Why do they have to keep talking about it?

Listening to and watching the coverage of the commemoration of the Tulsa 1921 massacre, I recalled the number of times I’ve heard people express impatience with the recounting of incidents from the past. It goes something like, “Why do they have to keep talking about it?”
My response is, “When you admit it happened.” In some cases, “I would add, “And that you did it.”

5 Comments

  1. 伟思礼 says:

    I appreciated it, though I had already known a lot of it. In my reading, though, there was no mention of flying over and bombing. Also, the TV version said the girl screamed when the guy bumped into her. The print version I read some years ago claimed she told people he made her nervous when he “looked at her.”

  2. 伟思礼 says:

    This particular atrocity is something I had NOT heard anyone talk about ever until this year. I learned of it a few years ago just because I do a lot of poking around in history. I lived in Tulsa ten years without hearing of it. My mother lived there twenty years, her parents more than forty years, and her grandparents lived there during it, and none of them ever mentioned it.

    1. Pat Barrett says:

      Having read some hundred books and more on Black history, I can point a many facts, factoids, incidents, perspectives, people and so on whose existence most people do not know about. I think I’ve blogged somewhere about the two Black doctors who were sure they had come across an “unknown” chapter of Black history, that of the Amistad. Their enthusiasm was so great and my certainty they would never get around to doing anything about it that I did not point out that the Amistad case was an important legal case that had been covered, but because it was about Africans, no one picked it up to make a movie about it or any other mass media effort. It’s like the fact that some 50 Africans purchased as slaves were landed on an island in the Mississippi River at Mobile, AL in 1862, the last known delivery of slaves and there is a whole book on it. But when you are spending your time bringing babies into the world and caring for them, you may not browse libraries. So it’s not just uncovering people and events, it’s getting them into mass circulation.

    2. Sandra Verbe says:

      so sad that this Atrocity was never talked about over 4 generations.
      It should have been Taught in EVERY class room, and in Every spiritual gathering And Better Treatment RULINGS turned into Laws in the governtment ……

      Biggest loathsome fact of these current years – is the Political Apartheid, happening in the States by the goP, & Maga-ts….

      As Author Ibrahm Kendi wrote in his book:
      “the Only way to Undo Racism is to CONSISTENTLY Identify and Describe It and then DISMANTLE It. ”

      Let Us, the Caring and Sane Continue to do Our Best **
      S V

  3. Sandra Verbe says:

    Glad I read this one, same day as Your “Rascism without Malice”
    and my Length-y response to you on that one. Trusting I did Not over-do.

    I’d like to feel there is more “withOUT malice” than I actually feel there is.

    And I so wish I had a wider berth and height in my circulation of my research and writings on Inclusion and those that do the alternate.
    Though, my short note here, is to tell another example of “legal case” above, Same with Black Music. Even tho I’m from Detroit (mentioned in other response) and grew up around Fantastic Black Musicians who became popular …… Your story of the legal case, still took me back to when . . .
    Songs that were Written and Sung by Black musicians, Would not be put on the Radio, Until Elvis, YES that Elvis P. did the Same exact song.

    that has always turned me the color of “Livid”. Last month I believe, at least it was Encored on PBS, Marvin Gaye – Anthem for the Ages … I so enjoyed it… though still Not a happily ever after story…… But his Song “What’s going on”, about the same Injustice we are experienceing again……..

    Oh by the way, I did mean to proudly date myself (decades your senior) by saying, I was growing up -Detroit style – in the mid 1960’s when Marvin and others were Royalty **

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