‘Oklahoma Was Never Really O.K.’ [New York Magazine]

Frank Rich took a hard look at the legacy of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and wonders about the whitewashing of American history pertaining to the Tulsa race riot, which was “still within recent memory” during its creation. “Or would have been had it not been purged from the record. And I mean literally purged,” he wrote. “The incident was not a part of the Oklahoma public schools’ curriculum until 2000, and only recently entered American-history textbooks.”

‘Timeline: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre’ [Tulsa World]

Tracking the conditions leading up to, during, and following the 14-hour-period of May 31-June 1, 1921, such as the previous investigation into the corrupt police force and the arrest of a young black teenager for allegedly attacking a white female elevator operator (a case that was later dismissed). As the suspect was held in a courthouse cell, a large crowd gathered outside, leading to armed confrontation and looting. “At dawn, a force of ‘citizens, police and members of the National Guard,’ numbering perhaps 1,500, moved into Greenwood from the south and west, under orders to take into protective custody unarmed blacks and to subdue any who resisted. To people in Greenwood, it looked more like an invading army.”

‘A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921’ [Smithsonian Magazine]

In a 10-page document written in 1931 and found in 2015, an Oklahoma lawyer, Buck Colbert Franklin, bore witness to the riots, including aerial assaults of planes dropping incendiary bombs, contributing to the arson: “Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air,” Franklin wrote. “Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes — now a dozen or more in number — still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.”

‘Eyewitness to the Desolation of “Black Wall Street”’ [The New York Times]

Olivia J. Hooker, one of the last living survivors, remembered the violence that ripped apart her peaceful Greenwood community, when looters broke into her home as she and her siblings hid under the dining table. “I used to scream at night,” she said. “It took me years to get over the shock of seeing people be so horrible to people who had done them no wrong.”