Tulsa news – live: Biden lands in Oklahoma to ‘make sure America knows the story’ of 1921 massacre

After arriving in Tulsa, Biden visited with Greenwood Cultural Center with White House officials for a history lesson of the neighborhood, from the flourishing Black Wall Street at the turn of the century to a white mob unleashing violence and the lingering impacts that followed.

He was told about the impacts of discriminatory housing and building policies after Greenwood residents rebuilt in the decades after the attack, and how construction of a federal highway through the neighborhood undermined progress by lowering property values and displacing residents.

Following the tour, he will meet privately with known survivors of the massacre.

When she was 34, she was given a book written by her great grandmother, titled “Events of the Tulsa Disaster by Mrs. Mary Jones Parrish.”

Anneliese Bruner – whose great grandmother and grandmother Florence Mary survived the 1921 massacre – was in possession of one of the only surviving, comprehensive, first-person accounts of the atrocities.

Read more in Politico’s report about the families grappling with a legacy that is finally receiving mainstream attention, along with conversations about reparations that have now reached the White House and Congress.

Joe Biden has landed in Tulsa, where he will meet privately with survivors from the 1921 race massacre before touring the Greenwood Cultural Center and delivering remarks on the centennial of the atrocity.

He will be the first president to visit the city to commemorate the massacre.

“Frankly, he plans to discuss a shared sense of frustration and pain that justice has been denied to these families for so long,” said White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

“He is traveling to Tulsa to shine a light on what happened, and to make sure America knows the story,” she told reporters on Air Ford One en route from Washington DC.

Take a look at three new documentaries – Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten, National Geographic’s Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer, and Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street – airing around the 100th anniversary of the massacre.

The mass media push to elevate the stories of the survivors and what happened before and after the violence follows years-long attempts to whitewash the history or ignore it altogether.

Dreamland director Salima Koroma said her pitch to some networks nearly five years ago was ignored, with “gatekeepers” not ready or willing to air it, she said.

A commission founded to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre removed Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Kevin Stitt from the panel last month, after the governor signed into law a controversial measure that restricts how public schools can teach about race.

Opponents of the law – which invokes GOP “critical race theory” attacks that have swept Republican-dominated legislatures in the wake of the 2020 election – argue that the policy will have a chilling effect on how students learn about racism as well as the history of the massacre in their own state.

After signing the legislation, the commission called his support for the law “a sad day and a stain on Oklahoma.”

Commissioner Phil Armstrong said he was “gravely disappointed” that neither the governor or other officials from his office discussed the measure with the panel. Mr Armstrong said the measure is “diametrically opposite to the mission of the Centennial Commission and reflects your desire to end your affiliation.”

Tiffany Crutcher, whose twin brother Terence Crutcher was fatally shot by Tulsa police in 2016, tells PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor what repartitions and true justice looks like for Tulsa 100 years after a racist massacre:

A “Remember and Rise” concert organized by the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission was cancelled after negotiations between officials and lawyers for the last known survivors over reparations had fallen apart.

John Legend was scheduled to perform, and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams was to deliver a keynote address.

Mr Legend issued a statement on 30 May supporting “a true reckoning and reparations for the survivors and their descendants”:

The centennial of the racist massacre in Tulsa has revived discussions about its whitewashed past and the persistence of white supremacism in the institutions that kept its history in the dark for decades.

On 31 May, 1921, the Tulsa Tribune published the headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator” after 19-year-old Black man Dick Rowland was arrested and “charged with attempting to assault the 17-year-old white elevator girl” in a department store building. It is believed he tripped and bumped into her.

Hours later, a lynch mob formed at the courthouse where he was held.

Black World War I veterans defended the courthouse. A fight broke out, spawning one of the worst episodes of racist violence in the US.

The offices of the city’s two Black-owned newspapers – The Tulsa Star and Oklahoma Sun – were also destroyed.

Black newspapers published an account from the NAACP’s Walter F White, who visited Tulsa in the aftermath, and several large newspapers ran front-page stories about the massacre.

But local reports from the Tribune and World , along with city leadership, blamed the massacre on Black residents. The World ran an editorial headline on 4 June titled “Bad N******” and told Black residents to protect themselves against “worthless Negroes”.

An editorial in the Tribune on 4 June argued that “such a district as the old ‘N*****town’ must never be allowed in Tulsa again.”

Here is a thread about how local white clergy members responded to the attack:

On Monday, hundreds of people gathered at Tulsa’s Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church, where survivors continued to attend services in the basement as the community rebuilt after the 1921 massacre.

Revs Jesse Jackson and William Barber joined local faith leaders and other civil rights figures at the church to mark the massacre’s centennial.

The three known survivors of the 1921 massacre testified to Congress on 19 May to continue their community’s calls for justice and reparations.

“Greenwood should have given me the chance to truly make it in this country, but in a few hours all of that was gone,” said 107-year-old Violet Fletcher, who was seven years old when she was forced to leave her home in Tulsa in the middle of indiscriminate violence and bombing.

It is worth watching their remarks in full, linked below: