This episode of Focus: Black Oklahoma features reports on implicit bias, wealth inequalities and the March 7 vote on legalizing recreational cannabis in Oklahoma.
The episode features reports on the state of teaching, the ongoing battle over critical race theory and white supremacist gangs in southwestern Oklahoma.
4:31
George Monroe recalled bits and pieces of the Tulsa Race Massacre up until the end of his life.
The images never could escape his memory.
“I remember seeing people getting shot,” he said In a 1999 oral history.
In that oral history, collected by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission for their 2001 report, Monroe vividly recalls his mother telling her four children to hide under a bed as a group of white men approached their home.
“My sister grabbed me and pulled me under there,” he said. “And while I was under the bed, one of the guys come in past me and stepped on my finger. And as I was about to scream, my sister put her hand over my mouth so I couldn’t be heard.”
4:28
In that oral history, collected by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission for their 2001 report, Monroe vividly recalls his mother telling her four children to hide under a bed as a group of white men approached their home.
“My sister grabbed me and pulled me under there,” he said. “And while I was under the bed, one of the guys come in past me and stepped on my finger. And as I was about to scream, my sister put her hand over my mouth so I couldn’t be heard.”
Monroe, who died in 2001, was a survivor of one of the most tragic race-based massacres in American history. Officially, 37 Black people were killed and but contemporary estimates range to as many as 300 dead. Additoinally, 35 blocks of property belonging to Black people were destroyed in the tragedy that was sparked by an unproven accusation from an elevator operator that she was assaulted by a Black man.