Justice Department opens cold-case investigation into 1921 Tulsa race massacre

Attorney for living survivors of racist massacre says federal report will set the record straight for the ‘largest crime scene in the history of this country’

Alex Woodward

More than 100 years later, the federal government is opening an investigation into a white mob’s destruction of a bustling Black neighborhood and the massacre of dozens of people in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Department of Justice is reviewing the attack under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which empowers the federal government to reopen civil rights-related cold cases, named after the Black teenager who was abducted and lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955.

The probe comes roughly four months after Oklahoma’s highest court rejected a decades-in-the-making lawsuit filed by the racist massacre’s two remaining survivors who have demanded justice in its ongoing aftermath. No one was ever charged with a crime for the two-day attack within the decades that followed.

Justice Department announces criminal charges in Russian interference campaign

“We acknowledge descendants of the survivors, and the victims continue to bear the trauma of this act of racial terrorism,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said on Monday.

Federal investigators do not expect to criminally prosecute any living perpetrators, but the Justice Department will be “examining available documents, witness accounts, scholarly and historical research and other information on the massacre” for a report “analyzing the massacre in light of both modern and then-existing civil rights law,” according to Clark.

That report is expected by the end of the year.

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who leads the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, announced a federal investigation into the Tulsa race massacre on September 30 (AP)

On May 31, 1921, in Tulsa’s thriving “Black Wall Street” of Greenwood, an armed white mob deputized by law enforcement fired indiscriminately on Black Americans in the street.

According to witness accounts and limited news coverage of the attack, planes dropped flaming turpentine-soaked rags and dynamite, and the bodies of Black victims were thrown into the Arkansas River or into mass graves. Survivors were rounded up at gunpoint and detained in internment camps.

The mob torched and looted homes and businesses, including restaurants, hotels, theaters and a newspaper’s office. A truck mounted with a machine gun fired on Mount Zion Baptist Church before it was burned to the ground.

A lawsuit from Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110 – who were small children during the attack – continued even after the death of Fletcher’s brother, Hughes Van Ellis, who was also a plaintiff before dying at age 102 last year.

“It only took 103 years, but this is a joyous occasion, a momentous day, an amazing opportunity for us to make sure that what happened here in Tulsa is understood for what it was: the largest crime scene in the history of this country,” attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons said from Tulsa on Monday.

“The dead cannot cry out for justice,” added Tiffany Crutcher, a descendant of massacre survivors. “It is our duty, as the living, to do so for them.”

Coronavirus update: U.S. case tally climbs above 2.2 million as Tulsa prepares for Trump’s indoor rally


Published: June 19, 2020 By  Ciara Linnan

Supporters of President Donald Trump sleep while lined up to attend a campaign rally planned for Saturday. GETTY IMAGES
The number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus illness COVID-19 in the U.S. rose above 2.2 million on Friday, as Tulsa, Okla., geared up for President Donald Trump’s planned campaign rally on Saturday night.

A group of local business owners and residents, worried at the prospect of a fresh outbreak of infections at the 19,000-seat indoor arena if attendees do not observe the safety guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had sued the owner of the venue to block it, but a Tulsa County judge denied their request for an injunction. The group has appealed the decision with the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which is expected to make a ruling on Friday, as the Washington Post reported.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines for reopening safely last Friday, and identified the highest risk of spreading the virus as stemming from: “large in-person gatherings where it is difficult for individuals to remain spaced at least 6 feet apart and attendees travel from outside the local area.”

From the CDC:Considerations for Daily Life and Considerations for Events and Gatherings

Trump’s rallies tend to involve attendees queuing outside for hours before going through security and into arenas, where they cheer, shout and chant, all risk factors for spreading the droplets that contain the virus. The Trump campaign has acknowledged that risk by insisting that those who attend sign legal waivers absolving Trump and his staff of any blame, if people get sick or are injured.

Read: What we do know — and don’t know — about the coronavirus at Day 100 of the pandemic

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, reiterated in an interview with the Washington Post his message that Americans should continue to observe social distancing, frequently was their hands and cover their faces in public.

“When you have a congregation of people, you increase the risk. It doesn’t matter why they’re congregating or where they’re congregating. When you have a congregation of people in a setting in which there’s active virus circulating in the community, you are at risk. You need to wear a mask.”

For more on Tulsa, read:Trump rally attendees dismiss heat and coronavirus concerns as they line up outside Tulsa arena

Face masks have been caught up in a culture skirmish that has seen many resist wearing them, including President Donald Trump, who has theorized this week that some Americans are wearing them not for stemming the spread of a deadly virus but to express displeasure with him. The White House has been criticized for failing to push the message that masks are an important means of containing the spread of COVID-19, although local officials have stepped into the vacuum.

Read:Despite concerning data, White House continues to play down coronavirus worries

California Gov. Gavin Newsom made them mandatory for Californians when they’re in public on Thursday.

Fauci said the virus is “one of the most highly transmissible viruses that we know of,” and urged Americans to pull together and work to get the outbreak under control. “It’s tough for everyone. But remember, we are in this all together. We’re not just separate individual components. We’re in it together.”

Don’t miss:100 days of the COVID-19 pandemic: 5 critical mistakes that created the biggest public health crisis in a generation
Latest tallies

There are now 8.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, and at least 454,582 people have died, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University. At least 4.2 million people have recovered.

The pandemic is actually accelerating, according to the World Health Organization, which said it received reports of a record of more than 150,000 new cases on Thursday. WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu told reporters that about half of those new cases came from the Americas.

“The world is in a new and dangerous phase,” Tedros said. “We call on all countries and all people to exercise extreme vigilance.”

The U.S. has the highest case toll in the world at 2.19 million and the highest death toll at 118,467, with 20 states still seeing daily increases in infections, including Florida, Texas and Georgia.

Brazil has 978,142 cases and 47,748 fatalities, the data show, the second highest death toll in the world.

Russia has 568,292 cases and 7,831 fatalities. India has 380,532 cases and 12,573 deaths.

The U.K. has 301,935 cases and 42,546 deaths, the highest death toll in Europe and now third highest in the world.

Spain has 245,268 cases and 27,136 deaths, while Italy, another early hot spot in Europe, has 238,159 cases and 34,514 deaths.

Peru moved past Italy by case number, with 244,388 cases and 7,461 deaths.

Chile, Iran, France, Germany, Turkey, Pakistan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Canada are next and all ahead of China, where the illness was first reported late last year.

China has 84,494 cases and 4,638 deaths. China has shut down parts of Beijing after a fresh cluster of cases.




What are companies saying?
The IPO market continued to heat up with supermarket operator Albertsons Cos. ACI, +3.69% setting terms for its planned deal on Thursday. The company is planning to sell 65.8 million shares priced at $18 to $20 to share, to raise $1.3 billion at the top of the range.

Albertsons is profitable, earning $466 million in 2019 on sales of $62.5 billion. It has reported strong demand for delivery and pickup at its stores during the pandemic. The company has filed to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “ACI.”

Chinese oncology biotech Genetron Holdings Ltd. priced its IPO at $16 per American depositary share, above its $11.50-to-$13.50 price range. The company upsized the deal early Thursday, indicating strong demand for its paper. The shares, trading on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “GTH,” jumped 10% in their post-IPO debut.


‘We did not want to be drawn into a political controversy. We thought it might be counterproductive if we forced mask wearing on those people who believe strongly that it is not necessary.’— Adam Arom, CEO of cinema chain AMC

Elsewhere, companies continued to update investors on their reopening plans and post their latest earnings.

Here are the latest things companies have said about COVID-19:

• AMC Theatres, the biggest cinema chain in the U.S. that’s owned by AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. AMC, -1.95%, will require all guests to wear face masks when it reopens its cinemas across the U.S. on July 15. The Leawood, Kansas-based company made the decision after listening to its customers and to scientific advisers, who recommend face masks to stop the spread of the coronavirus illness COVID-19. The announcement comes after AMC Chief Executive Adam Aron told Variety on Thursday that the company would not force customers to wear face masks, as he did not want to become part of what is now a political hot potato. His comments “prompted an intense and immediate outcry from our customers, and it is clear from this response that we did not go far enough on the usage of masks,” the executive said on Friday. “At AMC Theatres, we think it is absolutely crucial that we listen to our guests. Accordingly, and with the full support of our scientific advisors, we are reversing course and are changing our guest mask policy.” AMC will continue to monitor the scientific community’s thinking on the efficacy of masks and will look at the varying case numbers around the country as it moves forward. It will make face masks available for a nominal price of $1.00 each.

What we do know — and don’t know — about the coronavirus at day 100 of the pandemicPublished: June 18, 2020 at 1:56 p.m. ET
By
Jaimy Lee


Does having antibodies provide immunity? When will herd immunity kick in? Will there be a viable vaccine?


IRF - Frederick 3/9/2020 10:05 110000 8.0 80 Imaging #2020-04-E SARS-COV-2 XpixCal=3.848812 YpixCal=3.848812 Unit=nm ##fv3 4096 3008 7.0.1.147 Blank1 Blank2 ##fv4 NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH

Scientists and infectious-disease experts are pushing hard to understand more about the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and how to treat patients suffering from the sometimes deadly illness and prevent transmission.

In the roughly three months since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared regional COVID-19 outbreaks a worldwide pandemic and hundreds of millions of Americans began to observe stay-at-home orders, much has changed. As of June 18, more than two million people in the U.S. have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least 117,000 have died, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

We have a standard of care for hospitalized patients, though that is sure to evolve. We know that masks and physical distancing prevent transmission of the virus, though both practices have become politicized and aren’t always observed in Western countries where mask-wearing hasn’t been part of the culture. We know that investors overreact to mildly positive clinical news about COVID-19 treatments and vaccines and tend to ignore the bad news.

“The most important thing we’ve learned is that in the absence of a vaccine or therapeutic, aggressive public health action and individual public health practices can reduce transmission,” Dr. Brian Castrucci, an epidemiologist and president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, said in an email. “Mask-wearing, social distancing, and hand-washing are critical to mitigating the spread of the virus, reopening portions of the economy, and allowing us to return to some semblance of normalcy.”

Here’s what we know so far about COVID-19 treatments:

• Once-promising drugs have failed. Hydroxychloroquine, once lauded by President Donald Trump as a “very successful drug,” doesn’t reduce mortality in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, according to studies conducted by Veterans Health Administration and the University of Minnesota, among others. Many clinical trials including the WHO’s Solidarity trial have stopped enrolling participants in their hydroxychloroquine trials, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week revoked the emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine.

• Gilead Sciences Inc.’s GILD, +4.63% remdesivir works; however, it’s no silver bullet. While the experimental drug hasn’t been proven to reduce deaths among severely ill patients, research found it can reduce the amount of time patients spend in the hospital, which in turn can help reduce capacity at overcrowded intensive care units in regions with severe outbreaks and allow patients to go home sooner.

• At least one drug can reduce death in severely ill patients, a finding announced this week on the heels of the FDA’s hydroxychloroquine decision. University of Oxford researchers said a clinical trial found that dexamethasone, a commonly prescribed steroid, can reduce mortality among hospitalized patients on ventilators and oxygen support.

• The growing clinical evidence behind remdesivir and dexamethasone matters for two reasons: having a widening range of viable treatments can reduce the number of deaths from COVID-19, reducing capacity in emergency rooms and intensive care units and can also create a safer environment for economies to reopen, according to Dr. Roger Shapiro, associate professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s a lot better to be a patient today than in March,” he said.

Here’s what we know so far about how the virus behaves:

• The virus is more likely to spread by the droplets or aerosols we release when we speak, yell, or sing than on the shared surfaces we touch. Transmitting the disease becomes even more of a concern in enclosed indoor spaces than outdoors, especially in the presence of a super spreader. (“Everything we do outside is a lot safer,” Shapiro said.)

• COVID-19 has disproportionately sickened and killed certain groups of people, including people of color, men, the elderly, and those living in contained, crowded environments, like nursing homes and prisons. It is less likely to make children ill. More than one-third of the people who have died in the U.S. from COVID-19 lived in long-term care facilities. “COVID-19 has exposed the weakness of infection control programs in many of our nation’s long-term care and assisted living facilities,” said Ann Marie Pettis, a registered nurse and president-elect of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.

• The U.S. has primarily focused on providing diagnostic testing to people who present with common COVID-19 symptoms but there are concerns about asymptomatic and presymptomaticindividuals, who may be inadvertently continuing to spread the disease. Experts want to see more random testing of the population. “People without symptoms can transmit the virus, making containment very challenging,” Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, wrote in an email.

• Wearing a mask or engaging in social distancing behaviors can prevent transmission of the virus. One reason why there may be fewer cases in China, Japan, and South Korea is that mask-wearing is more common in Asia. China, where the virus first emerged late last year, has about 84,000 cases, Japan has roughly 17,000 cases, and South Korea about 12,000 cases. “What we do know is that social distancing, hand washing and wearing a face mask in public are the ways people can help protect themselves and others,” Pettis said.

Here’s what we don’t know:

• Does having antibodies provide immunity for the people who have been exposed to or recovered from COVID-19? With other viruses, antibodies usually indicate a level of protection against re-infection with the same virus for a set period of time. People who had SARS, for example, had antibodies for about two years and weren’t thought to be susceptible to reinfection until three years after the first exposure to the severe acute respiratory syndrome. “How long does immunity last, and do you need a certain level of antibodies to be immune?” Wen asked.

• Will herd immunity kick in?And if it does, when? Some experts predict that about two-thirds of Americans would need to have antibodies to declare herd immunity in the U.S. But without practicing physical distancing, using masks, and developing a contract tracing system, “it’s impossible to flatten the curve,” said Dr. Bob Kocher, a partner at venture-capital firm Venrock and a member of California’s coronavirus testing task force. “The question is whether we have the desire and discipline to do that.”

• Will there be a viable vaccine? Vaccine development is moving at a record pace, with 13 vaccine candidates now in clinical trials worldwide. Moderna Inc. MRNA, +2.15% was the first company to release some clinical data from a Phase 1 study, finding that eight out of 45 participants in the first phase of its COVID-19 vaccine study developed neutralizing antibodies. However, vaccine development is notoriously difficult and time intensive — vaccines traditionally take up to seven years to be developed — and have to be both safe and efficacious.

"This was not a riot": Biden commemorates anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre

"[T]his was not a riot. This was a massacre — among the worst in our history, but not the only one. And for too long, forgotten by our history.

Shawna Chen  AXIOS JUNE 1,2021

•  

Tulsa Race Massacre survivors Viola Fletcher and Hughes Van Ellis watch as President Biden speaks during a commemoration of the massacre's 100th anniversary. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

The acts of hate in Tulsa 100 years ago bear a "through line that exists today," President Biden said Tuesday, as he commemorated the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Why it matters: The massacre, which killed an estimated 300 people and burned multiple blocks of the Black neighborhood Greenwood, is considered one of the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history. Survivors and their descendants have pressed for reparations for decades.

• "I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire," Viola Fletcher, one of the last living survivors, testified before a House committee in May. "I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot."

What he's saying: "For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness," Biden said. "Just because history is silent, it doesn't mean that it did not take place, and while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing."

• That night, "'Mother' Fletcher says they fell asleep rich in terms of wealth, not real wealth but a different wealth, a wealth in community and heritage," Biden said. "One night changed everything."
• "[T]his was not a riot. This was a massacre — among the worst in our history, but not the only one. And for too long, forgotten by our history. As soon as it happened, there was a clear effort to erase it from our memory, our collective memory," Biden noted. "Tulsa didn't even teach the massacre" for years.
• Oklahoma governor to name stretch of state highway for Trump
• "We can't choose to just learn what we want to know and not what we should know."

In his speech, Biden unveiled a set of policies aimed at closing the wealth gap between white and Black people.

Worth noting: Some of Biden's proposals have drawn backlash from the NAACP, whose leader criticized the plan's failure to cancel student debt, the Washington Post reports.

The big picture: Biden met with survivors earlier on Tuesday after touring the Greenwood Cultural Center.

Rather than jump-start reelection campaign, Tulsa rally highlights Trump’s vulnerabilities

Trump making no effort at national unity; low turnout reportedly leaves president fuming


President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, early Sunday after stepping off Marine One as he returned from a campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla. 

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump’s return to the campaign trail was designed to show strength and enthusiasm heading into the critical final months before an election that will decide whether he remains in the White House.

Instead, his weekend rally in Oklahoma highlighted growing vulnerabilities and crystallized a divisive reelection message that largely ignores broad swaths of voters — independents, suburban women and people of color — who could play a crucial role in choosing Trump or Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

The lower-than-expected turnout at the comeback rally, in particular, left Trump fuming.

“There’s really only one strategy left for him, and that is to propel that rage and anger and try to split the society and see if he can have a tribal leadership win here,” former Trump adviser-turned-critic Anthony Scaramucci said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

The president did not offer even a token reference to national unity in remarks that spanned more than an hour and 40 minutes at his self-described campaign relaunch as the nation grappled with surging coronavirus infections, the worst unemployment since the Great Depression and sweeping civil unrest.

Nor did Trump mention George Floyd, the African American man whose death at the hands of Minnesota police late last month sparked a national uprising over police brutality. But he did add new fuel to the nation’s culture wars, defending Confederate statues while making racist references to the coronavirus, which originated in China and which he called “kung flu.” He also said Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who came to the U.S. as a refugee as a child, whom he said “would like to make the government of our country just like the country from where she came, Somalia.”

Trump won the presidency in 2016 with a similar red-meat message aimed largely at energizing conservatives and white working-class men. But less than four months before early voting begins in some states, there are signs that independents and educated voters — particularly suburban women — have turned against him. Republican strategists increasingly believe that only a dramatic turnaround in the economy can revive his reelection aspirations.

“It’s bad,” said Republican operative Rick Tyler, a frequent Trump critic. “There’s literally nothing to run on. The only thing he can say is that Biden is worse.”

But the day after Trump’s Tulsa rally, the president’s message was almost an afterthought as aides tried to explain away a smaller-than-expected crowd that left the president outraged.

The campaign had been betting big on Tulsa.

Trump’s political team spent days proclaiming that more than 1 million people had requested tickets. They also ignored health warnings from the White House coronavirus task force and Oklahoma officials, eager to host an event that would help him move past the civil rights protests and the coronavirus itself.

His first rally in 110 days was meant to be a defiant display of political force to help energize Trump’s spirits, try out some attacks on Biden and serve as a powerful symbol of American’s re-opening.

Instead, the city fire marshal’s office reported a crowd of just less than 6,200 in the 19,000-seat BOK Center, and at least six staff members who helped set up the event tested positive for the coronavirus. The vast majority of the attendees, including Trump, did not wear face masks as recommended by the Trump administration’s health experts.

After the rally, the president berated aides over the turnout. He fumed that he had been led to believe he would see huge crowds in deep-red Oklahoma, according to two White House and campaign officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

There was no sign of an imminent staff shakeup, but members of Trump’s inner circle angrily questioned how campaign manager Brad Parscale and other senior aides could so wildly overpromise and underdeliver, according to the officials.

Publicly, Trump’s team scrambled to blame the crowd size on media coverage and protesters outside the venue, but the small crowds of pre-rally demonstrators were largely peaceful. Tulsa police reported just one arrest Saturday afternoon.

It’s unclear when Trump will hold his next rally.

Before Oklahoma, the campaign had planned to finalize and announce its next rally this week. Trump is already scheduled to make appearances Tuesday in Arizona and Thursday in Wisconsin. Both are major general election battlegrounds.

At least one swing state governor, meanwhile, says Trump would not be welcome to host a rally in her state amid the pandemic.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said she “would think very seriously about” trying to block Trump from hosting a rally there if he wanted to.

“We know that congregating without masks, especially at an indoor facility, is the worst thing to do in the midst of a global pandemic,” Whitmer said in an interview before the Oklahoma event, conceding that she wasn’t aware of the specific legal tools she had available to block a prospective Trump rally. “I just know we have limitations on the number of people that can gather and that we’re taking this seriously.”

Biden’s campaign, meanwhile, seized on a fresh opportunity to poke at the incumbent president, suggesting that Trump “was already in a tailspin” because of his mismanagement of the pandemic and civil rights protests.

“Donald Trump has abdicated leadership and it is no surprise that his supporters have responded by abandoning him,” Biden spokesperson Andrew Bates said.

Trump comeback rally features empty seats, staff infections

"WE HAVE NEVER HAD AN EMPTY SEAT IN THE HOUSE" D. J. TRUMP

By KEVIN FREKING and JONATHAN LEMIRE

1 of 24 https://apnews.com/1a59b4efe97f2249d414ae4f0b3c6495
President Donald Trump arrives on stage to speak at a campaign rally at the BOK Center, Saturday, June 20, 2020, in Tulsa, Okla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — President Donald Trump launched his comeback rally Saturday by defining the upcoming election as a stark choice between national heritage and left-wing radicalism. But his intended show of political force amid a pandemic featured thousands of empty seats and new coronavirus cases on his own campaign staff.

Trump ignored health warnings to hold his first rally in 110 days — one of the largest indoor gatherings in the world during a coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 120,000 Americans and put 40 million out of work. The rally was meant to restart his reelection effort less than five months before the president faces voters again.

“The choice in 2020 is very simple,” Trump said. “Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob, or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?”

Trump unleashed months of pent-up grievances about the coronavirus, which he dubbed the “Kung flu,” a racist term for COVID-19, which originated in China. He also tried to defend his handling of the pandemic, even as cases continue to surge in many states, including Oklahoma.

He complained that robust coronavirus testing was making his record look bad — and suggested the testing effort should slow down.

“Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more cases,” he said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.”

“Speed up the testing,” Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, tweeted later.

In the hours before the rally, crowds were significantly lighter than expected, and campaign officials scrapped plans for Trump to address an overflow space outdoors. When Trump thundered that “the silent majority is stronger than ever before,” about a third of the seats at his indoor rally were empty.

Trump tried to explain away the crowd size by blaming the media for scaring people and by insisting there were protesters outside who were “doing bad things.” But the small crowds of pre-rally demonstrators were largely peaceful, and Tulsa police reported just one arrest Saturday afternoon.

Before the rally, Trump’s campaign revealed that six staff members who were helping set up for the event had tested positive for the coronavirus. Campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said neither the affected staffers nor anyone who was in immediate contact with them would attend the event

The president raged to aides that the staffers’ positive cases had been made public, according to two White House and campaign officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

Trump devoted more than 10 minutes of his 105-minute rally — with the crowd laughing along — trying to explain away a pair of odd images from his speech last weekend at West Point, blaming his slippery leather-soled shoes for video of him walking awkwardly down a ramp as he left the podium. And then he declared that he used two hands to drink a cup of water that day because he didn’t want to spill water on his tie — and proceeded to this time drink with just one hand.

But Trump also leaned in hard on cultural issues, including the push to tear down statue s and rename military bases honoring Confederate generals following nationwide protests about racial injustice.

“The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments,” Trump said. “They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new repressive regime in its place.”

Trump also floated the idea of a one-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of burning an American flag, an act of protest protected by the First Amendment. And he revived his attacks on Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who emigrated from Somalia as a child, claiming she would want “to make the government of our country just like the country from where she came, Somalia: no government, no safety, no police, no nothing — just anarchy.”

“And now she’s telling us how to run our country,” Trump continued. “No, thank you.”

After a three-month break from rallies, Trump spent the evening reviving his greatest hits, including boasts about the pre-pandemic economy and complaints about the media. But his scattershot remarks made no mention of some of the flashpoints roiling the nation, including the abrupt firing of a U.S. attorney in Manhattan, the damaging new book from his former national security adviser or the killing of George Floyd..

Large gatherings in the United States were shut down in March because of the coronavirus. The rally was scheduled over the protests of local health officials as COVID-19 cases spike in many states, while the choice of host city and date — it was originally set for Friday, Juneteenth, in a city where a 1921 racist attack killed as many as 300 people — prompted anger amid a national wave of protests against racial injustice.



But Trump and his advisers forged forward, believing that a return to the rally stage would reenergize the president, who is furious that he has fallen behind Biden in polls, and reassure increasingly anxious Republicans.

But Trump has struggled to land effective attacks against Biden, and his broadsides against the former vice president did not draw nearly the applause as did his digs at his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.

City officials had expected a crowd of 100,000 people or more in downtown Tulsa. Trump’s campaign, for its part, declared that it had received over a million ticket requests. The crowd that gathered was far less than that, though the rally, being broadcast on cable, also targeted voters in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.

The president’s campaign tried to point fingers elsewhere over the smaller-than-expected crowds, accusing protesters of blocking access to metal detectors and preventing people from entering the rally. 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.

The campaign handed out masks and hand sanitizer, but there was no requirement that participants use them and few did. Participants also underwent a temperature check.

“I don’t think it’s anything worse than the flu,” said Brian Bernard, 54, a retired IT worker from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who sported a Trump 2020 hat. “I haven’t caught a cold or a flu in probably 15 years, and if I haven’t caught a cold or flu yet, I don’t think I’m gonna catch COVID.”

___


Lemire reported from New York. Associated Press writers John Mone and Ellen Knickmeyer in Tulsa, Okla., contributed to this report.

'Whitewashed and erased': There's a reason Juneteenth isn't taught in schools, educators say

WHY WE NEED CURRICULUM TO RECOGNIZE AND ADAPT RUBRICS FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH, LABOUR HISTORY MONTH, WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH, LGBTQ PRIDE MONTH, SOUTH ASIAN & ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH, DIFFERENTLY ABLED MONTH,  ETC. 
Daniella Silva, NBC News•June 18, 2020



A Connecticut fourth grade social studies textbook falsely claimed that slaves were treated just like “family.” A Texas geography textbook referred to enslaved Africans as “workers.” In Alabama, up until the 1970s, fourth graders learned in a textbook called "Know Alabama" that slave life on a plantation was "one of the happiest ways of life."

In contrast, historians and educators point out, many children in the U.S. education system are not taught about major Black historical events, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre or Juneteenth, the June 19 commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States.

As the country grapples with a racial reckoning following the killing of George Floyd in police custody, educators said that what has and what has not been taught in school have been part of erasing the history of systemic racism in America and the contributions of Black people and other minority groups.
'

Whitewashed and erased': There's a reason Juneteenth isn't taught in schools, educators say

“There’s a long legacy of institutional racism that is barely covered in the mainstream corporate curriculum,” said Jesse Hagopian, an ethnic studies teacher in Seattle and co-editor of the book “Teaching for Black Lives.”

“It’s really astounding how little the contributions of Black people are included in much of the mainstream curriculum and how much of that institutional racism is disguised,” he said.

Historians said curriculums are about identity and learning about ourselves and others.

“The curriculum was never designed to be anything other than white supremacist," Julian Hayter, a historian and an associate professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said, "and it has been very difficult to convince people that other versions of history are not only worth telling. They’re absolutely essential for us as a country to move closer to something that might reflect reconciliation but even more importantly, the truth."

LaGarrett King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri, said the history curriculums in schools are meant to tell a story and, in the U.S., that has been one of a “progressive history of the country.”

“Really the overarching theme is, ‘Yes, we made mistakes, but we overcame because we are the United States of America,'” said King, who is also the founding director of the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education at the university.

“What that has done is it has erased tons of history that would combat that progressive narrative,” he said.

King said the experiences and oppression of Black people, Latino people, indigenous people, Asian people and other minority groups in the U.S. are largely ignored or sidelined to fit those narratives.

“So, of course you’re not going to have crucial information such as what happened in Tulsa, you’re not going to have information such as the bombing of a Philadelphia black neighborhood,” he said.

In 1921 in Oklahoma, whites looted and destroyed Tulsa's Greenwood District, known for its affluent Black community. Historians believe that as many as 300 Black people were killed.



In May 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb onto the compound of MOVE, a black liberation group, killing six members, five of their children and destroying 65 homes in the neighborhood.

Another often-omitted period of U.S. Black history is the Red Summer, a period of time through 1919 when white mobs incited a wave of anti-Black violence in dozens of cities.

As for the protests against racial inequality and police brutality after the killing of Floyd and other Black people at the hands of police, King emphasized that these movements were not new.

“Black people have been saying this for the past 400 years, this is not a new movement,” he said. “Each generation has had their point in time where they’re trying to say through protest, through rebellion, ‘listen to us, listen to us,’” he said.

Part of the problem is that society has never listened to that history, he said.

“In many ways we wouldn’t have a Black Lives Matter movement if Black lives mattered in the classroom,” he said.

The current moment has also put increased national attention on Juneteenth, which is Friday this year.

President Donald Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that he moved a rally in Tulsa set for Friday to Saturday “out of respect” for two African American friends and supporters.

“I did something good. I made it famous. I made Juneteenth very famous. It’s actually an important event, it’s an important time. But nobody had heard of it,” he said, although his office has previously put out statements marking the occasion.

Historians note that Juneteenth has been celebrated in Black communities across the country for 155 years.

Hayter said that the history of Black people and other minority communities has already “been completely whitewashed and erased" when it is taught in American classrooms.

He pointed to the argument made by some that removing Confederate statues and iconography is tantamount to erasing history.

“So when people say you can’t erase history, it's like, what are you talking about?” he said. “If you crack open a textbook from the mid-20th century, there are no minorities in those textbooks.”



“The contributions they made to the American democratic experience are completely ignored,” he said.

Hayter said those histories have been seen as “a footnote to a larger narrative and not an important and integral portion of the history more largely.”

“As long as we continue to treat these as addendums to a larger American narrative, we’re failing these kids in large part because we’ve reduced these histories to second-class status,” he said.

Hagopian said “Teaching for Black Lives” seeks to uncover some of these really important periods of Black history and give educators access points to teach students about them, including a whole lesson on the Tulsa Race Massacre.

He said another historical period that was glaringly absent from the mainstream curriculum was Reconstruction, the era following the Civil War that sought to address the inequalities of slavery.

“Reconstruction is one of the most fascinating and revolutionary periods in American history,” he said.

Hagopian said it was a remarkable period of time, although short, when the country undertook a conscious effort to tear down institutionally racist structures.

“Black people built the public school system across the South, and there were integrated schools in the 1860s. They were more integrated than today, just incredible examples of Black empowerment,” he said, adding that there were more Black elected officials than at anytime until recently.

“It’s such an important era to examine," Hagopian said. "If we’re going to escape the intense level of racism that we have today, we’re going to need to look at what it looked like when there was a movement toward institutional anti-racism."

It is also important, Hagopian said, to teach students that the civil rights movement went beyond a few famous figures commonly featured in history books or during Black History Month, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.

“I think one of the most important things for students to learn about is the way young people have helped shape American history in profound ways and to help understand the contributions especially of Black youth to this nation,” he said.

“They’re so often erased, but when students learn that it was young people who were the leaders of the civil rights movement, they can then see themselves as potential actors to transform the world today."

Pain management: Tulsa shooting exposes threats doctors face

The deadly mass shooting at an Oklahoma medical office by a man who blamed his surgeon for pain following back surgery underscores the escalating threats doctors face

By Andrew Demillo 

Associated Press
June 02, 2022

The deadly mass shooting at an Oklahoma medical office by a man who blamed his surgeon for continuing pain following an operation on his back underscores the escalating threat of violence doctors have faced in recent years.

Michael Louis, 45, fatally shot Dr. Preston Phillips and three other people in Tulsa on Wednesday before killing himself. Police said Louis had been calling the clinic repeatedly complaining of pain and that he specifically targeted Phillips, who performed his surgery.

“What we currently know is that Louis was in pain, Louis expressed that he was in pain and was not getting relief and that was the circumstance surrounding this entire incident,” Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin said at a news conference.

Doctors have been increasingly threatened with or become victims of violence by patients complaining of pain, especially in recent years when they have prescribed alternatives to opioids and tapered patients off addictive painkillers. Police have not said that Louis was seeking opioids to relieve his pain.

More than two-thirds of pain specialists surveyed during a violence education session at a 2019 American Academy of Pain Medicine meeting said a patient threatened them with bodily harm at least once a year. Nearly half said they had been threatened over opioid management.

“We only become aware of it when these dramatic and tragic events occur,” said Dr. W. Michael Hooten, a former president of the academy and a professor at the Mayo Clinic. “Some of the lower-level threats and lower-level occurrences of violence, we're simply not aware of them because they don’t get the attention.”

A jury in Minnesota returned a guilty verdict on all counts Thursday against Gregory Paul Ulrich, who was charged in the 2021 health clinic shooting that left one person dead and four injured. Sentencing is scheduled for June 17.

Investigators have said the alleged gunman's addiction to opioid medication was the “driving factor" behind the shooting.

A police report says Ulrich had threatened a similar mass shooting in 2018, allegedly as revenge against people who he said “tortured” him with back surgeries and prescribed medication.

In 2017, an Indiana man shot and killed a doctor who refused to prescribe opioids to his wife.

Oklahoma has been hit particularly hard by the opioid crisis. State statistics show that from 2007 to 2017, more than 4,600 people in Oklahoma died from opioid overdoses, including prescription painkillers and illicit drugs such as heroin and illegally made fentanyl. Nationally, opioids have been linked to more than 500,000 deaths since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the Tulsa shooting, Franklin said Louis was carrying a letter that said he was targeting Phillips, an orthopedic surgeon with an interest in spinal surgery and joint reconstruction.

Franklin said Phillips performed the surgery on Louis on May 19 and that the patient was released from the hospital on May 24.

He said Louis called the doctor’s office “several times over several days” reporting he was still in pain and that he saw Phillips on Tuesday for “additional treatment.” Louis called the office again Wednesday “complaining of back pain and wanting additional assistance,” he said.

The threats have prompted some facilities to take steps including installing panic buttons, restricting high-risk patients’ access and seating doctors closer to the door than patients. Dr. David Holden, president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association, said it’s also meant reviewing access points to their facilities.

Holden, an orthopedic surgeon, said doctors have long dealt with concerns about threats from patients over care. But the violence in recent years has taken that concern to a new level.

“We've had those concerns forever, so that's not new," Holden said. “What is new is the sudden, targeted violence to the extreme."

Trump snubs former EPA chief Pruitt in Tulsa visit

Alexander Nazaryan National Correspondent, Yahoo News•June 19, 2020

WASHINGTON — When President Trump comes to Tulsa on Saturday for his first campaign event since the coronavirus shut down the United States, he will be joined by Oklahoma’s most prominent Republican leaders, as well as rising GOP stars from other parts of the country.

Those expected to stand with the president at the BOK Center are Kevin Stitt, the state’s governor, as well as its two U.S. senators, James Lankford and Jim Inhofe, its four Republican members of the House of Representatives and Sen. Tom Cotton from neighboring Arkansas. Also present will be Reps. Lee Zeldin and Elise Stefanik, ardent defenders of the president who are both from the New York delegation.

One person won’t be there, at least not onstage with Trump and his allies: Tulsa’s own Scott Pruitt, the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator. His absence is a reminder that former Trump Cabinet members rarely leave the administration unscathed.

Pruitt did not return calls from Yahoo News. The Trump campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The mere mention of Pruitt’s name evokes, for some, the freewheeling early days of the Trump presidency, a pre-impeachment, pre-pandemic time when Pruitt’s search for a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel could credibly pass as the biggest story in Washington.

Then-Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt in 2018. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

Pruitt was dismissed by Trump shortly after the mattress incident was made public, but the president had clearly been fond of Pruitt, arguing that he was treated unfairly by the media. Yet whatever sympathy Trump may have had for him appears to have expired. That may prove unfortunate for Pruitt, who is only 52 and is widely known to have political ambitions. During the heyday of his tenure, some even suspected he would run for president.

For all the scandal he caused in Washington, Pruitt retained the goodwill of his fellow Sooners. “I think Oklahomans still love him, support him and trust him,” the chairwoman of the Oklahoma GOP told the Associated Press after Pruitt’s dismissal by Trump.

Although he did not seek the governorship of Oklahoma in 2018, as some expected him to do, he was also once rumored to be after a more coveted prize: Inhofe’s seat in the U.S. Senate. At 85, Inhofe is the fifth-oldest member of the entire Congress. Inhofe said in March he would run again, but that was before the coronavirus and anti-racism protests upended virtually every political calculation across the land.
IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS 

Pruitt with President Trump in the White House Rose Garden in 2017. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Once in the news on a near-daily basis, Pruitt has been functionally invisible for the better part of a year. “Where in the world is Scott Pruitt?” wondered one headline a year ago. The article noted that he had been spotted at a high-end Tulsa gym, running slowly on a treadmill. He had also registered as an energy lobbyist. There wasn’t much else.

Pruitt’s lonely fate is similar to that of many other top former administration officials. No longer part of Team Trump, removed from the intrigues of Capitol Hill, “formers” like Ryan Zinke (Interior Department) and Reince Priebus (White House chief of staff) are caught in political purgatory.

Some, like Pruitt, Zinke and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, were quickly undone by attempts to replicate the lifestyle befitting a high-net-worth administration. Living luxuriously on the taxpayers’ dollar angered the public, members of Congress and a president always sensitive to bad news.

Others, like Priebus and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, succumbed to the chaos and infighting that have characterized the Trump administration from the very start.

Few of the now-formers survived with their reputations intact. Most notable in that category is former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who always kept his distance from Trump and, most recently, criticized the president for clearing peaceful protesters from Washington’s Lafayette Square in the midst of the anti-racism protests that swept the nation.

Others have tried to claw their reputations back and exact revenge, often by writing books. Among them is David Shulkin, the former Department of Veterans Affairs head and the lone Obama holdover in the original Trump Cabinet. In his book, Shulkin claims that wealthy conservative allies of the president tried to sabotage his efforts and tried to privatize the agency’s operations.

And then, of course, there is John Bolton, who was dismissed as national security adviser in 2019. The scorned Bolton’s new book contains harsh assessments of the president and his policymaking style.

Pruitt is almost certainly not writing a tell-all book, but he did leave the Trump administration with a flourish, penning a fulsome resignation letter to the boss who fired him. “My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people,” Pruitt wrote. “I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence.”
Being ignored by the Trump campaign is still probably preferable to what happened to Jeff Sessions, the attorney general Trump blamed for the investigation into Russian electoral interference. Fired by Trump, Sessions returned to Alabama and declared he would seek to regain the Senate seat he’d held before joining the Trump administration. 

Trump has instead endorsed former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, also running for the Republican nomination. For good measure, the president lambasted Sessions, the first sitting senator to endorse his improbable White House bid back in early 2016, for having “no courage.

Tank Fire Prompts Evacuation at Port of Catoosa, Oklahoma

The roof of a chemical tank (foreground) caught fire at the Port of Catoosa on Wednesday, prompting a full evacuation (

Tulsa Fire Department / Gabe Graveline)

PUBLISHED FEB 17, 2023 12:48 AM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

On Wednesday, a fire broke out on the top of a chemical storage tank at the Port of Catoosa, an inland port at the western end of Oklahoma's Verdigris River. 

The fire broke out at about 0900 hours local time on Wednesday, and the port and a nearby elementary school were evacuated as a precautionary measure. Smoke from the tank was drifting towards a residential area, so local residents were ordered to shelter in place while fire crews responded to the blaze. 

According to the Tulsa Fire Deparment, the tank was empty at the time that the fire broke out. The first fire crew on scene reported fire and heavy smoke, and they applied water to extinguish the fire. Once the fire was out and temperatures on the tank fell, the site was turned back over to the tank farm operator. 

"You know, we prepare for it," Port Director David Yarbrough told local media. "Every now and then, something goes not according to plan, and you just react, and you do what you gotta do."

The extent of the damage to the tank is still under investigation, but some amount of soil surface remediation is expected. 

Image courtesy Tulsa Fire Department / Gabe Graveline

Port of Catoosa is a 2,000-acre industrial park and intermodal port on the northeast edge of Tulsa, and it is one of the largest, furthest-inland riverine ports in the United States. Its lessees employ about 3,000 people in a variety of manufacturing industries. The Verdigris River connects the port with the Arkansas River, then onwards to the Mississippi, and handles about 1,000 barges per year in traffic. 

Understanding the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Legacy of White Supremacy


By  Kendra Pierre-Louis

DE SMOG

Oil field workers adding a length of pipe to drill stream in Kilgore, Texas, in the 1930s. Credit: Russell Lee for U.S. Farm Security Administration, public domain


In December, The New York Times published a story revealing how ExxonMobil and other oil companies had paid a public relations firm named FTI to build “news” and information websites falsely suggesting grassroots support for the fossil fuel industry and its initiatives. ExxonMobil, which didn’t speak with Times reporter (and my former coworker) Hiroko Tabuchi for the story, responded by trying to smear the messenger. “We refused to work with the author,” ExxonMobil tweeted, “because of her obvious bias against the oil and gas industry.”

The firm was alluding to an October tweet by Tabuchi that she’d “been thinking a lot about fossil fuels and white supremacy recently,” noting that nearly every oil industry official she’d encountered as a reporter was white and male. ExxonMobil complained the tweet was a “baseless claim alleging industry links to white supremacy,” and Tabuchi later deleted it. But according to University of Notre Dame historian Darren Douchuk, Tabuchi’s tweet reflected something real.

“In researching the history of oil in modern America since the 1860s to the present, oil was I think unquestionably the most racially homogenous industry in America. And, there are clear racist patterns of organization within the industry from the very beginning,” says Douchuk, author of Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America.

White supremacy can be narrowly defined as a system of overtly racist individuals who seek to oppress or eliminate anyone who is not white, and more broadly as a system designed to protect and elevate whiteness. This latter definition shifts the focus from a few explicitly racist individuals to the underlying system of norms that give white people a disproportionate advantage. A banal example is when a nightclub establishes a “No Timbs” policy, referring to the brand of work boots long fashionable in Black hip-hop culture, to exclude young Black male patrons.

These norms can also oppress Black people and elevate white people in more enduring ways. People with “Black” names get fewer calls for job interviews compared to similarly qualified white people. Homes with a Black owner are typically appraised at lower values than those whose owners are perceived to be white.

Whichever definition you choose, says Douchuk, the historical record reveals clear links between white supremacy and the oil industry. According to his research, when crude oil was discovered in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania just prior to the Civil War, it was seen “as a mystical fount that might ease America out of bloodshed and into a new age of peace and prosperity. Oil was to be a healing balm for the body politic.”

A game of cards at the oil workers’ union headquarters in Seminole, Oklahoma, in the 1930s. Credit: Russell Lee for U.S. Farm Security Administration, public domain

But this healing balm was intended for “whites only,” and that wasn’t just because in that era few Black people lived in the communities where oil was first extracted. As the industry shifted west and south at the turn of the 20th century, to Texas, California, and Mexico, it collided with the emergence of the “Lost Cause” mythos across the South, a set of pseudo-historical justifications for slavery as a just system in which the enslaved were happy, and the Civil War was a heroic insurrection to protect the South’s “economic prosperity” from “Northern aggression.” The Lost Cause lie erases from history the reasons that abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, Denmark Vessey, and Nat Turner fought for Black liberation.

White oilmen (they were almost all men) saw oil as a resource that could help the South rebuild, while also re-installing a system that ensured Black people would remain structurally at the bottom of their racial hierarchy. So they codified segregation into the oil fields. “The oil industry circa 1901 [and] going forward is very much implanted in regions of Texas and Oklahoma that are typically places where lower-class whites have been fighting and clawing for privilege on the racial ladder,” says Douchuk, “fighting against, as they see it, rising Black southerners who want also a place on the economic pecking order.”

One way the industry accomplished this in the South was by limiting the types of work available to people of color. By the early 20th century, white oilmen had firmly established a pattern of keeping the most lucrative roles in the oil business for themselves, says Douchuk, while relegating the most difficult and least profitable to Black and Mexican American workers, such as drilling pipe and laying pipelines that could weigh upwards of 600 pounds through mosquito-infested swamps.

Oil field worker housing in Hobbs, New Mexico, around 1940. Credit: Russell Lee for U.S. Farm Security Administration, public domain

The oil industry also segregated its employees in other ways. Black workers typically lived in tents, compared to sturdier lodging for white workers. Black workers were left to feed themselves, often turning to hunting, despite earning a fraction of the pay of white workers who were fed on the company dime.

Oil towns were also scenes of brutal attacks by whites against Blacks, according to Douchuk. “Traditionally, this is where a lot of the most violent lynching has gone on,” he says. Texas was so violent that Black oil workers who managed to eke out enough money sometimes sought safer pastures in Oklahoma. But that was no guarantee of safety. The story of the 1921 Tulsa Riots, in which white rioters killed 36 Black people in Tulsa, Oklahoma and obliterated the city’s prosperous Greenwood district (known as “Black Wall Street”), gained new public attention in 2019 when it was featured in the opening episode of HBO’s “Watchmen.” But the fact that Tulsa was an oil town, then nicknamed the “Oil Capital of the World,” is less remarked upon.

This kind of racist violence was common among oil towns. The Tulsa massacre was just unique in the scale of the destruction.

ExxonMobil has roots in this era, going all the way back to the 1911 founding of the Humble Oil & Refining Company in Humble, Texas. Humble Oil was soon acquired by Standard Oil of New Jersey, which in 1972 became the Exxon Corporation, which merged with Mobil (formerly the Standard Oil Company of New York) in 1999

.

Oil field workers eating lunch on site in Kilgore, Texas, in the 1930s. Credit: Russell Lee for U.S. Farm Security Administration, public domain

Even as the oil business went all in on Jim Crow, Black workers began to carve out spaces for themselves in the lumber and shipping industries. By 1910, Black laborers made up 59.1 percent of the timber workforce in Louisiana, and 38 percent in Texas. But as late as 1940, Black oil workers only accounted for 0.05 percent of all employees in oil production, and 3 percent of refinery workers.

American oilmen also exported this bigotry. During early-20th-century oil exploration in Mexico, U.S. firms relegated Black and Chicano workers to “the hot, dirty, and unskilled jobs: clearing land, doing laundry, cooking and washing, cleaning buildings, and carrying equipment,” according to Jonathan Brown’s book Oil and Revolution in Mexico. In the 1930s, Texaco chief executive Torkild Rieber was a Nazi sympathizer whose company would go on to literally fuel Hitler’s regime. In Saudi Arabia, Standard Oil Company of California (now part of BP) created “a system of privilege and inequality, which we know as Jim Crow in the United States, as Apartheid in South Africa, and as racism more generally,” writes University of Pennsylvania political scientist Robert Vitalis in America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, and brought the system with it to Latin America and Indonesia as well. In Libya, Esso (another ExxonMobil precursor) created a “settler community” based on architectural separation between Libyans and white American, British, and Canadian employees.

The U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, along with the decolonization movements across Asia and Africa, sought to upend some of these racist hierarchies. But the oil industry’s white supremacy remained entrenched. As reported recently in Drilled News, in 1994 financial analyst Bari-Ellen Roberts and five colleagues filed a class action suit against Texaco (now Chevron) after she was passed over for a promotion, and then asked to train the white man who got the job. In 1996, Richard A. Lundwall, a dismissed Texaco executive, turned over recordings of senior Texaco officials discussing the lawsuit to the plaintiffs’ lawyers in which they considered destroying incriminating evidence related to the suit. They referred to Black employees as the “N-word” and “Black jelly beans,” helping make Roberts’ case.

Civil rights march in Washington, D.C. in 1963. Credit: Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection

After winning a $176 million settlement — the largest to date in a corporate discrimination lawsuit — Roberts wrote a book chronicling the racism she had encountered at Texaco. In one incident, a white employee poked his head into Roberts’ office and exclaimed, “Well, Jesus Christ, I never thought I’d live to see the day when a Black woman had an office at Texaco.” In another, Roberts discovered her performance grade was lowered because a manager considered her “uppity,” a racist dog whistle suggesting that a Black person was moving beyond their “station.” Roberts also learned that behind her back, one of her bosses had referred to her as a “little colored girl.”

This kind of bigotry isn’t relegated to the last century. Just four years ago, NPR reported on discrimination in oil fields. One former Black employee who spoke to reporter Jeff Brady described finding phrases like “n***** go home” scribbled onto a pipe, and nooses being left for him and other Black workers to find. Late last year, a class action lawsuit was filed against Pipeliners Local Union 798, a major pipeline workers trade union of more than 8,000 members, alleging that the union refused to employ Black workers (and white women) through the 1980s. The suit contends that even today Black workers are consistently hired for less well-regarded and more poorly paid “helper” roles, but passed over in favor of less qualified white employees for the better-paid “journeyman” roles. Everything old, it seems, is indeed new again.

The links between the oil industry and white supremacy extend beyond the corporate office and the drill pad. Refineries and other industrial sites are deliberately and disproportionately sited in or near communities of color. Race can predict which communities will and won’t get cleaned up after an oil spill. One could argue that white supremacy within the oil industry is so much the norm, that it is easier to point to the exceptions.

When firms like ExxonMobil make accusations of bias against those who, like The Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi, point out the historic links between the oil industry and white supremacy, they are trying to rewrite more than a century of well-documented racism into a rosier history. “They’re coming out of certain assumptions of racial privilege, which they might not even be able to articulate,” says Douchak. But learning from previous generations frees us to make new advances and avoid catastrophic pitfalls.

As James Baldwin, the acclaimed activist and writer, once wrote, “we are trapped in history.” The present is built upon the past, and will be constrained by it until we face up to these devastating truths. Will the oil industry embrace that reckoning? “I think there’s been an effort lately to improve on that,” Douchak says, “but that, that is a legacy. And it’s not just a legacy, but it’s something that needs to be confronted.”

Mar 29, 2021

ByKendra Pierre-Louis

Kendra Pierre-Louis is a climate reporter. She currently works for Gimlet, the podcasting company. Previously she was a climate reporter with The New York Times, a staff writer for Popular Science (PopSci) where she wrote about science, the environment, and, occasionally, mayonnaise.