force things that have been previously hidden into the light. The Tulsa massacre was ignored by the local government for decades. In a perfect world, the commission will set the nation on the road to racial and financial recovery. We must seize this historic opportunity to achieve a future in which the false notion of a racial hierarchy is finally obliterated.

The commission seeks to properly memorialize, archive, mitigate and prevent harms and violence like the massacres in America that didn't begin or end with Tulsa. That's complementary to existing calls for reparations for African Americans long heralded by late Rep. John Conyers and now advanced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, in H.R. 40, a bill that would establish a commission to study the history of discrimination and avenues for repair.

Perhaps we can look to South Africa for an example (even if an imperfect one) of how commissions can acknowledge hurt, make victims financially whole and help a nation collectively move forward.

The process included gruesome testimony that took seven years and included stories of violence, rape and murder from 2,000 people of the apartheid era – some of whom committed acts of violence, others who were victims. The commission surely helped the nation avoid genocide and massive brutality in apartheid's aftermath. The solution included payments to each victim's family that totaled $85 million. Not everyone was happy with the final outcome, but it was a step in the right direction, and it started with the acknowledgment that horrible human atrocities happened.

Testimony from the victims and descendants of the Tulsa massacre, and every other recorded massacre in our nation's history, is vital. It has the potential to not only right the ship but also move the nation forward with a newfound awareness of how and why racism's influence hinders our collective prosperity and solidarity.

Black activists and leaders on the ground have worked tirelessly to restore, repair and replenish the Greenwood district. This work has not been easy, but it's necessary.

The loss of a financial district anywhere in America is a financial threat and loss for all Americans.

Understanding that is the key to racial healing, racial equity and a more prosperous inclusive future. All of our lives – regardless of ethnic background – and economy depend on it.

Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociology and African American studies professor at UCLA, is the author of several books, including "Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Racial discrimination has cost USA trillions. Tulsa is just a start.

100 years ago, Tulsa endured a racial massacre

AFP•June 19, 2020

This image obtained from the American National Red Cross photograph collection at the US Library of Congress, shows Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the May 31 and June 1, 1921, riots when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses (AFP Photo/-)
    

This image obtained from the US Library of Congress, shows Tulsa, Oklahoma aflame during the 1921 during a mob attack on the black district of Greenwood by white residents (AFP Photo/-)

A monument in Tulsa to a 1921 massacre in which a black neighborhood was burned to the ground and as many as 300 peolple were killed (AFP Photo/WIN MCNAMEE)

This image obtained from the American National Red Cross photograph collection at the US Library of Congress, the smoldering ruins of Tulsa, Oklahoma's black Greenwood district after white mobs attacked May 31-June 1, 1921

Tulsa (United States) (AFP) - Tulsa bears the scars of a racial massacre in 1921 that left up to 300 blacks dead, 1,200 buildings burned to the ground and none of the white rioters that committed the violence ever charged.

It started when a young black shoeshiner was accused of assaulting a white woman working as an elevator operator.

As newspapers jumped on the story and rumors spread, the white community in the Oklahoma city became enraged. Hundreds of whites demanding justice gathered outside the courthouse where the black suspect was being held.

Black men, some of them armed veterans of World War I, feared he would be lynched and raced to the courthouse to intervene.

Shots were fired, and bedlam broke out as white mobs attacked the black neighborhood known as Greenwood on May 31 to June 1, 1921.

"Some type of confrontation between blacks and whites was inevitable because of racism that existed because of the presence of Ku Klux Klan members that were part of our local city government, that were on the rosters of the police department and fire department," said Michelle Brown, program coordinator of the Greenwood Cultural Center. An exhibit there commemorates the massacre.

A commission of inquiry formed in 2001 concluded that local authorities armed some white people and named them police deputies and that they added to the violence rather than curb it.

A night of bloodshed ensued as gunfire rang out from both sides, black-owned stores were looted and torched, and homes of black families were shot up.

Many accounts say planes piloted by white men dropped incendiary bobs on Greenwood, which was known at the time as the Black Wall Street because it was one of the most prosperous African-American communities in America. For whites it was a source of envy and jealousy.

For many years, the massacre was not widely known among average white Americans. But the orgy of violence was depicted last year in the TV series "Watchmen" on HBO, and several documentaries on it are being produced, including one by basketball great LeBron James.

The chaos lasted 24 hours and ended only when the National Guard arrived in Tulsa. One of the first things it did was lock up 6,000 black people in internment camps.

At the exhibit on the massacre at the cultural center, there are photos of all the death and destruction.

"There are about 15 or 20 of these photographs that were taken by white photographers that were used as postcards and were sent around the country because many of them were proud of what they had accomplished," said Brown.

The exact number of blacks killed in the massacre is not known because many bodies were thrown into a river, burned or buried in mass graves.

Investigator: DNA could identify 2 Tulsa massacre victims

By KEN MILLER

June 22, 2022

 In this Friday, July 30, 2021, photo, a group prays during a small ceremony as remains from a mass grave are reinterred at Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa, Okla. Investigators say another step forward has been taken in efforts to identify possible victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre. The committee overseeing the search for mass graves of victims was told Tuesday, June 21, 2022, that enough usable DNA for testing has been found in two of the 14 sets of remains that were removed from Tulsa's Oaklawn Cemetery a year ago. (Mike Simons/Tulsa World via AP, File)


Investigators seeking to identify victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre have found enough usable DNA for testing on two of the 14 sets of remains removed from a local cemetery a year ago, a forensic scientist said Wednesday.

Danny Hellwig with Intermountain Forensics in Salt Lake City, which is examining the remains, told The Associated Press that it’s a promising step toward identifying the people whose remains were removed from Oaklawn Cemetery.

“We have two (sets) that we’re very excited about,” Hellwig said. “It doesn’t guarantee us a result, but it gives us hope” for learning the names.

The key, Hellwig said, is having descendants of those individuals provide DNA to a database so a match can be made when DNA sequencing is complete.

The sequencing is expected to begin in July or August, Hellwig said. A match to a family member could be made within days if the descendant is in Intermountain Forensics’ DNA database.

None of the remains are confirmed as victims of the 1921 massacre, which occurred when a white mob descended on Greenwood, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Tulsa. More than 1,000 homes were burned, hundreds were looted and the thriving business district known as Black Wall Street was destroyed.

Historians who have studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300.

To confirm the remains are massacre victims, investigators are seeking signs of trauma, such as gunshot wounds. Based on accounts at the time, most of those who were killed by the mob were male, according to forensic scientist Phoebe Stubblefield, a member of the team that excavated the cemetery and the remains.

One set of the remains sent to the Intermountain Forensics’ DNA lab in Utah includes a male with a bullet in his shoulder, but did not have enough usable DNA, Hellwig said.

“We’re talking with the investigative team to see if additional evidence can be provided” in hopes of extracting more DNA of that individual, Hellwig said.

Bones and teeth from each of the remains have been provided to the lab, with the usable DNA coming from the teeth, according to Hellwig.

A search for the graves of massacre victims began in 2020 and resumed last year with nearly three dozen coffins containing remains of possible victims recovered.

Investigators haven’t said when they’ll analyze additional sites where suspected mass graves are located and are potential search areas are planned, according to a news release from the city of Tulsa.