Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This is 50 Weeks that Shaped America, our series pinned to the semi-Quincennial, looking at some of the key

stories that shaped this country's history over the last 250 years

and brought us to this moment. Today, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, two days in Tulsa, Oklahoma

when white citizens raided a part of town that had come to be known as Black Wall Street,

mobs of white men, some of whom were part of the Tulsa government, others who'd been

deputized and armed by the city's police forces, descended on the Greenwood District. More than

800 people were admitted to hospitals. Thousands of Black residents of Tulsa spent days in

hiding from the violence. Official Oklahoma records state that 36 people died. That's a little

contested. And that is one of these stories of the Tulsa massacre. And one of the reasons we actually

wanted to get to it in our series is that so much of the history of this incident was actively

hidden or erased until fairly recently. So the story of Tulsa is not just one of racial violence and the American

frontier, but one about how we do history and what stories get to be part of it, which is

certainly something that we are interested in on this show. So here to discuss, as always,

Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter-Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody.

Hey there. We have done Tulsa on this show before

we've mentioned it a bunch. We did do an episode many years ago at this point with Cord Jefferson,

who was one of the writers on Watchmen, which of course opens with the depiction of the Tulsa

Massacre. One of my favorite shows that shows like epic of all

TV yeah yeah we didn't need more of it yeah we didn't need more of it and I've been I've been

wanting to go back and rewatch but I'm curious before we get into the story of it and then in the

second episode we will very much sort of dig into how the story was forgotten how it was brought

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