When it comes to teaching history in our schools, we still have a lot to learn.
I never learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre when I was a kid. It never appeared in my history textbooks, and it never once came up in classroom discussion. But it happened. One hundred years ago last week, as the prevailing story goes,19-year-old Dick Rowland, who was Black, left his shoeshine stand to use a racially segregated restroom in a nearby building. Upon entering the building’s elevator, he stumbled and inadvertently grabbed the arm of Sarah Page, the 17-year-old elevator operator. So startled was Page, who was white, that she screamed. A nearby store clerk called the police, and Rowland was arrested the next day for assault. Rumors of a lynching spread quickly through town. Dozens of Black men from Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood district, also known at the time as “America’s Black Wall Street,” converged on the jail, as did a throng of white men. Shots rang out. Twelve people died. By the time it was over two days later, Greenwood had been burned to the ground. An estimated 150 to 300 of its residents lay dead, and hundreds more were injured. Upwards of 10,000 Black people were displaced. Well worth remembering, huh? Yet as a kid growing up just four decades later, I heard not a peep about it. That uncomfortable realization followed me around last week as I watched and read about the 100-year commemoration of a travesty that these days would be front-page national news for months. (See: murder of George Floyd by then-Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin, May 25, 2020.) At the same time, I found myself mystified by two local outgrowths of the latest far-right rallying cry: We shouldn’t teach the full, unvarnished history of racism in this country because it will make white kids feel bad about themselves. That head-in-the-sand notion was embedded in illegal signs recently planted all over Portland by a group calling itself Concerned Ethnic Fathers, who want people to vote against the city’s school budget Tuesday. Their beef: The $125.2 million package contains $2.9 million in new spending on making the city’s schools more equitable for English Language Learners, children of color, special education students and others who otherwise might slip through the cracks of Portland’s education system.
