Veteran Human Rights Researcher Discusses the Tulsa Massacre, Police Brutality and State-Sanctioned Violence

Through the Lens of History and Human Rights

Tulsa 1921 race riots caused many buildings and homes to be destroyed by fire. Courtesy/Tulsa and Oklahoma History Collection

Through the Lens is a series of Q&A sessions on the current political issues with practitioners and researchers affiliated with the Human Rights Center at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The Q&A’s provide insights on the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, police brutality, American Exceptionalism, and violence against Black lives in the United States — spanning the terrain of health, tech, and rights through summer 2020.

The 1921 Tulsa Massacre, which took place 99 years ago this month is one of the most notorious events in an era of US racial terrorism in which several hundred Black men, women, and children were murdered and their prosperous “Black Wall Street” burned to the ground. The Tulsa Massacre — which followed an era of intense racial terror against Black Americans, known as the Red Summer of 1919 — is part of the continuum of systemic racism that underlies the Black Lives Matter movement. It is also part of America’s history of state-sanctioned violence against Black lives and the trauma of racial violence that still echoes in African American homes. In the anniversary month of the Tulsa Massacre, Eric Stover, faculty director of the Human Rights…