Tulsa Race Massacre, 100 years later: Why it happened and why it s still relevant today yahoo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yahoo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Related Before Vanessa Hall-Harper won her District 1 City Council position in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2016, she talked extensively with her soon-to-be constituents and learned that food security was one of the most pressing issues for residents in North Tulsa. That’s why she made it a mission to place a moratorium on dollar stores and bring in healthy food options.
“In engaging with my community, the number one issue of concern that I heard was that we don’t have a grocery store in our community where we can go and shop, that all we have are dollar stores,” said Hall-Harper in a recent phone interview. “It’s something that I didn’t suffer from because I happen to have adequate transportation, so I could go anywhere in Tulsa to shop and get what I want. But obviously, there’s a large segment of my constituents that cannot.”
Tulsa massacre descendant who lost brother to police violence: deeply segregated city Tiffany Crutcher
My great-grandmother would say that, up until 1921, you couldn’t tell the difference between Tulsa and New York City. That’s how well Tulsa’s Black community was thriving in the Greenwood neighborhood. Blacks were self-sufficient, independent and wealthy.
But my great-grandmother was keeping a painful secret: The Greenwood that she knew didn’t simply fade away. It was massacred. And that revelation sent me reeling. After all, the destruction of Black Wall Street wasn’t a lesson I had learned growing up in Tulsa’s public schools. It was never mentioned. Not in a textbook or a history class or anywhere else.
The failure by city and state authorities in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to provide comprehensive reparations has compounded the harms of the May 31, 1921 Tulsa race massacre on its upcoming centennial.