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TULSA 2025: The Trump Era Extermination of The Black Professional Class
Exploring The Lesser Included Offenses Of Racial Attacks
Every human being worth talking to about American race relations knows good and damned well that Dick Rowland was innocent. He was the victim of a set up. Dick was the nineteen-year-old African-American shoeshine accused of assaulting seventeen-year-old Sarah Page, a white girl working as a Tulsa hotel elevator operator on May 30th, 1921. Like so many other young brothers of the day, Dick was lied on and conspired against. The confrontation between a White mob intending to lynch him and the small but brave contingent of Black World War 1 veterans who took up arms to defend him, exploded into The Tulsa Race Massacre.
This was, at the time, the greatest civil disturbance since the Civil War broke out almost exactly sixty years earlier to the day. That event served two critical purposes in the American tapestry: a connective tissue to our darkest racist past, and a harbinger for the future of a nation as desperate to deny that past as it is incapable of escaping it. And we are about to revisit that event. The style and execution will be different, but the intent and impact will be the same. Unless Black people are able to thwart the attack more effectively this time around. With history as a guide, and…