Letter to the Editor: Don't whitewash the 1921 Tulsa race massacre

I am perplexed by the Tulsa World’s decision to publish, albeit with an editorial addendum, the letter by Donald W. Rominger, Jr. (“Don’t use term ‘massacre’ to describe the 1921 Tulsa race riot,” Sept. 23.)


As a former war correspondent and journalist, I value the need to present different sides of an argument. As a witness to genocidal campaigns and ethnic cleansings in Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other geographies, I also appreciate the danger of seeking to portray balance where there is none.

Historical record indicates that the 1921 massacre in Greenwood was a systemic, targeted campaign to extinguish black well-being and wealth in Tulsa, and that a white mob and an air raid murdered hundreds of people.

The letter's description of the tragedy as “26 black citizens and 10 whites…people of both races were arrested or detained” trivializes the death toll, omits the bombing and fudges the obscenity of hundreds of black residents being subsequently imprisoned in what newspapers defined as a concentration camp.

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