may have helped raise public awareness of the Tulsa Race Massacre that killed countless Black people and burned the Oklahoma city’s Black Wall Street to the ground, but that only means that we have more learning to do—and not just about Tulsa. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie
The burning of Black Wall Street—like so many unsavory events, people, causes and motives—was buried by those conservative and white powers that be who set the past in stone. Controlling school textbooks means the proliferation of Lost Cause narratives. “Genocide” was not a term used for what settlers did to Indigenous people. As Rob Alex Fittit, “Malcolm X was included, but only so he could be shown to have been assassinated.
Silver deploys moving archival interviews from survivors who were spoken to in 1999 when a state commission began researching and documenting the event. Nebulous reparations were its potential endpoint. They never came. But its efforts still kicked off something important, as the film emphasizes the burial, uncovering and rediscovery of this event—and of the country’s history of racial pogroms in general.