The Tulsa Race Masscre

Watchmen, a new show based on Alan Moore’s famous comic book series Watchmen, opens its pilot episode with the Tulsa Race Massacre. As I have not taken a single history class in my life, I didn’t find it strange that I had no idea what or when in history these riots were, but as I researched them, they revealed the ugly history of racism in America. The Tulsa race massacre, also known as the Tulsa race riots, occurred in 1921 when mobs of white citizens attacked an area called the “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While this event has been called “one of the worst outbreaks of racial violence in American history”, it rarely occurs in any history textbook. Most people have no idea about this critical point in America’s history, where the first bombings from airplanes took place to run the African Americans out of Tulsa. So why isn’t this event covered much in history books? Well for one, there was a deliberate attempt to cover up this event. Newspapers removed stories talking about these riots and historians later found out that police and military reports about these riots were somehow “missing” as well. In fact, this news blackout has even spread to recent years. In 2012, a bill in Oklahoma requiring that all Oklahoma high schools teach the race riots failed to pass. And, opposite to how Emmett Till’s death seemed to spark the fire that was the civil rights movement, the Tulsa race massacre simply established and strengthened the KKK’s role in segregating African Americans from white Americans.