Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy

Try as one might to disguise and forget the shameful events of the past, murder will out. So James Hirsch, author of the acclaimed book Hurricane, shows in this careful examination of a particularly shameful episode in modern American history. On the evening of May 31, 1921, fueled by rumors and newspaper headlines charging that a young black man had assaulted a young white women, a mob of armed white citizens burned much of the predominantly African American Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the ground. More than 35, and as many as 300, Tulsans died, most of them black. Tulsa's city fathers did all they could to keep the news of this mass lynching from spreading; they found convenient scapegoats (including a blameless but prominent African American businessman) and went about excising mention of the Greenwood affair from official documents. Yet the memory of the crime lived on, and Hirsch's narrative shows how modern Tulsans translated that memory into justice--or at least the possibility thereof.

A remarkable book on an astonishing incident too long overlooked, Riot and Remembrance tells us that history does not always belong to the victors, and that the past is never truly forgotten. --Gregory McNamee