Daily US Times: President Joe Biden will take part in a remembrance of one of the country’s darkest and largely forgotten moments of racial violence when he helps commemorate the 100th anniversary of the destruction of a thriving Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The US president’s visit Tuesday, in which he will grieve for the hundreds of Black people killed by a white mob a century ago, comes amid a national reckoning on racial justice.
And it will stand in stark contrast to the most recent visit to Tulsa by a president, which took place last year.
President Biden will be the first president to participate in remembrances of the destruction of what was known as “Black Wall Street.”
On May 31 and June 1 in 1921, Tulsa’s white residents and civil society leaders looted and burned to the ground the Greenwood district and used planes to drop projectiles on it.
Mr Biden will meet privately with survivors of the massacre. Up to 300 Black Tulsans were killed, and thousands of survivors were forced for a time into internment camps overseen by the National Guard.
A fragment of a church basement and burned bricks are about all that survive today of the more than 30-block historically Black district.
America’s continuing struggle over racial justice will continue to test Joe Biden, whose presidency would have been impossible without overwhelming support from Black voters across the country, both in the Democratic primaries and the general election.
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