On May 31, 1921, a white terrorist bombing destroyed Greenwood, a section of Tulsa, OK densely populated with Black businesses and known as Black Wall Street. To add insult to injury, they don’t even talk about this history in local schools!
Dr. Tamecca Rogers, a writer and mother, was not satisfied with this. “I have lived in Oklahoma most of my life, but I just learned about the massacre of the Greenwood district a few years ago,” she says. “[W]e had to pass Oklahoma history, but this tragic event was not mentioned in any of the textbooks.” Her son hadn’t been taught about it, either.
So she took things into her own hands: she and her son crafted a children’s book that could explain to Black youth exactly what happened to our people that day.
“A Promised Deferred: The Massacre of Black Wall Street” is a book that should be a required text for the Black children of Oklahoma and all over the nation. It fills in the gaps of American education, and reveals for our children what this country truly is.
They want to erase our history, because time and time again it shows our power and resilience and reveals their violence. We have to control the education of our Black children – if we don’t tell them the truth, white people surely won’t!