May 31 · This Day in America
On the evening of May 31, a white mob descends on Greenwood, the Black district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood is something America rarely allowed: a thriving, self-made Black city within a city — banks, hotels, theaters, doctors, newspapers, a place people called Black Wall Street. Over the next eighteen hours it is looted and burned to the ground. Forty square blocks, more than a thousand homes, churches, schools, businesses — gone. More than three hundred people are killed. Thousands are left homeless, rounded up and detained in their own city. For decades it was kept out of the textbooks, the mass graves unmarked, the survivors unpaid. The 250th tells this straight: what was built in Greenwood was the American dream working exactly as promised, and what was done to it was the country breaking that promise on purpose. Remembering it is part of keeping faith with it.
Source: www.neh.gov
Also on this day · 1819
Walt Whitman is born in West Hills, Long Island. In 1855 he self-publishes a thin book of strange, sprawling poems — Leaves of Grass — that sounds like nothing before it and like America itself talking. When the Civil War comes he spends it in army hospitals, sitting with the wounded and dying of both sides, writing letters home for men who could not. He tried to put the whole country, beautiful and broken, into one voice — and very nearly did.
Source: www.loc.gov
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855