Trump Will Stand Atop a Land of Tragedies
Tomorrow, in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, Donald Trump will hold his first campaign rally in more than 100 days. The rally has been widely criticized because of concerns that it will spread the coronavirus, and because its original date—June 19—is Juneteenth, a holiday marking the day the last enslaved people in the former Confederacy gained their freedom. After public outcry, the rally was moved by a day to tomorrow.
But the plan also drew criticism for the choice of location. The city of Tulsa was the site of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, when a white mob burned a prosperous black neighborhood to the ground, killing likely hundreds of black residents and leaving thousands of others homeless.
Trump’s rallies have been routinely denounced for encouraging and inciting racial violence. But when thousands gather to hear him speak tomorrow, they will be standing on land already soaked in it. Tulsa emerged amid a flurry of oil and land profits and decades of violence against its black and Native residents. The history is buried underneath the skyline itself.
The BOK Center spans four blocks in downtown Tulsa. If you stand at its western corner and face west, you can see a set of train tracks at the end of the block. If you follow those tracks to the bank of the Arkansas River, a distance
