Requiem for the Massacre
A Black History on the Conflict, Hope, and Fallout of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massac re
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards
NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literary Work - Non-Fiction
With journalistic skill, heart, and hope, Requiem for the Massacre reckons with the tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one hundred years after the most infamous act of racial violence in American history
More than one hundred years ago, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, perpetrated a massacre against its Black residents. For generations, the true story was ignored, covered up, and diminished by those in power and in a position to preserve the status quo. Blending memoir and immersive journalism, RJ Young shows how, today, Tulsa combats its racist past while remaining all too tolerant of racial injustice.
Requiem for the Massacre is a cultural excavation of Tulsa one hundred years after one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Young focuses on unearthing the narrative surrounding previously all-Black Greenwood district while challenging an apocryphal narrative that includes so-called Black Wall Street, Booker T. Washington, and Black exceptionalism. Young provides a firsthand account of the centennial events commemorating Tulsa's darkest day as the city attempts to reckon with its self-image, commercialization of its atrocity, and the aftermath of the massacre that shows how things have changed and how they have stayed woefully the same.
As Tulsa and the United States head into the next one hundred years, Young’s own reflections thread together the stories of a community and a nation trying to heal and trying to hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fox Sports analyst Young (Let It Bang) mixes memoir and history in this provocative study of the legacy of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. A century after white mobs destroyed the prosperous Black enclave of Greenwood, Young reflects on his own experiences as a Black teenager in Tulsa struggling under fierce pressure from his parents to succeed by assimilating to the city's white culture. Eventually feeling triumph in his decision to stay ("One of my most prominent acts of resistance and self-determination has been to buy a house here"), Young is at his strongest when he critiques Tulsa's commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the massacre, pointing out how events meant to bridge the city's racial divides only reinforced them: ceremonies largely attended by white Tulsans took place in locales difficult for Black Tulsans to reach, while a mixed crowd attending a q&a with the creators of the HBO series Watchmen (which takes place in Tulsa) were subjected to a graphic scene from the series depicting an attempted lynching. Though some of Young's digressions run long, he skillfully captures the insidious workings of racism. The result is a fierce and poignant portrait of the aftereffects of racial violence.
