Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy
Try as one might to disguise and forget the shameful events of the past,  murder will out. So James Hirsch, author of the acclaimed bookHurricane,  shows in this careful examination of a particularly shameful episode in modern  American history. On the evening of May 31, 1921, fueled by rumors and newspaper  headlines charging that a young black man had assaulted a young white women, a  mob of armed white citizens burned much of the predominantly African American  Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the ground. More than 35, and as many  as 300, Tulsans died, most of them black. Tulsa's city fathers did all they  could to keep the news of this mass lynching from spreading; they found  convenient scapegoats (including a blameless but prominent African American  businessman) and went about excising mention of the Greenwood affair from  official documents. Yet the memory of the crime lived on, and Hirsch's narrative  shows how modern Tulsans translated that memory into justice--or at least the  possibility thereof.A remarkable book on an astonishing incident too long overlooked,Riot and  Remembrancetells us that history does not always belong to the victors, and  that the past is never truly forgotten.--Gregory McNamee