Greenwood, 1921: One of the Worst Race Massacres in American History (video)

The death of George Floyd, in the hands of Minneapolis police, came on Memorial Day. Ninety-nine years before, that same week, black Americans suffered a massacre. In the days after World War I, a neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called Greenwood was among the wealthiest black communities. Oil made Greenwood rich, but jealousy made it suffer. In 1921, a white mob, with incendiary rage, burned Greenwood to ash. Even memories were murdered when the dead were dropped into unmarked graves. Last December, before the pandemic, we found Tulsa preparing to embrace a reckoning, with a plan to exhume the truth and raise the dead.