The Race Massacres They Never Taught Us About in School
By the time I graduated high school in 1980, I had read about exactly one race massacre in American history: the Battle of Little Big Horn. It was only at some point afterward that I began to read admissions that General Custer was a pompous ass who was court-martialed for abandoning his troops to visit his wife, and that the Sioux were morally justified in attacking his cavalry troops.
In other words, the only race massacre in American history I learned about in K-12 school was of the slaughter of white soldiers. To be sure, we were also taught about the Trail of Tears, though in retrospect, it seems our history classes spent as much time on that one event as on all the centuries of slavery itself.
“Wait, what?”
It wasn’t until about four years ago that I had a “Wait, what?” moment when I first read about the Tulsa massacre. Thirty-five city blocks were burned, and one of the most prosperous Black communities in America was obliterated in just a few hours. Perhaps as many as 300 Black men, women, and children were slaughtered, though the official death count was ‘merely’ 36. The initial cause — as was so often the case in massacres and lynchings over centuries of slavery and Jim Crow — was false allegations by a white woman against a Black man. But, as the saying goes, the truth will out…
