Why whitewash history?
Talk of Tulsa, Juneteenth and Critical Race Theory made me realize my schooling was incomplete.
There are still chances to learn, like a new exhibit at the Springfield and Central Illinois African American History Museum, “Something so Horrible: The Springfield Race Riot of 1908,” when a mob of 5,000 Whites over two days destroyed Black homes and businesses, and attacked Blacks; 16 died.
The 1921 Tulsa Massacre – a White mob of about 1,000 killed 300 Blacks and wounded hundreds, and destroyed the Black business district and countless homes, displacing thousands – reminds us that racism wasn’t just in the Deep South. I’d assumed that as a Illinois pupil in the 1950s and ’60s, hearing about 1964’s Civil Rights Act and 1965’s Voting Rights Act. We read about Reconstruction and its “carpetbaggers,” but not how Congress tried to reconcile post-war North-South friction by sacrificing ex-slaves to Jim Crow discrimination. We heard about Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre, but not that many Blacks fought in the American Revolution, and that in the Old West one in four cowboys was Black.