You probably didn't hear about the Tulsa Massacre in your high school history class, just like you didn't hear much about the lynchings or the KKK. That's because Whites (especially those on the right) have attempted to cover up the terrorist actions of White people -- and done a pretty good job of it.This attempt to cover up for White terrorists has not stopped. The denial by Republicans to create a bipartisan committee to investigate the January 6th attack on our Capitol was just another in a long line of cover-ups for White extremist terrorism.
The following is much of an article by Dean Obeidallah at MSNBC.com on this subject:
If you’re wondering why you may have only recently heard of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, it's because this horrific incident in Oklahoma was intentionally covered up for decades by white people in power and their allies.
Historian Scott Ellsworth explained to NBC News that the mayor and other city officials “realized that the massacre was this horrible public relations problem,” so they actively sought to erase records of the attack. This cover-up worked, which is why so few people outside of Black communities have heard much, if anything, about it until very recently.
One hundred years later, we’re seeing a disturbing similarity in the way many Republicans are downplaying a different terrorist attack carried out by white extremists: the Jan 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol. . . .
While the Tulsa Race Massacre and Jan. 6 are not comparable in terms of loss of life or destruction, as Biden shared in his Tulsa address, one 107-year-old Tulsa survivor, Viola "Mother" Fletcher, pointed out some telling resemblances. The Jan. 6 attack by “a mob of violent white extremists, thugs” had “reminded her of what happened in Greenwood 100 years ago,” Biden shared.
There’s another glaring similarity between the two events: Today’s GOP is desperate to cover up the Jan. 6 attack because — like the whites who ran Tulsa in 1921 — it grasps how bad this looks for it politically, since its supporters carried out the attack. . . .
Senate Republicans just last week blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the details of the Jan. 6 riot. Like the politicians in Tulsa in the 1920s, they appear to want to cover up the details surrounding the attack because it’s bad PR for the GOP. It’s also possible that some Republicans in Congress — likely similar to some white politicians in 1920s Tulsa — feared a thorough investigation might implicate them in the attack.
When Biden stated in his Tuesday address that “what happened in Greenwood was an act of hate and domestic terrorism with a through line that exists today still,” he was 100 percent correct. So was FBI Director Christopher Wray when he stated in his March testimony at a Senate hearing that Jan. 6 was an act of “domestic terrorism.”
And like in 1921, the threat posed by white extremist violence today is very real. In his testimony, Wray said that since he became FBI director in 2017, “the number of arrests of white supremacists and other racially motivated extremists has almost tripled,” The Associated Press reported. He also said, “Jan. 6 was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away anytime soon.”. . .
"Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they can't be buried, no matter how hard people try," Biden said Tuesday. This principle must also guide us when it comes to the Jan. 6 attack. For the sake of our democracy, we cannot allow today’s Republicans to cover up the attack like white politicians covered up the Tulsa Race Massacre.
