My family’s response When I reflected on the anniversary, I realized my fourth grade son knew nothing about these devastating events. I wondered why I hadn’t mentioned it to him yet. I realized it was painful to talk about a divided nation, hate, mistrust and racism, but it was necessary. As parents, we can sometimes sugar coat things for our children. But I decided I couldn’t sugar coat this. It was important to research and learn together, discuss it openly and journal our feelings. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my son and I have had extra time together, so we used it to research Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre. My son asked questions that were hard to answer, not only because of the devastation that happened but because of the disappointment and disbelief in his face. His questions included: “Why did they burn churches? Why didn’t the police help? Isn’t the National Guard our military? Why would they capture Black people for no reason? Why would they do that to us? They acted like our lives didn’t matter.” When I said, “Son, that was a different time when some people’s hearts were full of hate,” he was not satisfied. He told me, “I think everyone should know about this so it won’t happen again.” As a result, we wrote a children’s book together, A Promised Deferred: The Massacre of Black Wall Street , describing the massacre from a child’s perspective and including activities that promote critical thinking, reading comprehension, a word search and coloring activities.
Commemorating the anniversary As the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre approaches, we invite you, your family and our community to commemorate the victims and their descendants of this tragedy. To do this, you could research historical facts, explore historical websites and visit museums, parks and churches in the Greenwood District. Don’t know where to start? Here are a few things we have done to help you get started: 1. Get informed together . Visit the Oklahoma Historical Society website okhistory.org, search for and read
Hannibal B. Johnson’s article Greenwood District and the article Tulsa Race Massacre . 2. Visit the places these events happened . Go to jhfcenter.org/ guided-tours to schedule a guided tour of these places: • Greenwood Cultural Center has a historic collection of news- paper articles and photos of the survivors of the horrific events.
• John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park
memorializes the tragedy and tells the story of how African Americans built Oklahoma.
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