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Chaparral Books
If We Must Die: A Novel of Tulsa's 1921 Greenwood Riot
For decades, a riot that killed three hundred people and wounded hundreds of others was scarcely heard of. But several new studies have focused attention on Tulsa's Greenwood race riot of 1921. In If We Must Die novelist Pat Carr turns that tragedy into a riveting novel.
When Berneen O'Brien's mother dies, the seventeen-year-old moves from Wyoming to Tulsa to live with her stern uncle. Berneen secures a teaching position at Liberty Elementary School. When she meets the principal, Nelson Flowers, she is amazed to find that he is a black man. Slowly, as she meets the other teachers, Berneen realizes that she is teaching in a black school. Her worries about being an outcast soon disappear, as the other teachers make her welcome. Berneen, who is of Black-Irish descent, doesn't realize that the teachers and students all assume she is also black.
At school and after hours Berneen finds herself moving in the world of the segregated Greenwood neighborhood. And she finds herself increasingly drawn to Nelson Flowers.
Racial tension erupts into violence when a young white girl accuses a black shoeshine boy of raping her in an office-building elevator. Whites burn Greenwood and storm the neighborhood, shooting and beating black men, women, and children.
Berneen is trapped in the school with Nelson Flowers and the teachers when the mob approaches. The story of their desperate attempt to escape is realistic and frightening, made more so by its historical accuracy. This novel is both insightful and a real page-turner.
When Berneen O'Brien's mother dies, the seventeen-year-old moves from Wyoming to Tulsa to live with her stern uncle. Berneen secures a teaching position at Liberty Elementary School. When she meets the principal, Nelson Flowers, she is amazed to find that he is a black man. Slowly, as she meets the other teachers, Berneen realizes that she is teaching in a black school. Her worries about being an outcast soon disappear, as the other teachers make her welcome. Berneen, who is of Black-Irish descent, doesn't realize that the teachers and students all assume she is also black.
At school and after hours Berneen finds herself moving in the world of the segregated Greenwood neighborhood. And she finds herself increasingly drawn to Nelson Flowers.
Racial tension erupts into violence when a young white girl accuses a black shoeshine boy of raping her in an office-building elevator. Whites burn Greenwood and storm the neighborhood, shooting and beating black men, women, and children.
Berneen is trapped in the school with Nelson Flowers and the teachers when the mob approaches. The story of their desperate attempt to escape is realistic and frightening, made more so by its historical accuracy. This novel is both insightful and a real page-turner.
166 pages, Paperback
First published July 15, 2002
2 people are currently reading
140 people want to read
About the author
Pat Carr
32 books4 followersPAT CARR has a B.A. and M.A. from Rice, a Ph.D. from Tulane, and sixteen published books, including the Iowa Fiction Prize winner, The Women in the Mirror, and the PEN Book Award finalist, If We Must Die. She’s published over a hundred short stories in such places as The Southern Review, Yale Review, and Best American Short Stories. Her latest short story collection, The Death of a Confederate Colonel, a nominee for the Faulkner Award, won the PEN Southwest Fiction Award, the John Estes Cooke Civil War Fiction Award, and was voted one of the top ten books from university presses for 2007 by Foreword Magazine. She’s won numerous other awards, including a Library of Congress Marc IV, an NEH, the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award, an Al Smith Literary Fellowship, and a Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt Writing Fellowship in Lausanne, Switzerland. She’s taught creative writing and literature in numerous universities across the South, has conducted writing workshops from Santa Fe to New York, and in August, 2011, taught the Civil War novel at New York’s Chautauqua Institute. Her writing text, Writing Fiction with Pat Carr appeared from High Hill Press in 2010, and her memoir, One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life, also published in 2010 by Texas Tech University Press, was a finalist for both the Willa Cather Award and the PEN Southwest Non-fiction Award. Her novella, The Radiance of Fossils, is scheduled to appear from the Main Street Rag Press in the summer of 2012. She lives and writes on a thirty-six acre farm in Arkansas with her writer husband, Duane Carr, three dogs, a cat, and fifteen black chickens.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 30, 2020
2.3 STARS...
⭐️⭐️💫
When I came across this book, I had no idea what to expect. I mean it is a children's book about the Tulsa's 1921 Greenwood Riot. How can you create historical fiction, for children, around one of the most horrific; yet often erased, events in modern American history? Well, Pat Carr's If We Must Die: A Novel of Tulsa's 1921 Greenwood Riot definitely gives it the ole' college try.
I have to be honest. The heroine is not who I expected when I opened the book. Berneen O'Brien is a seventeen year old teacher who ends up taking a job at the segregated Liberty Elementary School in Tulsa. And, due to her Black-Irish features, which means she has dark features--hair, eyes and skin tone, she is accepted as one of their own--from Wyoming. Berneen is viewed as a black girl, from the Northwest, who needs to be educated on race relations in the South. So, yes, I am reading a book about the Greenwood Riot through the eyes of a white girl who passes as black. (And, before, you say something: Her silence to speak to her ethnicity, when it becomes apparent that her new co-workers are completely naive, means that she is choosing to accept the identity they have bestowed upon her). I will not delve too much into the narrative, as I do not wish to spoil it for anyone, but I honestly find this aspect of the story a little challenging to accept. (To say the least).
There is definitely no happy ending to this story. What little history is known about the violence and atrocities set upon the residents of Greenwood in May 1921, tells us that. I also question whether all the elements of the story are appropriate for a young reader. There were moments when I found myself shocked and hesitant to precede because of Ms. Carr's descriptive language. However, Ms. Carr leaves us with one revelation that sticks with me. It is the one revelation that makes me say her book has something to contribute to the discussion about race relations.
I will continue to research the attack on Black Wall Street for myself. Initially I bought this book in hopes of having another buddy read with my son. However, I do not see me sharing this book with him or anyone else for that matter. It just does not tell the story in the manner that it needs to be heard.
⭐️⭐️💫
'A black man doesn't have to do or be anything [to be feared. He just is].'
When I came across this book, I had no idea what to expect. I mean it is a children's book about the Tulsa's 1921 Greenwood Riot. How can you create historical fiction, for children, around one of the most horrific; yet often erased, events in modern American history? Well, Pat Carr's If We Must Die: A Novel of Tulsa's 1921 Greenwood Riot definitely gives it the ole' college try.
I have to be honest. The heroine is not who I expected when I opened the book. Berneen O'Brien is a seventeen year old teacher who ends up taking a job at the segregated Liberty Elementary School in Tulsa. And, due to her Black-Irish features, which means she has dark features--hair, eyes and skin tone, she is accepted as one of their own--from Wyoming. Berneen is viewed as a black girl, from the Northwest, who needs to be educated on race relations in the South. So, yes, I am reading a book about the Greenwood Riot through the eyes of a white girl who passes as black. (And, before, you say something: Her silence to speak to her ethnicity, when it becomes apparent that her new co-workers are completely naive, means that she is choosing to accept the identity they have bestowed upon her). I will not delve too much into the narrative, as I do not wish to spoil it for anyone, but I honestly find this aspect of the story a little challenging to accept. (To say the least).
There is definitely no happy ending to this story. What little history is known about the violence and atrocities set upon the residents of Greenwood in May 1921, tells us that. I also question whether all the elements of the story are appropriate for a young reader. There were moments when I found myself shocked and hesitant to precede because of Ms. Carr's descriptive language. However, Ms. Carr leaves us with one revelation that sticks with me. It is the one revelation that makes me say her book has something to contribute to the discussion about race relations.
'Sometimes people need educating more than they need forgiving.'
I will continue to research the attack on Black Wall Street for myself. Initially I bought this book in hopes of having another buddy read with my son. However, I do not see me sharing this book with him or anyone else for that matter. It just does not tell the story in the manner that it needs to be heard.
March 10, 2021
It reads like those little stories on standardized tests.
June 16, 2022
I have had this book for awhile, but I finally had time to read it. It is sad that this true event has for so long gone unknown by most white Americans. This was not a riot. This was a massacre!
Carr has researched the event, although it has been hard to find the true story. It isn't in the textbooks, but it is a story that must be told.
This is the second book I have read about this seminal event this summer. The other is Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham. I would recommend reading both of them, then doing more research. This was in the news this last June. Find out why.
I re-read this book in October after talking to a friend about "Dreamland Burning." Upon re-reading, I would give it five stars. I would love to see this book read by every person who thinks that racism is an issue of the past. As the main character realizes more and more about her own white privelege, readers are forced to take a clear eyed view of our current society. Just the fact that most of us do not know this history is witness to the problem.
It is a well-written story with well-developed characters. It is a book that makes readers want to know more.
Carr has researched the event, although it has been hard to find the true story. It isn't in the textbooks, but it is a story that must be told.
This is the second book I have read about this seminal event this summer. The other is Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham. I would recommend reading both of them, then doing more research. This was in the news this last June. Find out why.
I re-read this book in October after talking to a friend about "Dreamland Burning." Upon re-reading, I would give it five stars. I would love to see this book read by every person who thinks that racism is an issue of the past. As the main character realizes more and more about her own white privelege, readers are forced to take a clear eyed view of our current society. Just the fact that most of us do not know this history is witness to the problem.
It is a well-written story with well-developed characters. It is a book that makes readers want to know more.
July 14, 2020
This was another historical fiction based on the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921.
Carr has a gentler touch than the last book that I read by Payne about these events, but it still follows the IRL events and shows what the attitudes were at the time...which resulted in such mass destruction and senseless violence done upon the people of Greenwood at that time.
This has been a story long-hidden or long-ignored in history books or classes that we all knew about when we were younger....and something I only learned about (in all places) during an art festival exhibit a half-dozen years ago!
The re-life events are ugly enough as they are, but still worth reading multiple accounts to educate yourself on your own if that's how you have to do that.
Off to read a couple of non-fictional accounts over the next few weeks now.
Those who do not know the history of their own country, shouldn't be surprised to see it repeated :(
Carr has a gentler touch than the last book that I read by Payne about these events, but it still follows the IRL events and shows what the attitudes were at the time...which resulted in such mass destruction and senseless violence done upon the people of Greenwood at that time.
This has been a story long-hidden or long-ignored in history books or classes that we all knew about when we were younger....and something I only learned about (in all places) during an art festival exhibit a half-dozen years ago!
The re-life events are ugly enough as they are, but still worth reading multiple accounts to educate yourself on your own if that's how you have to do that.
Off to read a couple of non-fictional accounts over the next few weeks now.
Those who do not know the history of their own country, shouldn't be surprised to see it repeated :(
October 25, 2020
I have had this book for awhile, but I finally had time to read it. It is sad that this true event has for so long gone unknown by most white Americans. This was not a riot. This was a massacre!
Carr has researched the event, although it has been hard to find the true story. It isn't in the textbooks, but it is a story that must be told.
This is the second book I have read about this seminal event this summer. The other is Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham. I would recommend reading both of them, then doing more research. This was in the news this last June. Find out why.
I re-read this book in October after talking to a friend about "Dreamland Burning." Upon re-reading, I would give it five stars. I would love to see this book read by every person who thinks that racism is an issue of the past. As the main character realizes more and more about her own white privelege, readers are forced to take a clear eyed view of our current society. Just the fact that most of us do not know this history is witness to the problem.
It is a well-written story with well-developed characters. It is a book that makes readers want to know more.
Carr has researched the event, although it has been hard to find the true story. It isn't in the textbooks, but it is a story that must be told.
This is the second book I have read about this seminal event this summer. The other is Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham. I would recommend reading both of them, then doing more research. This was in the news this last June. Find out why.
I re-read this book in October after talking to a friend about "Dreamland Burning." Upon re-reading, I would give it five stars. I would love to see this book read by every person who thinks that racism is an issue of the past. As the main character realizes more and more about her own white privelege, readers are forced to take a clear eyed view of our current society. Just the fact that most of us do not know this history is witness to the problem.
It is a well-written story with well-developed characters. It is a book that makes readers want to know more.
Read
January 9, 2012 I highly recommend "If We Must Die: a Novel of Tulsa's 1921 Greenwood Riot" by Pat Carr. This re-telling, realistic fiction novel does a great job explaining the point of view of Berneen O'Brien and her new work experinces in a black elementry school. The book is about this young woman's awakening to the diversity and racism that surrounds her. When Berneen, who is Black Irish desent, begins working as a teacher within the black community is when she realizes all of the segeration and racism that goes on in Tulsa. To Berneen, working in a colored school isnt a problem, but due to her mother's death Berneen must live with her uncle who is a racist member of the KKK. Pat Carr creats a nice closing to the end of the story that actually builds suspense at the conclusion. Unfortunately,I personally couldn't relate to the characters in this book, but the story is enormously moving and I recommend it to all young adult readers!
September 4, 2009
This is a very good re-telling of the 1921 Tulsa Race War through the eyes of a white school teacher at a black school. The teacher is fictional but the story is all too real. The author tells a lot with a little. I actually could not get into this book at first as there were many predictable elements - a white relative turning out to be a Klan member being one of them - but then the author did a nice job of turning the story at the end and actually builds suspense at the conclusion. Any re-telling, fictional or not, of THIS sad story is worth it.
January 27, 2016
Again, one of the ones I read for the civil rights book club books. It's based on a true story about a riot in Tulsa--a young white woman comes to Tulsa to teach after her mother dies and meets Black people for the first time when she discovers the school that hired her is an all-Black school. Since she's of Black Irish heritage, they think she is Black as well. Quite interesting and very eye-opening.
January 23, 2016
I learned about this event this summer at the Memorial Holocaust Library in NY and have lessons to go with it for my students. The book is excellent and the author's use of the main character's passing as white it frightening. My 8th graders will love reading this book but learn so much from its content. Awesome read!
August 31, 2012
A book of few, but powerfully descriptive words. Was all the more interesting because I know the author personally, and regularly see her at church and at the grocery store.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews