Tulsa Race Massacre

 Jan 10, 2024, the Justice Department issued a report on the Tulsa Race Massacre, acknowledging that it was "the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood: "The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps. Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about this race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa. This report breaks that silence by rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past.

"This report lays bare new information and shows that the massacre was the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood. Now, more than 100 years later, there is no living perpetrator for the Justice Department to prosecute. But the historical reckoning for the massacre continues.

"This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles. We issue this report with recognition of the courageous survivors who continue to share their testimonies, acknowledgement of those who tragically lost their lives and appreciation for other impacted individuals and advocates who collectively push for us to never forget this tragic chapter of America’s history.”

"The report documenting the department’s findings on the Tulsa Race Massacre, examines events that occurred between on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when white Tulsans mounted a concerted effort to destroy a vibrant Black community, remembered today as Black Wall Street. During the massacre, hundreds of Black residents were murdered, their businesses and homes burned to the ground and their money and personal property stolen. Survivors were left without resources or recourse.

"In the aftermath, the City of Tulsa resisted offers of meaningful help to the victims and utterly failed to provide necessary aid or assistance, and efforts to seek justice through the courts foundered."

https://www.justice.gov/.../justice-department-announces...

"Biplanes dropped fiery turpentine bombs from the night skies onto their rooftops—the first aerial bombing of an American city in history." https://www.neh.gov/article/1921-tulsa-massacre

Wikipedia offers this:

A two-day-long white supremacist terrorist massacre took place in the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma between May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been appointed as deputies and armed by city government officials,^[15] attacked black residents and destroyed homes and businesses. The event is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history. The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time, one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as "Black Wall Street."

More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned in large facilities, many of them for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. The 2001 Tulsa Reparations Coalition examination of events identified 39 dead, 26 black and 13 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records. The commission reported estimates ranging from 36 up to around 300 dead.

Sources: 

• The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 (2021; Trinity University Press ISBN 978-1595349439) by Mary E. Jones Parrish, previously titled The Events of the Tulsa Disaster (1923, self-published), eyewitness accounts that were compiled by a woman who survived the massacre.
• Magic City (1998; HarperCollins: ISBN 978-0060929077), presents a fictionalized account of the massacre.
• Fire in Beulah (2001; Penguin Books: ISBN 978-0142000243), a novel by Rilla Askew, is set during the riot.
• The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (2001; St. Martin's Press: ISBN 978-0312272838), a nonfiction account of the massacre by Tim Madigan.
• If We Must Die (2002; TCU Press: ISBN 978-0875652627), a novel about Tulsa's 1921 Greenwood Riot by Pat Carr. A poem with the same name was published by Claude McKay in 1919 and it is about the Red Summer race riots.
• Tulsa Burning (2002), a book by Anna Myers, is a novel for middle-grade readers set during the riot.
• Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (2003; ) Mariner Books. ISBN 0-618-10813-0), a nonfiction account of the massacre by James S. Hirsch
• Big Mama Speaks (2011), Hannibal B. Johnson's one-woman play featuring Vanessa Harris-Adams and remembrances and reminiscences of the Black Wall Street.^[220]
• "The Case for Reparations" (2014) in The Atlantic, an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates that brought more attention to the riots.^[221]
• Dreamland Burning (2017; Little, Brown and Company: ISBN 978-0316384902), a novel by Jennifer Latham that interweaves the events in Tulsa in 1921 with their modern consequences.
• The Tulsa massacre gives the backstory for Bitter Root, an Eisner Award winning comic series by David F. Walker, Chuck Brown, and Sanford Greene.
• Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre (2021; Carolrhoda Books ISBN 978-1541581203) with text by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrations by Floyd Cooper was awarded the 2022 Caldecott Medal.

JFK

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on this date in 1917.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), also known as JFK, was the 35th president of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the first Roman Catholic and youngest person elected president at 43 years.^[a] Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his foreign policy concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. A member of the Democratic Party, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in both houses of the United States Congress prior to his presidency.

Born into the prominent Kennedy family in Brookline, Massachusetts, Kennedy graduated from Harvard University in 1940, joining the U.S. Naval Reserve the following year. During World War II, he commanded PT boats in the Pacific theater. Kennedy's survival following the sinking of PT-109 and his rescue of his fellow sailors made him a war hero and earned the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, but left him with serious injuries. After a brief stint in journalism, Kennedy represented a working-class Boston district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953. He was subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate, serving as the junior senator for Massachusetts from 1953 to 1960. While in the Senate, Kennedy published his book, Profiles in Courage, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Kennedy ran in the 1960 presidential election. His campaign gained momentum after the first televised presidential debates in American history, and he was elected president, narrowly defeating Republican opponent Richard Nixon, the incumbent vice president.

Kennedy's presidency saw high tensions with communist states in the Cold War. He increased the number of American military advisers in South Vietnam, and the Strategic Hamlet Program began during his presidency. In 1961, he authorized attempts to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro in the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and Operation Mongoose. In October 1962, U.S. spy planes discovered Soviet missile bases had been deployed in Cuba. The resulting period of tensions, termed the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly resulted in nuclear war. In August 1961, after East German troops erected the Berlin Wall, Kennedy sent an army convoy to reassure West Berliners of U.S. support, and delivered one of his most famous speeches in West Berlin in June 1963. In 1963, Kennedy signed the first nuclear weapons treaty. He presided over the establishment of the Peace Corps, Alliance for Progress with Latin America, and the continuation of the Apollo program with the goal of landing a man on the Moon before 1970. He supported the civil rights movement but was only somewhat successful in passing his New Frontier domestic policies.

On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, assumed the presidency. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the assassination, but he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby two days later. The FBI and the Warren Commission both concluded Oswald had acted alone, but conspiracy theories about the assassination persist. After Kennedy's death, Congress enacted many of his proposals, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Revenue Act of 1964. Kennedy ranks highly in polls of U.S. presidents with historians and the general public. His personal life has been the focus of considerable sustained interest following public revelations in the 1970s of his chronic health ailments and extramarital affairs. Kennedy is the most recent U.S. president to have died in office.

See Wikepedia for more of his life history. 

 War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. -John F. Kennedy, 35th US president (29 May 1917-1963)

Rachel Carson

  Born in 1907 in Springdale, PA, Rachel Carson grew up in the hills overlooking the Allegheny River, where she fell in love with nature after exploring the landscapes and wildlife on walks with her mother. And it was also there that she fell in love with writing, winning several awards in her youth. She would tell people her dream was to become a writer.

While her family was not well off, her mother insisted that Rachel attend college. Rachel entered intending to study English but changed her major to biology. After graduating, she earned a master's degree in zoology and then began a doctorate. But because of the Great Depression and with her father's passing in 1935, Rachel dropped out, taking a job with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to help support her family.

In addition to working in this job, Rachel began writing articles about environmental issues for publications. Those articles evolved into books. And in these works, which were beloved by many, she helped people better understand nature while courageously challenging practices that hurt people and the environment. These challenges had policy implications, leading to a national ban on DDT and other pesticides.

Many of us, including myself, consider her the mother of the environmental movement.

Today more than ever before, we must each individually decide what we can do to help keep our earth safe in which to live and thrive against the forces of climate change.

From the Marginalian:

“The real wealth of the Nation,” marine biologist and author Rachel Carson wrote in her courageous 1953 protest letter, “lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife… Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.” Carson’s legacy inspired the creation of Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose hard-won environmental regulations are now being undone in the hands of a heedless administration. Carson was a scientist who thought and wrote like a poet. As she catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her epoch-making 1962 book Silent Spring, she was emboldened by a line from a 1914 poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.

Tony Hillerman

 It's the birthday of detective novelist Tony Hillerman, born in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma (1925). His parents were farmers and owned a general store. He grew up around Pottawatomie Indians, and he and some of the other farm boys went to St. Mary's Academy, a boarding school for Indian girls.

He wrote his first novel, The Blessing Way (1970), featuring Navajo detective Joe Leaphorn. Hillerman went on to write 17 more books featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, and they were all best-sellers.

--------------

I've read and re-read all his interesting books, telling a lot about the Navaho reservations and their way of life.

Now his daughter is writing more books with some of the same characters carrying on his tradition. I read each of hers as they come out!

Dorothea Lange

 Dorothea Lange, the influential documentary photographer and photojournalist, was born on this day in 1895. Lange is most widely known for her Great Depression-era work documenting the realities of life for poor and oft-forgotten Americans, and bringing their experiences into public awareness. Her talent resulted in a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography in 1941 making her the first woman to receive the honor. Her decades of work greatly influenced generations of documentary photographers.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Lange’s journey as a photographer began as a college student and then an informal apprentice in New York City. By 1918 she had moved to San Francisco and established a successful portrait studio, catering to upper class clients. However, a cultural shift changed her course and led to her lasting fame as a documentary photographer.

At the start of the Great Depression, Lange began to focus her work on the unemployed and homeless people on the streets in San Francisco. Her powerful black-and-white images led to a position with the Federal Resettlement Administration, later called the Farm Security Administration, highlighting the plights of sharecroppers, migrant workers and other members of agricultural communities. Her striking photography brought awareness and humanity to marginalized groups across the nation, including the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s and the Japanese-American internees during World War II.

For adults who would like to learn more about her life and legacy, we highly recommend the award-winning biography, "Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits," which also includes more than 100 of her iconic images, at https://www.amightygirl.com/dorothea-lange

She is also the subject of a fascinating historical fiction novel for adult readers: "Learning to See: A Novel of Dorothea Lange, the Woman Who Revealed the Real America" at https://www.amightygirl.com/learning-to-see

To share Dorothea Lange's inspiring story with kids, it's told in two excellent picture books: "Dorothea Lange" for ages 5 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/dorothea-lange-faces-of...) and "Dorothea's Eyes: Dorothea Lange Photographs the Truth," for ages 6 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/dorothea-s-eyes)

There is also a picture book that tells the story of a family like the one featured in Lange's famous "Migrant Mother" photo, "Ruby's Hope," for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/ruby-s-hope

For Mighty Girl stories set during the Great Depression, we recommend "The Gardener" for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-gardener), "Out of the Dust" for ages 9 to 13 (https://www.amightygirl.com/out-of-the-dust), "Someplace to Call Home" for 10 to 13 (https://www.amightygirl.com/someplace-to-call-home), and "Echo Mountain" for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/echo-mountain)

Abandoned home in Utah, taken by Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange, photo of migrants 1935

Detail of a famous Lange photo for Life Magazine

Mill worker's children eat watermelon on the porch of their rented house, six miles north of Roxboro. Person County, North Carolina, 1939. Photographed by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration.