A piece of history … and a book about it

 

If I seem obsessed with children’s/young adult literature these days, it’s because there is so much good work coming out for young readers, and as I said the other day, good books are desperately needed in a time when even school boards are limiting readers’ choices.

Yesterday an article on the online newsletter, Shelf Awareness, caught my attention. It was about Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre, by Carol Boston Weatherford with illustrations by Floyd Cooper. Unspeakable was just given the Coretta Scott King Author and Illustrator Award and named a Caldecott Honor Book. The 1921 Tulsa race massacre only came to public attention because last year was the centennial of the horror. Previously it had been dismissed as a race riot. The truth is that it was a massacre sparked by a young white girl’s accusation that a young Black shoeshine boy had assaulted her. The boy denied it and was whisked safely out of town, but the anger remained. The community paid the price for his supposed misdeed.

Tulsa at that time had one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country. The Greenwood community was sometimes known as the Black Wall Street. Somehow white citizens were deputized and armed, and when they finished sweeping through Greenwood, 35 blocks of buildings, businesses, and residences lay in ashes; anywhere from 75 to 300 people were dead, 800 hospitalized, and several thousand African Americans interned at various facilities.

Ms. Weatherford said that she learned nothing about the massacre in school—it was not taught as part of any history. Denial reigned, so that in writing the book, she had to rely on secondary resources. In a video, illustrator Cooper, who died in the summer of 2021, said the book spoke to him, echoing the stories his grandfather had told him. According to the author, the massacre has been taught this year in Oklahoma schools but because of new laws, she expects her book to be banned.

I first learned of the Tulsa massacre in 2002 when TCU Press published Pat Carr’s juvenile novel, If We Must Die. I was appalled, spellbound, and wanted to be in disbelief as I read the manuscript. An Irish girl with black hair and eyes (the true Black Irish) puts a spin on racial “passing” and passes as African American so that she can teach in a Greenwood school—and lives through the massacre. There’s a bit of romance, plenty of blind prejudice, both on a large scale and personal, a close call, and in the end a lot of brutality, all in a riveting tale. You definitely do not have to be a juvenile to be captivated by this book. I only wish I could say that it helped bring public awareness almost twenty years sooner, but it didn’t. Academic presses do not always have a wide marketing reach, and although the book did well—and is still for sale on Amazon—it did not get major attention. Still, as I’ve read about the Greenwood massacre in the last year, I’ve been proud of having been part of that book.

Oscar Wilde perhaps said it best about censorship and book banning: “The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.”