President Joe Biden on Tuesday paid tribute to the forgotten victims of the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the worst outbreaks of racist violence in U.S. history.
“I am coming here to help break the silence as the wounds deepen in the silence,” Biden told the crowd, including those who had survived the Tulsa massacre.
The massacre began after a group of black men went to a local court to defend a young African American accused of assaulting a white woman.
At dawn the next day, the white men looted and burned the area, which until then had flourished so much that it was called Black Wall Street. More than 300 African Americans were killed in the massacre.
A century later, Biden said that the “sacred rights” of black Americans to vote were now being attacked “incredibly intensely” as he had “never seen” before.
In Tulsa, excavations have also begun on mass graves where many of the victims of the massacre were buried at the time.
Be the first to comment