The Road to Racial Justice Runs Through Tulsa
America needs to reckon with its racism through concrete action on this Juneteenth.
A burned-out block in Tulsa, June 1921.
Source: Oklahoma Historical Society/Archive Photos
One of the big problems with President Donald Trump’s nostalgic view of the country’s history — “Make America Great Again” — is that it has always winked at the ghost of Jim Crow. Nowhere does that ghost haunt the promise of the American Dream more vividly than the city where Trump will hold his re-election campaign rally on Saturday night: Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Last week, as the country was engulfed in protests against racism, President Trump announced that he would stage his first live campaign rally since the start of the coronavirus pandemic on, of all days, Juneteenth. The annual celebration of Juneteenth marks the date (June 19, 1865) when word finally reached Texas that slavery was abolished and slaves were, at long last, free. The president announced the rally on the same day he made a show of rejecting a public demand — supported by a growing group of military leaders — to rename military bases that still honor Confederate generals. This was just a few days after he had echoed rhetoric employed in the 1960s by former Alabama Governor George Wallace and Southern sheriffs.