The state of Oklahoma hasn't said anything substantive yet on reparations 100 years after the Tulsa Massacre. University of Oklahoma Department Chair Karlos Hill says he hopes President Biden's trip changes that.
Introduction
At 107 years old, Viola Fletcher is the oldest known survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. She recounted to a congressional subcommittee last week the traumatic night when a white mob forced her family to flee their thriving Black neighborhood.
“I still see Black men being shot; Black bodies lying in the streets,” Fletcher said. “I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day.”
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Centennial commemorations for the massacre, one of the worst known racial-terror episodes in U.S. history, are taking place in Tulsa this Memorial Day weekend. In Oklahoma, the site of the massacre, those remembrances will coincide with the recent passage of a law critics say threatens educators’ ability to teach about the massacre and other incidents of racial violence with transparency.
<p>Karlos Hill has researched the Tulsa race massacre and developed an institute to train teachers to examine it in their classrooms. This experience has led him to question whether objectivity can be a core principle of historiography. </p>