Tulsa massacre reparations

 

The Tulsa race massacre report

The report came more than 100 years after a June 1921 report by the justice department’s Bureau of Investigation, a precursor to the FBI, blamed the massacre on Black men and alleged that perpetrators did not violate any federal laws.

The Friday DoJ report, however, acknowledged that the attack by white citizens on Black residents “was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence”.

“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,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DoJ’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of [the community of] Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

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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.”

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The DoJ’s findings acknowledged the role of Tulsa law enforcement in the massacre, including that of Tulsa police who “deputized hundreds of white residents, many of whom – immediately before being awarded a badge – had been drinking and agitating for [a lynching]”. According to the report, more than 500 men were deputized in less than 30 minutes.

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The review includes multiple acknowledgments of the extensive role of law enforcement and city officials encouraging white Tulsans to murder their Black neighbors.

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“As the fires consumed Greenwood, many Black families fled for their lives, leaving behind their homes and valuable items. White residents chased them across and beyond the city, taking into custody men, women, children, the elderly and the infirm, and looting the homes they left behind. The destruction of the district was total. The survivors were left with little to nothing.”

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Despite the report’s findings, Clarke noted that “there is no living perpetrator for the justice department to prosecute”. Last June, the Oklahoma supreme court threw out a lawsuit brought by Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, two Tulsa race massacre survivors, that sought to make the city of Tulsa pay restitution to survivors and their descendants. Randle and Fletcher, who are both 110, were children at the time of the massacre.

  Guardian

One hundred years after the fact.  Will we see Jack Smith's report on Trump crimes sooner than 100 years? And do Oklahoma schools permit the teaching of this incident?

February is Black History Month.

The Tulsa massacre

If you're over the age of 30, you didn't learn this in public school.  If you haven't learned about it since school, it's time.

This is why Trump's rally to be held in Tulsa on Juneteenth - a black American holiday - is a shameless strike at black Americans.

Continue reading.

You have no excuse. Even if you aren't a good reader.  Even Trump could handle it.  It's presented in the form of a graphic novel. 

Welcome to Tulsa rally

It's on a sensitive day for race relations, and, btw, don't sue Trump if you get Covid-19.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What a fucking bunch of pricks

On Aug. 27, 1960, a mob of 200 white people in Jacksonville, Fla. – organized by the Ku Klux Klan and joined by some of the city’s police officers – chased and beat peaceful civil rights protesters who were trying to integrate downtown lunch counters. The bloody carnage that followed – in which ax handles and baseball bats were used to club African Americans, who sought sanctuary in a church – is remembered as “Ax Handle Saturday.”

  WaPo

So guesss what day the RNC and Trump have scheduled for him to accept the GOP nomination in Jacksonville?

Under a revised plan, which is still being finalized and has not been announced, Trump would accept his party’s nomination for a second term on Aug. 27, according to three sources familiar with the deliberations. One venue under consideration would be the 15,000-person-capacity VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena. Hemming Park, where local civil rights leaders have planned their commemoration, is a mile away.

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A permit had already been approved for the 60th anniversary commemoration of those events when Republican National Committee officials tentatively decided to move their convention festivities from Charlotte to the northern Florida city.

There will be riots, no doubt instigated by the police.

In 1960, Rodney Hurst was 16 and the president of the local Youth Council of the NAACP. He and several of his black high school classmates were sitting at a “whites only” lunch counter in Jacksonville when they were spit on – and then the violence began. Now 76, Hurst is aghast at the RNC plan. He said the commemoration event is more important than ever. “Donald Trump is a racist,” Hurst said in an interview Wednesday night. “To bring a racist to town for his acceptance speech will only further separate an already racially separated community.”

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[On Tuesday Jacksonville Republican Mayor Mayor Lenny Curry] ordered the removal of the bronze statue of a Confederate soldier that since 1898 has been the centerpiece of Hemming Park. Speaking to a crowd of Black Lives Matter activists later that day, where the “Ax Handle Saturday” commemoration is scheduled for August, the GOP mayor pledged that that he will remove all remaining Confederate monuments throughout the city.

Expect Trump to bad-mouth Curry in his acceptance speech, and nasty-tweet him all the way from now till then.

It’s part of a pattern. Trump told reporters on Wednesday that his first campaign rally since the start of the coronavirus pandemic will take place next Friday in Tulsa. In 1921, that city was the site of one of the worst race massacres in U.S. history. A white mob descended on an affluent black neighborhood. As many as 300 people died. The June 19 rally also happens to coincide with Juneteenth, a holiday widely celebrated in the black community to mark the day that the last American slaves were freed.

These are no longer dog whistles to racists. They're in your face racist moves.

Impeach the motherfucker.

UPDATE:  He backed down.