Regeneration Talk: The Tulsa Race Massacre: Causes, Cover Up, and the Fight for the Past

The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was the worst single incident of racial violence in American history. But for decades its very existence was denied. Official records went missing, incriminating articles were torn out of bound volumes of old newspapers, and researchers even had their lives threatened. Award-winning author and historian Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice, unpacks the story of the massacre and the challenges it presents for racial justice today. A reception will follow.

Scott Ellsworth has been researching and writing about the Tulsa race massacre off and on for more than forty-five years. In 1982, he published Death in a Promised Land, the first comprehensive history of the massacre, while in the late 1990s, he initiated the search for the unmarked graves of massacre victims. Ellsworth teaches in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Regeneration series; the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment; the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy; the Department of Black Studies; and the Department of History 

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