Free eBooks Riot And Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War And Its Legacy Available To Downloads
A best-selling author investigates the causes of the twentieth century's deadliest race riot and how its legacy has scarred and shaped a community over the past eight decades. On a warm night in May 1921, thousands of whites, many deputized by the local police, swarmed through the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing scores of blacks, looting, and ultimately burning the neighborhood to the ground. In the aftermath, as many as 300 were dead, and 6,000 Greenwood residents were herded into detention camps. James Hirsch focuses on the de facto apartheid that brought about the Greenwood riot and informed its eighty-year legacy, offering an unprecedented examination of how a calamity spawns bigotry and courage and how it has propelled one community's belated search for justice. Tulsa's establishment and many victims strove to forget the events of 1921, destroying records pertaining to the riot and refusing even to talk about it. This cover-up was carried through the ensuing half-century with surprising success. Even so, the riot wounded Tulsa profoundly, as Hirsch demonstrates in a compelling combination of history, journalism, and character study. White Tulsa thrived, and the city became a stronghold of Klan activity as workingmen and high civic officials alike flocked to the Hooded Order. Meanwhile, Greenwood struggled as residents strove to rebuild their neighborhood despite official attempts to thwart them. As the decades passed, the economic and social divides between white and black worlds deepened. Through the 1960s and 1970s, urban renewal helped to finish what the riot had started, blighting Greenwood. Paradoxically, however, the events of 1921 saved Tulsa from the racial strife that befell so many other American cities in the 1960s, as Tulsans white and black would do almost anything to avoid a reprise of the riot. Hirsch brings the riot's legacy up to the present day, tracing how the memory of the massacre gradually revived as academics and ordinary citizens of all colors worked tirelessly to uncover evidence of its horrors. Hirsch also highlights Tulsa's emergence at the forefront of the burgeoning debate over reparations. RIOT AND REMEMBRANCE shows vividly, chillingly, how the culture of Jim Crow caused not only the grisly incidents of 1921 but also those of Rosewood, Selma, and Watts, as well as less widely known atrocities. It also addresses the cruel irony that underlies today's battles over affirmative action and reparations: that justice and reconciliation are often incompatible goals. Finally, Hirsch details how Tulsa may be overcoming its horrific legacy, as factions long sundered at last draw together.
Series: .
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1St Edition edition (February 22, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0618108130
ISBN-13: 978-0618108138
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #135,923 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #14 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology > Race Relations > General #103 in Books > History > Americas > United States > African Americans > History #655 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > History > United States
I read Martha Southgate's novel of three generations of black Tulsa women, each hiding a horrible tragedy. The name of the book is THIRD GIRL FROM THE LEFT. The oldest woman, Mildred, has lived through the Tulsa race riots of 1921 and has kept her secrets well. After reading this accomplished novel I wanted to know more about the holocaust in Tulsa, and to find out why it was so underreported at the time and for the next 50 years. James Hirsch's book seems to be about the best of a new crop of revisionist history, and I read the whole thing in about two and a half hours.At this late date there is no smoking gun, and a five month search for rumored mass graves in the surrounding areas of Tulsa proper turned up nothing out of the ordinary. That will never stop people from assuming that more than the 36 victims of vigilante action were killed, their bodies disposed of summarily. Hirsch thinks that the figure is probably somewhere between 75 and 300. Thousands of people lost their homes, and acres of Greenwood, the so called "black Wall Street" were burned to the ground. The famed historian John Hope Franklin came to Tulsa four years after the riots and bears witness today to the sense that, in 1920 black Oklahomans had made some definite progress, but after the catastrophe they lost their confidence and never could make up the backwards steps. Of course trauma studies indicate that such a devastating blow can never be recuperated, not entirely. That is why the issue of reparations has come to the forefront of the debate in recent times, for it seems, following Freud, that money is the only thing that people really sit up and take notice of, and as such it is the only proper way of dissolving guilt from human relations.
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