New book from Trinity University Press offers first-person account of 1921 Tulsa massacre

The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, by Mary E. Jones Parrish, will be released May 25. Credit: Courtesy / Trinity University Press


On May 31, 1921, the progress of race relations in the United States came to a terrifying halt in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Provoked by a small group of armed Black residents protecting a young man from an almost certain lynching, an angry white mob of thousands brutally attacked and destroyed what had been a thriving Black residential and business district, burning it to the ground and depriving residents of their homes and livelihoods.

That event, now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, is “believed to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history,” according to scholar Scott Ellsworth, writing for the Oklahoma Historical Society. Hundreds, by some accounts, were murdered by a coalition of police and white citizens in a warlike scenario that would reverberate for generations.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the event, Trinity University Press is releasing on May 25 The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, a first-person account by survivor Mary E. Jones Parrish.

Read more: https://sanantonioreport.org/trinity-university-press-tulsa-race-massacre/