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tulsa massacre
Oklahoma Screening Teachers From California, New York for 'Radical Leftist Ideology'
"This MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage," said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
Aug 20, 2025
Teachers from California and New York seeking work in Oklahoma will be required to pass an "America First Test" designed to weed out applicants espousing "radical leftist ideology," the state's public schools chief affirmed Monday.
Oklahoma—which has a severe teacher shortage, persistently high turnover, and some of the nation's worst educational outcomes—will compel prospective public school educators from the nation's two largest "blue" states to submit to the exam in a bid to combat what Superintendent for Public Instruction Ryan Walters calls "woke indoctrination."
"As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safeguarded from the radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York," Walters said in a statement Monday.
Walters told USA Today that the test is necessary to vet teachers from states where educators "are teaching things that are antithetical to our standards" and ensure they "are not coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids."
However, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten warned in a statement Monday that "this MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage."
The exam will be administered by Prager University—also known as PragerU—a right-wing nonprofit group which, despite its name, is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees.
While all of the test's 50 questions have not been made public, the ones that have been published run the gamut from insultingly basic—such as, "What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?"—to ideologically fraught queries regarding the "biological differences between females and males."
PragerU's "educational" materials are rife with false or misleading information regarding slavery, racism, immigration, the history of fascism, and the climate emergency. Critics note that the nonprofit has received millions of dollars in funding from fossil fuel billionaires.
PragerU materials also promote creation mythology over scientific evolution and attack LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender individuals, calling lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare "barbaric" while likening its proponents to "monsters."
In one animated PragerU video, two children travel back in time to ask the genocidal explorer Christopher Columbus why he is so hated today. Columbus replies by asserting the superiority of Europeans over Indigenous "cannibals" and attempting to justify the enslavement of Native Americans by arguing that "being taken as a slave is better than being killed."
Closer to home, PragerU's curriculum aligns with so-called "white discomfort" legislation passed in Oklahoma and other Republican-controlled states that critics say prevents honest lessons on slavery, the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and enduring systemic racism.
The law has had a chilling effect on teachers' lessons on historical topics including the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which a white supremacist mob backed armed by city officials destroyed more than 35 city blocks of Greenwood, the "Black Wall Street," murdering hundreds of Black men, women, and children in what the US Justice Department this year called a "coordinated, military-style attack."
Responding to Oklahoma's new policy, University of Pennsylvania history professor Jonathan Zimmerman told The Associated Press that "instead of Prager simply being a resource that you can draw in an optional way, Prager has become institutionalized as part of the state system."
"There's no other way to describe it," he said, adding, "I think what we're now seeing in Oklahoma is something different, which is actually empowering Prager as a kind of gatekeeper for future teachers."
Oklahoma is not the only state incorporating PragerU materials into its curriculum. Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Texas have also done so to varying degrees.
Weingarten noted Walters' previous push to revise Oklahoma's curriculum standards to include baseless conspiracy theories pushed by President Donald Trump that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. Walters also ordered all public schools to teach the Bible, a directive temporarily blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in March. The court also recently ruled against the establishment of the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school.
"His priority should be educating students, but instead, it's getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him," Weingrarten said in her statement.
Cari Elledge, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, called the new testing requirement "a political stunt to grab attention" and a distraction "from real issues in Oklahoma."
"When political ideology plays into whether or not you can teach in any place, that might be a deterrent to quality educators attempting to get a job," she added. "We think it's intentional to make educators fearful and confused."
California Teachers' Association president David Goldberg told USA Today that "this almost seems like satire and so far removed from my research around what Oklahoma educators need and deserve."
"I can't see how this isn't some kind of hyper-political grandstanding that doesn't serve any of those needs," he added.
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At Least 5 Killed in Tulsa Mass Shooting
The incident is the 20th U.S. mass shooting since the May 24 massacre of 21 students and staff at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Jun 01, 2022
Tulsa police confirmed Wednesday that five people were killed, including the shooter, during a mass shooting at a medical facility in the northeastern Oklahoma city.
The Tulsa World reports the shooting occurred Wednesday afternoon in a building just south of Saint Francis Hospital. Tulsa Police Capt. Richard Meulenberg described a "catastrophic scene" at the Natalie Building at 64th Street and Yale Avenue.
Deputy Tulsa Police Chief Eric Dalgleish said that the shooter--who used a rifle and a handgun during his rampage--died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police also said they connected a bomb threat at a home in Muskogee to Wednesday's shooter.
Tulsa City Councilor Connie Dodson was at St. Francis Hospital's emergency room when the shooting took place.
"They locked it down without announcing anything, but then people heard the large presence of police and responders in the area and were getting alerts on their phones," she told the World. "There were approximately 30 people in the ER at the time, but everyone was calm and watching the activity outside and live reports on the TV."
According to the Gun Violence Archive, the incident is the 20th U.S. mass shooting--defined as acts in which at least four people are shot--since the May 24 massacre of 21 students and staff at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
It was also the second mass shooting in Oklahoma this week. One woman was killed Sunday and seven others were injured when a gunman fired more than 40 rounds during a Memorial Day festival in Taft, near Muskogee.
The Oklahoma shooting occurred on the 101st anniversary of the second and final day of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, in which scores and possibly hundreds of Black residents of the city's prosperous Greenwood District, popularly known as "Black Wall Street," were shot, burned, beaten, and bombed to death by racist mobs of white people, at least 10 of whom were also killed.
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It's Been Two-Hundred Years, Not Twenty: Targeted Repression in the US Started Long Before 9/11
There is a terrible theme that runs throughout the story of the United States: when a group of people are seen as a threat, state power has been used to oppress them.
Sep 24, 2021
What comes after the anniversary of a tragedy? Earlier this month, many of us participated in memorials and retrospectives on the changes to American society in the two decades since the attacks of 9/11. We were among the many American Muslims who wrote about the impact of 9/11 on civil rights. As co-executive directors of Muslim Advocates, we were asked to document how the Patriot Act enabled mass surveillance and profiling of Muslims by local and national government, how a Bush-era immigrant registration program (NSEERS) effectively created a Muslim registry, and the many ways that the stereotype of Muslims as terrorists has fueled decades of anti-Muslim hate crimes and bullying. So what comes next?
Profiling, surveillance and over-prosecution of marginalized populations in this country are nothing new.
After 9/11, we were part of a group of Muslim lawyers who helped create a Muslim legal advocacy organization because we knew that things could get much worse for American Muslims. We knew and took seriously the way this country has discriminated against Black Muslims and other marginalized communities.
Simply put, profiling, surveillance and over-prosecution of marginalized populations in this country are nothing new. Trump's frenzy about an "invasion" of gangs across our southern border was not all that different from Democratic politicians' warnings about "super predators" during the passage of the 1994 crime bill. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were just two of many civil rights leaders under constant FBI surveillance, and the Black Panthers were targeted with the blunter, more violent end of that stick. Many in our families were alive when Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps upon zero evidence of wrongdoing. Anti-German sentiment led to bans against teaching the German language and COINTELPRO and the McCarthy hearings painted anyone with communist beliefs as an enemy of the state. Even further back in our history, the Chinese Exclusion Act explicitly banned an entire race from emigrating to this country, and Jim Crow laws did everything short of slavery to control non-whites. And of course, all of this took place on the land of the many Native peoples who were killed or forcibly removed from their homes over centuries of repeated falsehoods and betrayal by the United States government.
So, yes, it has been twenty years since 9/11. But it has also been 77 years since Korematsu, 100 years since the Tulsa massacre, 131 years since the massacre at Wounded Knee, 139 years since the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and 199 years since the Denmark Vesey rebellion. In other words, we need to see the bigger picture. We believe something much more transformative is possible if we demand that post-9/11 reflections are connected to the rest of American history and that we learn from all of it.
There is a terrible theme that runs throughout the story of the United States: when a group of people are seen as a threat, state power has been used to oppress them. More specifically, political interests have built and solidified their power by ramping up fear--not just stoking a fire, but creating it. American communities are thus pitted against each other, and eventually there is public support for government overreach that is outrageously outsized to the supposed threat.
Monuments and memorials should help us learn about our history and grow from it. When we were asked to opine about all the ways American Muslims suffered in the aftermath of 9/11, we knew it wasn't enough. We want to also talk about what this means for today. What does this mean for oppression in all its forms right now? And then the really difficult question: are we complicit in any of it?
Abuse of power hurts not just the abused, but also the abuser. Everyone needs to heal from these past harms, so we all must ask these questions. We could start on anniversaries. What if every commemoration of every atrocity was a step on a path toward truth and reconciliation? Maybe, then, we could see our way out of this dangerous cycle, heal the fractures in our society, and finally write a new American story.
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As Congress Approves Juneteenth Bill, Advocates Say 'We Must Not Stop Here'
"Black liberation in its totality must be prioritized," stressed Rep. Cori Bush.
Jun 17, 2021
As legislation to designate Juneteenth a federal holiday breezed through the U.S. Congress this week and was signed into law by President Joe Biden Thursday afternoon, racial justice advocates stressed the imperative for meaningful policies and actions to address systemic racism and inequality that go beyond what some called performative gestures.
"Many of the senators who voted for Juneteenth to become a federal holiday regularly vote to impede civil rights for Black Americans."
--Dr. Tarika Barrett
Several congressional lawmakers took the occasion to both welcome the new holiday and speak to the need to address what author and activist Bill Fletcher Jr. has called "America's incomplete emancipation."
Speaking on the House floor Thursday, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) expressed his "great excitement and joy" over the designation of Juneteenth--which celebrates the day in 1865 when Black people in Texas learned they were no longer slaves, two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation--as a national holiday.
"But... we must not stop here. We must continue to go forward to fight for racial justice," he said, citing "housing discrimination and segregation, lack of access to healthcare, and wealth inequality."
"We must... do much more," asserted Bowman, who supports measures--including Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and the For the People Act--that progressive campaigners argue will uplift tens of millions of Americans, especially people of color adversely affected by centuries of systemic injustice and inequality.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) tweeted that "it's long past time for America to recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday."
"But we can't just call this a win and move on," she added. "Congress needs to act on voting rights, police violence, poverty, environmental justice, and much more to tackle systemic racism in America."
Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) tweeted, "As we take this time to acknowledge Juneteenth, I pray that we do not [lose] track of the fact that we have so much more work to do to ensure fairness, opportunity, and equality."
Racial justice advocates went even further in their calls for equity, with Black Lives Matter tweeting, "We won't be bamboozled by political theater."
Unfit Christian founder D. Danyelle Thomas called the new holiday "yet another tokenized victory to point to in the delusion of a post-racial society."
"The Senate unanimously passing Juneteenth as a federal holiday--and the Biden [administration's] championing of the cause--while actively obstructing raising minimum wages, student debt forgiveness, and gun reform is a reminder that performative liberation/resistance won't do a damn thing," she asserted.
In a syndicated opinion piece published on Thursday, National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) chief of programs and strategic development Sabrina Terry and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, chief of membership, policy, and equity at NCRC and an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote that "Juneteenth reminds us to be critical of how progress is measured."
"In the last month alone, we had two national remembrances of racial injustice: the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre," noted Terry and Asante-Muhammad. "Floyd's murderer, police officer Derek Chauvin, was found guilty this year. And this spring, President Biden became the first president to visit Tulsa and commemorate the massacre."
"Both events have been celebrated as turning points in popular American public opinion toward racial justice, yet there is still little evidence of meaningful systemic reforms," the authors wrote. "A year after Floyd's murder, Congress still hasn't passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020. And the few remaining survivors of the Tulsa massacre have yet to receive reparations from their federal, state, or local governments."
Terry and Asante-Muhammad continued:
A year since the nation's 'racial reckoning' following the death of George Floyd, and 100 years since the massacre in Tulsa, our nation has still failed to even promise the type of repair--much less deliver the investments necessary--to bridge the centuries-old racial inequality that's maintained through economic inequality. But that doesn't mean we can't.
As we celebrate Juneteenth this year, the promise of freedom alone isn't enough to move us forward. Instead, we need to celebrate it every year with sustained action and investment to repair the inequality that even a general and his troops 150 years ago were not able to deliver.
"History... shows that without a sustained deployment of federal resources, the promise of Black freedom and opportunity were quickly dashed against the rocks of racially concentrated power and wealth, leaving African Americans vulnerable in a racially segregated society," they added. "And today, like then, there's huge division among states when it comes to racial justice."
Indeed, observers noted the irony of Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday at the same time that numerous states including Texas and Oklahoma are banning or whitewashing the teaching of the history behind events like Juneteenth and the Tulsa Massacre.
"Imagine making Juneteenth a federal holiday when laws are being enacted all over the country that will prevent people from being taught why it's a holiday," tweeted Monique Judge, news editor at The Root.
Screenwriter Kashana Cauley quipped, "This'll be fun to teach in the anti-critical race theory states: 'So we're all getting this day off because absolutely no one did anything wrong.'"
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The Tulsa Massacre: Remembering the History of 'Black Wall Street'
The story of prosperity of Black communities in Tulsa, Oklahoma is incomplete without discussing their roots.
Jun 01, 2021
When HBO's TV series Watchmen (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020) splashed across our screens, recreating the historical event now known as the Tulsa Massacre, Americans of all races were flabbergasted that a story so brutal, so significant had been seemingly lost to history.
Few had known the details of the mass killing of Black people by white mobs in what at that time was thought to be the wealthiest Black community in the United States.
After the collective shock, multiple projects were born from originators such as NBA superstars LeBron James and Russell Westbrook, as well as Dream Hampton (executive producer of the documentary Surviving R Kelly), all aiming to tell this story of Black economic success torn asunder by white racism.
But as is often the case, history is more complex than it seems. Why were there so many African Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th century? Why were they able to become so successful in a period of time, the late 1800s and early 1900s, known for the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow?
As I discuss in my book, I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, the story of the Tulsa neighbourhood known as "Black Wall Street" is incomplete without the knowledge of its inception as a Creek Indian town, populated by the Black former slaves of Creek women and men. The freedpeople used the land they had received through the American government to build a prosperous life for themselves, attracting African Americans from the United States who built upon the existing Black-Native landscape.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the massacre and it is worth getting its broader history right as we celebrate our new awareness of it and its unfortunate continued relevance to our modern moment.
In the late 1820s and early 1830s, when members of the Cherokee Nation embarked on their now-infamous "Trail of Tears," their forced dispossession from the lands in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee that Cherokee people had called home for millennia, they were not alone. A small number of these tribal members brought with them enslaved Black women and men, who helped ease their burden, performing physical labour and other tasks.
By 1860, these enslaved people would make up approximately 15 percent of the Cherokee Nation. Members of four other slaveholding Indian nations--the Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations--made a similar journey to what was then known as Indian Territory (part of modern-day Oklahoma).
After members of all five nations fought on both sides of the Civil War, in 1866, the United States retaliated by forcing these nations to free enslaved people, provide them with all the rights and privileges of citizenship, and give them land allotments.
Creek freedpeople (those formerly enslaved by Creeks) settled in various places, many staying in what would become Tulsa to create towns and communities, some all Black and others interracial. In the late 1890s, oil was discovered by white Americans and Tulsa increasingly became a hub for speculators, bringing many American settlers.
As free people, Creek freedpeople voted in tribal elections, served as tribal representatives, and built schools and churches for themselves. At the same time, in the United States, after the highs of the 1870s, African Americans found themselves with decreased federal support in the realisation of their right to vote and live unmolested. When they looked West, they saw the land, annuity payments, and rights Black people in Native nations had, and they wanted it for themselves.
They came in droves, brought by newspaper editorials, advertisements, and in-person appeals by town promoters. Per the 1894 and 1910 US Census, between 1890 and 1907, the Black population of Indian Territory increased from 19,000 to more than 80,000. Their presence made Oklahoma the American state with the most towns created and populated by African Americans, referred to as "all-Black towns", While life was not perfect, as Black southerner Mildred Robertson put it, "my people [formerly] lived down at the bottom of Mississippi close to Louisiana... they had a little more freedom in Oklahoma."
Some Black families made it big, like titan and serial entrepreneur and financier O.W. Gurley, while others established comfortable middle-class lifestyles for themselves, catering to their fellow Black Tulsans with auto repair shops, grocery stores, rooming houses, and dentists' offices, among other businesses, creating one of the wealthiest Black locales in the country--hence the term, "Black Wall Street."
Some white Tulsans did not like this, and jealousy was clearly present, though racial violence was not a huge issue until after Oklahoma statehood in 1907. In 1921, what began with a Black teenager named Dick Rowland sharing an elevator with a white woman, prompting her to scream, ended with white Tulsans, including law enforcement, burning down buildings and indiscriminately shooting women, men, and children; Dick Rowland was the spark, but there was much kindling that preceded it.
African Americans flocked to Tulsa because of the lives and opportunities they saw Creek freedpeople and other Black people formerly enslaved by Indians enjoying. In Indian Territory, they were free from some of the reach of white supremacy in a space where tribal governments reigned. This was the specific context that made Black Wall Street possible. But the Tulsa Massacre was a grim reminder that wherever white settlers went, so did their anger at Black success and really, Black existence.
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One Hundred Years Later, the Mark of History Still Scars Tulsa Today
No one has been held responsible for the Tulsa massacre that left hundreds of Black people dead and their prosperous community in ruins.
May 25, 2021
Memorial Day marks one year since the murder of George Floyd by the hands of the Minneapolis police. This week also marks the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a brutal government-aided leveling of a prosperous African American community for which there still has been no accounting and no justice. Few even know about the massacre. It hasn't even been taught in the Tulsa public schools until this year. Although 100 years old, the massacre poses questions of justice and of decency that America cannot avoid.
After World War I, a neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, named Greenwood grew to be among the wealthiest Black communities in the country. Booker T. Washington called it the "Black Wall Street." Here were successful entrepreneurs, doctors, and lawyers who through hard work and good minds were building a prosperous Black community. The district was lined with Black-owned shops. restaurants, a 54-room grand hotel and the Dreamland Theater. It supported two newspapers and a hospital.
No one was held responsible for the deaths and injuries, or the millions in property losses.
Then on the day after Memorial Day, a white mob gathered to lynch a young Black 19-year-old who had startled a 17-year-old white girl, an elevator operator, in an elevator. Rumors inflated the incident into an alleged rape. Black veterans of World War I rushed to the jail to try to protect the young man from the mob. A shot was fired, and the enraged white mob chased blacks back into Greenwood.
Then the massacre began. The police and National Guard joined the mob rather than enforce the peace. Planes circled overhead to drop turpentine bombs on homes and businesses. As Rev. Robert Turner, pastor of the historic Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church that was torched in the massacre, notes, "The first time in American history that airplanes were used to terrorize America was not in 9/11, was not at Pearl Harbor, it was right here in the Greenwood District."
The 2001 report of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Race Riot of 1921, created by the state legislature, found that the city of Tulsa conspired to destroy Greenwood. According to the commission's report, the massacre destroyed some 40 square blocks. Nearly 10,000 people were left homeless as 1,256 homes were looted and burned down. So too was the thriving commercial district, including the Black hospital.
White hospitals turned away Greenwood's wounded. Many bled to death, including Greenwood's most prominent surgeon. The number of dead is estimated to be as many as 300, but went uncounted. Many were simply dumped in unmarked graves. Ten thousand African Americans were left homeless; some 6,000 were herded into internment camps for weeks. Government officials committed no public money to help Greenwood rebuild. Instead, they opposed any revival, even rejecting offers of assistance from outside of Tulsa.
No one was held responsible for the deaths and injuries, or the millions in property losses. Not one insurance company honored a claim by an African American. City and state officials covered up the crime for decades.
As Dreisen Heath, author of a Human Rights Watch report on the massacre summarized, "The Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa was destroyed, but survivors of the massacre and their descendants are still suffering the consequences. Decades of Black prosperity and millions of dollars in hard-earned wealth were wiped out in hours, but nobody was ever held accountable, and no compensation was ever paid."
Legacy of discrimination
That history lives today. Tulsa is still one of the most segregated cities in the country. The current mayor acknowledges "the history of racial disparity that exists in our city. A kid that's growing up in the predominantly African American part of our city is expected to live 11 years less than a kid that's growing up in a whiter part of the city." Tulsa still suffers from discrimination, institutionalized in the police, zoning laws, housing policies and more.
One hundred years later, the African American community still seeks justice. Rev. Turner marches each week to the city council to demand repair, reparations for the damage done. The state-created commission called for reparations such as direct payments to "riot survivors and descendants," a scholarship fund and a memorial. The Human Rights Watch report on the massacre calls on the Tulsa and Oklahoma governments to provide reparations, including "direct payments to the few massacre victims still living and the descendants," efforts to recover remains from mass graves, and a "comprehensive reparations plan," including targeted investments in health, education and economic opportunities." A House subcommittee has opened an inquiry into what can be done.
The issue of reparations always meets with resistance. Why should this generation pay for the crimes of those who lived 100 years ago? Yet once the massacre is admitted, the violation done to people can't be simply ignored. And the damage incurred--erasing a prosperous Black community and enforcing racially discriminatory policies through the decades--is real.
The mark of history scars Tulsa today. There, and elsewhere in America, there needs to be a process that can officially recognize the injustice, act to repair the damages done, and bring us together, so that our society can continue to make its difficult way to an inclusive, and better America.
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'Feels Like a Desecration': Critics Denounce Racist Trump for Rally at Site of Tulsa Massacre on Juneteenth
"Would a cross burning have been too subtle?"
Jun 11, 2020
Since announcing Wednesday he will hold his first campaign rally in months next week, President Donald Trump has come in for harsh criticism from advocates and lawmakers for scheduling the event to take place in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma--the site of a brutal racist massacre in 1921--on the specific date of June 19th, the holiday known as Juneteenth which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.
"This isn't just a wink to white supremacists--he's throwing them a welcome home party," Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said on Twitter.
Trump's rally will come in the midst of what has become a moment of national reckoning on racism and policing. Demonstrations in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers have sparked a worldwide movement against racial injustice and police brutality.
In that context, the history of the location and the timing of next Friday's rally was not lost on critics.
It was on June 19, 1865, that enslaved Africans in Texas first learned they were free--two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The day is now celebrated as Juneteenth.
Tulsa recently marked the 99th anniversary of one of the deadliest mass killings of African Americans in U.S. history. In 1921, a white mob killed as many as 300 people, most of them Black, after a Black man was accused of assaulting a white elevator operator. The white mobs destroyed a thriving African American business district known at the time as the Black Wall Street of America.
Trump's decision to rally supporters at the site of racist violence is nothing new for the Republican Party. On August 3, 1980, then-candidate Ronald Reagan addressed supporters at the Neshoba County Fair, just a few miles from the Philadelphia, Mississippi site of the Freedom Summer murders of three civil rights advocates in June 1964.
The decision by Trump to head to Tulsa was announced Wednesday during a roundtable with a group of black supporters at the White House. On Thursday, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany addressed the growing controversy over the date and location, telling reporters that Trump "often shares the great work he has done for minority communities" during his campaign rallies.
"It's a meaningful day to him, and it's a day where wants to share some of the progress that's been made as we look forward and more that needs to be done," said McEnany.
But the president's critics weren't buying it, referring to Trump's longstanding and well-established history of racist comments and behavior stemming from long before his entry into presidential politics in 2015.
"It's not only offensive but it also feels like a desecration," author Morgan Jerkins said on Twitter. "We still haven't found all the graves of those who were massacred there back in 1921."
I hate to break it to you but this is absolutely deliberate and the only thing shittier than doing it in Tulsa would be doing it in Galveston (it is Juneteenth next Friday) https://t.co/W3u3dKZOnj
-- vaccine haver (@kerrence) June 10, 2020
Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.), a frequent critic of the president who has regularly introduced articles of impeachment in the House against Trump, tweeted that the decision was meant to send a message of hate.
"Trump rally with rebel flags (a symbol of slavery and racism) in Tulsa, OK (the place of #TulsaMassacre) on Juneteenth (a day of emancipation recognition) is more than a slap in the face to African Americans; it is overt racism from the highest office in the land," Green said.
Other lawmakers weighed in on the decision, calling Trump out in stark terms.
" Donald Trump is a racist," said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). "He has contempt for the history of Black Americans and the Black lives destroyed by white mobs at the Tulsa Massacre. We need to do more than defeat him, we need to root out the systemic racism in our country that enabled him to ever come to power."
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