African American

But what “Watchmen” nails, more than details of Greenwood’s history, is the way that history itself is so susceptible to manipulation, distortion, and erasure. In the real world, the massacre was initially national news, landing on the front page of the Times and prompting promises of recompense by embarrassed white Tulsans. But, unlike on the TV show, justice was never served in Greenwood. No white rioters were punished for their actions. Insurance companies and the city government refused to compensate black Tulsans for their lost property. Lawsuits stalled out in the courts. Many Tulsans, both white and black, stopped talking about what happened. A brutal invasion became a victimless crime, then a repressed memory, then a hazy urban legend that few people had even heard about.

But some of the people who remembered—black people on the outskirts of recorded history—never stopped talking about it.

Black people have always derived power from their ancestral stories, from their ability to speak a truth that immediately complicates or contradicts an American myth. The reason we know what happened in Greenwood at all—the reason that the massacre is tangible enough for Hollywood to re-create in a glitzy prestige cable show—is because folks in Tulsa kept talking about their memories, even when the conspiracy of silence was deafening. So it’s fitting that this new iteration of “Watchmen” turned out to be a story about a black family shaping and sharing history.

Where the show shines most is in how it conditions viewers to second-guess any story that is presented to them as a definitive historical account.