Not long into my research, I realized that what happened in Tulsa in 1921 was scarcely an isolated event. It might have been the worst incident of its kind in our history, but almost every month, American newspapers of that time carried new accounts of racial bloodshed in another town or city, new atrocities perpetrated against Black people by mobs of white people. Rather than an exception, I learned, what happened in Tulsa was a metaphor for that period of our history, those particularly ugly years that followed World War I, and for the Black experience in America in the century after the
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