Tulsa 100

Sacrifice. 🕊

May 31, 2021

Memorial Day 2021

‘Lasting peace requires its active and systematized cultivation at every level of government and society.’

-Marianne Williamson

Thinking today of the Black Americans who returned from WW’s I and II only to be met with deeper segregation, violence and lynchings. -dayle

#Tulsa100

https://eji.org

EJI

[EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE]

Targeting Black Veterans

Lynching in America

Read the report

Inspired to defend their country and pursue greater opportunity, African Americans have served in the U.S. military for generations. But instead of being treated as equal members of society upon their return from military service, thousands of Black veterans were accosted, attacked, or lynched between the end of the Civil War and the post-World War II era.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white supremacy remained law and custom throughout the nation, and many whites feared that Black soldiers who had experienced the pride of military service would resist the disenfranchisement, segregation, and second-class citizenship that still characterized the African American experience. In August 1917, U.S. Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi warned that, once a Black soldier was allowed to see himself as an American hero, it would be “but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.” Bringing Black soldiers home to the South with expectations of equality, he predicted, would “inevitably lead to disaster.”

~

From professor and author Timothy Snyder:

“This one, from Polish, is about trauma, so I thought it might be fitting for May 31st, which in the United States is Memorial Day.”

‘After the Storm’ by Maria Konopnicka, from 1902.

[“The titular storm is never actually described. It is between the stanzas, in the past.”]

Oh lord, who grants to his world the rainbow

Who lifts to bent flowers a cup from below

Who unfolds the wings of the chick in the nest

Who purples the clouds that escape to the west

By morning the village is free from all care

Here an apple tree’s tended, a roof repaired there

And ere the young dawn can cast its first light

The good country folk have forgotten their fright

Oh lord, who every last trace of discord

Erases from earth by a merciful word

And stills forest’s fierce cry and ocean’s low moan

In the all-quiet heavens where you have your throne

Yet to the wrecked human heart, shattered by storm

Instead of the peace of the spectrum’s calm glow

You give endless thunder without sound or form

Echoes of storms past, memory’s woe.

Konopnicka is out of fashion now, even in Poland.  The painting by Józef Chełmoński, of the same era (1896), reminds us of the sensibility.

“There is something sharp here: the confession in the last stanza. Her brave point is that a conceit of art, that nature expresses the soul, that outer appearances reveal inner experiences, is false.  A storm means one thing in nature, and another inside a person.

So this is a poem about trauma that acknowledges God, but as something other than consolation.  God and nature are on one side, and the person is on the other. The poem is not hopeless, though: by placing her predicament beyond God and nature, Konopnicka is taking responsibility for defining it herself.  She does so, I think, rather beautifully.”

[Posted on Twitter by Jonathan Reiner: “Omaha Beach Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, France.”]

Tulsa 100

May 29, 2021

Black Main Street.

On Being:

The conversation between both of these writers is one that starts in the artistry of their work and includes questions about the imagination, and power, and about what constitutes liberative transformation. And the scope of history they focus on is wide: “These threats we live subject to… are the grotesque and perverse ends to which a nation founded in shame has gone in order to avoid atoning for its crimes.” 

The conversation between both of these writers is one that starts in the artistry of their work and includes questions about the imagination, and power, and about what constitutes liberative transformation. And the scope of history they focus on is wide: “These threats we live subject to… are the grotesque and perverse ends to which a nation founded in shame has gone in order to avoid atoning for its crimes.” -Pádraig Ó Tuama

Tracy K. Smith and Michael Kleber-Diggs — ‘History is upon us… its hand against our back.’

It wasn’t until I saw an episode from The Watchmen that I learned of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. A dysfunctional childhood took me to 16 schools in nine years, and not one teacher, not one, taught this history. -dayle

https://www.tulsa2021.org

For events in Tulsa, Oklahoma beginning on May 31st follow the link for more information and to join virtually.

Greenwood.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission will leverage the rich history surrounding the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre by facilitating actions, activities, and events that commemorate and educate all citizens.

“The projects of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission will educate Oklahomans and Americans about the Race Massacre and its impact on the state and Nation; remember its victims and survivors; and create an environment conducive to fostering sustainable entrepreneurship and heritage tourism within the Greenwood District specifically, and North Tulsa generally.”

“Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples with its Historical Racial Trauma, endorsed by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission and the 400 Years of African American History Commission, furthers the educational mission of both bodies. The book offers updates on developments in Tulsa generally and in Tulsa’s Greenwood District specifically since the publication of Hannibal B. Johnson’s, Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District.

Black Wall Street 100 is a window into what distinguishes the Tulsa of today from the Tulsa of a century ago. Before peering through that porthole, we must first reflect on Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District in all its splendor and squalor, from the prodigious entrepreneurial spirit that pervaded it to the carnage that characterized the 1921 massacre to the post-massacre rebound and rebuilding that raised the District to new heights to the mid-twentieth-century decline that proved to be a second near-fatal blow to the current recalibration and rebranding of a resurgent, but differently configured, community.

Tulsa’s trajectory may be instructive for other communities similarly seeking to address their own histories of racial trauma. Conversely, Tulsa may benefit from learning more about the paths taken by other communities. Through sharing and synergy, we stand a better chance of doing the work necessary to spur healing and move farther toward the reconciliation of which we so often speak.” [Amazon]

What’s past is prologue.

-William Shakespeare

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