#Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 Race Reparations

[reasoningdaily]

Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Race Reparations, and Reconciliation

click the title link to DOWNLOAD FREE From The BLACK TRUEBRARY

Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Race Reparations, and Reconciliation

click the title link to DOWNLOAD FREE From The BLACK TRUEBRARY

The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot was the country's bloodiest civil disturbance of the century. Leaving perhaps 150 dead, 30 city blocks burned to the ground, and more than a thousand families homeless, the riot represented an unprecedented breakdown of the rule of law. It reduced the prosperous black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma, to rubble.

In Reconstructing the Dreamland, Alfred Brophy draws on his own extensive research into contemporary accounts and court documents to chronicle this devastating riot, showing how and why the rule of law quickly eroded. Brophy offers a gut-wrenching portrait of mob violence and racism run amok, both on the night of the riot and the morning after, when a coordinated sunrise attack, accompanied by airplanes, stormed through Greenwood, torching and looting the community.

Equally important, he shows how the city government and police not only permitted the looting, shootings, and burning of Greenwood, but actively participated in it. The police department, fearing that Greenwood was erupting into a "negro uprising" (which Brophy shows was not the case), deputized white citizens haphazardly, gave out guns and badges with little background check, or sent men to hardware stores to arm themselves. Likewise, the Tulsa-based units of the National Guard acted unconstitutionally, arresting every black resident they could find, leaving Greenwood property vulnerable to the white mob, special deputies, and police that followed behind and burned it.

Brophy's revelations and stark narrative of the events of 1921 bring to life an incidence of racial violence that until recently lay mostly forgotten. Reconstructing the Dreamland concludes with a discussion of reparations for victims of the riot. That case has implications for other reparations movements, including reparations for slavery.

click the title link to DOWNLOAD FREE From The BLACK TRUEBRARY

[delgadolibrary-blog]

HBO’s new Watchmen series opened with the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, an act of white supremacy in American history. Many people are only just now learning about the real events of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Do you have questions about this dark story? The Delgado Community College Library has resources that will hopefully bring light to this tragic event.

Death In a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Scott Ellsworth City Park Campus Library: 976.686 E47d

When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice by Charles J. Ogletree City Park Campus Library: 347.73 W56

Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy by James S.  Hirsch Electronic Resources: eBook

Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation by Alfred L. Brophy Electronic Resources: eBook

“Tulsa Race Riot” segment in Boss: The Black Experience in Business by PBS Electronic Resources: Video

“Tulsa (Oklahoma) Race Riot (1921)” entry in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture : Volume 19: Violence by Amy Louise Wood Electronic Resources: eBook

“Tulsa, Oklahoma Race Riot of 1921” entry in Encyclopedia of Race and Crime by Gale Virtual Reference Library Electronic Resources: eBook

“The Tulsa Race Riot” entry in African Americans in the West by Douglas Flamming Electronic Resources: eBook

“On the Tulsa Race Riot” by Amy Comstock, chapter in Defining Documents in American History: The 1920s (1920-1929) Electronic Resources: eBook

“Remembrance, Contestation, Excavation: The Work of Memory in Oklahoma City, the Washita Battlefield, and the Tulsa Race Riot” by Edward T. Linenthal, chapter in Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States Electronic Resources: eBook

[cscclibrary]

[B/w photograph of homes and businesses burning during the Tulsa race riot, 1921.]

Thanks to the new Watchmen television series, the 1921 attack by armed mobs of resentful, angry whites on a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma has achieved a sudden prominence in popular awareness.  Many viewers had no idea that the riot--also called the Greenwood Massacre and the Black Wall Street Massacre--had really occurred, and were distressed to only now be hearing of this episode of mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

To make a sweeping generalization about K-12 education in the United States would be to risk gross inaccuracy, but those who had never previously learned about the Tulsa race riot may be also surprised to learn about episodes such as the Zoot Suit Riots and other race riots, as well as practices such as redlining (and other ways of maintaining segregation) and sundown towns. Learning about these episodes and practices flesh out our understanding of the past, and contextualize the present.

There’s a surprising number of books focusing solely on the Tulsa race riot available to our staff and students.  Some must be requested via OhioLINK--please chat with a reference librarian if you need assistance with this process.

Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and its Legacy 

Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation

The Tulsa Race War of 1921

Tulsa Race Riot: A Report

The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

[mbmspeaks]

Goaling for a happier new year

I would summarize 2019 as a year I worked really hard on things that I love and am passionate about and got minimal positive feedback in return. It has been frustrating. Yes that is probably the nicest adjective I could use to describe the past year. 

I believe the root of a lot of my frustration ties back to me doing a poor job of setting expectations for people in my life I interact with as well as for myself. I’m not afraid to jump into things I am passionate about and care about. I’m definitely learning I’m far less good at communicating expectations -  measurable ones -  on what success means.  Without shared expectations it’s natural that everyone won’t always be happy with the results of your labor. Worse yet it makes it very difficult for me to figure out if I have been successful in what i set out to do.  

This is my perhaps long winded way of saying I'm making some new year's resolutions and the first is to make goals that set me up for success! I usually make a point of not making resolutions at New Year's but instead on my birthday. This past year I did just that and this new year’s I did some revisions/updates on what I set out to do back in October. 

One of my resolutions was to start reading books again. This is terribly embarrassing for someone that was such an avid reader as a child, but I’ve just not made space in my life for reading. My goals is to read a book a month. I just finished my second book since October so I’m going to say I’m doing ok with  that goal. Here’s the two books I read.

They are both super interesting books that I definitely recommend. I read the first because we’d been using OKRs at work but I had not done my homework and gone to source material on doing it right. I am looking to lean on established frameworks to help my team execute and collaborate better across our company.

The second book had been recommended to me before and I’ve been really wanting to dive further into the world of big data, algorithms and ethics.  I just finished Weapons of Math Destruction yesterday. It is depressing and sobering to read in one place all the algorithms and data being used to increase inequality and lessen our democracy. The stakes are high and I feel there is a lot to be done to make progress.  

I was reflecting on an interesting intersection between the two books. In Weapons of Math Destruction author Cathy O’Neil stresses the importance of human evaluating ethics and morals of algorithms.  One thing that struck me when I read Measure what Matters was the goals Google set to scale to the massive company they have come to be. There was a complete lack of ethics, morals, and humanity in the goals that were set to scale.  They were getting view, reaching more people, scaling exponentially - but at with what impact to the people they reached? to Humanity?  While good goal setting always blends quantity with quality, if you are not explicitly considering the overall impact of your technology on society aren’t you inviting some kind of harm.  It’s not really a surprise that youtube is a platform that’s been used for hoaxes and propaganda - the teams that have worked on the technology were never motivated to consider that important.

In O’Neil’s book she suggests that Data Scientist take take some thing similar to the Hippocratic oath and I think she’s right but I think for us to really right the ship ALL responsible technologist need to take a similar oath. Blindly believing the technology you create will make the world a better place is unscientific and the height of hubris.  

So as I look to set my goals for the new year, I’m taking something from both these books. I’m working on setting measurable goals, keeping in clear focus the impact my actions have on the world we live in. Hopefully by setting tresponsible goals, I’ll succeed in goaling for happiness in 2020. 

Next up on reading list:

The Lean Start-up

Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 - Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation (Watchmen inspired me to better educate myself on History)

[mbmspeaks]

Reparations from Bloomberg?

I'm currently reading  Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 - Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation by Alfred Brophy. I just read this article about Bloomberg giving a speech in Tulsa and I'm amazed at the balls of this man.  He is going to straight up try to buy this election.   I'm torn between complete disgust and trying to mobilize to get him to fork over those reparations. Make sure we nail down some specifics and commitments now. If he wants to buy the vote,  should we be thinking about what real change can we make with that blank check. Should we be starting a chant at his rallies: "Write the check! Write the check!" Then I go back to being disgusted.