Recent Tulsa Race Massacre find.

It's hard to read especially in modern times. I have to say in a way that is how people talked back then, there was nothing 'wrong' with it, but yes everything wrong with it. They didn't know better, but should have. But it is hard to digest.

My mom lives in Claremore and she has shared lots of stories.. she got me excited about that new movie that is coming out soon (Killers of the Flower Moon).. which is another horrible thing in Oklahoma's history

That letter was hard to read. I wish I could say I thought that no one thinks like that anymore, but sadly I think there are plenty of people who would agree w/ a lot, if not all of what he wrote.

Thanks for sharing that. It was something. I wish it sounded antiquated but I’ve heard things in the same vein with less colorful language in current conversations. Shameful.

Thanks PolarGreen12 I needed to open it on my desktop.

Very disturbing and hard to read.

That’s a good point. It did seem like he was trying to convince his parents, who evidently lived in Orleans, N.Y., that the massacre was justified. 

However, I wonder if they were shocked when their son used the n word and used other racial slurs. My grandparents (who were about the same age as the letter writer) were prejudiced in that they viewed Blacks as childlike and inferior, but I never heard them use the n word or other racial slurs, and I don’t think they would have approved if other people talked like that in front of them.

Both of my grandmothers talked about the past when I was growing up and both of them were very proud Oklahomans. My maternal grandmother told me all about the incidents described in Killers of the Flower Moon. She thought those events were terrible. Osage County was the next county over from us, so I think those incidents hit very close to home.

Neither grandmother told me about the Tulsa Race Massacre. I like to think it was because it was such a shameful event in Oklahoma history that they just didn’t want to talk about it. However, I think it’s more likely that they just wiped it from their memory because it didn’t involve them. Tulsa was on the other side of the state and they rarely went there and probably didn’t know many people who lived there. However, if something that terrible had happened to White people in Tulsa, I think they would have told me all about it.

That was a tough read.

I find a really tragic part of this horrible part of American history is that I knew nothing about it until I read Dennis Lehane's book "Live by Night". It detailed the massacre. I had to look it up to see if it really happened or he made it up for his book. I can't believe this was never taught as part of American History.

Right? Growing up only two states away, you would think it would have come up at some point in our history classes.

But then I went to a junior high that started its life 100 years prior as an Indian school where children who had been taken from their families were brutalized in an attempt to turn them white, and we didn’t talk about that, either.

What I can tell all the parents who think it’s a good idea to whitewash our history is that when your kids find out what you and society kept from them, they will never trust you again.