President Joe Biden will lead an event Tuesday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in memory of the 300 African Americans killed a hundred years ago in a massacre caused by a white mob that razed a prosperous black neighborhood in the city.
Biden is expected to deliver a speech in the afternoon from the site of the Tulsa massacre.
Between May 31 and June 1, 1921, the largest racist massacre in recent United States history occurred, when a white mob set fire to and completely looted Greenwood, one of the wealthiest African-American neighborhoods in the country at the time.
MORE THAN 1,200 HOUSES WERE RUSHED AND BURNED BY THE WHITE TURBA
More than 1,200 homes were razed, looted and burned with the connivance of local authorities in a tragedy of which until today the exact number of deaths is unknown because no one wanted to investigate, although historians now place the deceased at at least 300.
Biden will be the first president in office to come to the city on this special date, and he does so after the wave of protests for racial justice that the country has experienced in the last year, triggered by the death of African American George Floyd after being suffocated by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The president expressed his commitment on Monday to end the “roots of systemic racism” in the country, on the occasion of the centennial of the Tulsa massacre.
It was in June 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
To commemorate this date, the president issued a presidential proclamation in which he urged Americans to “reflect on the deep roots of racial terror” and commit to “the elimination of systemic racism.”
Biden recalled in the text that families and minors were murdered in cold blood and that some 10,000 people were left homeless.
To this was added that “in the years following the destruction caused by the mob, laws and policies followed that made recovery impossible,” said the president. “The attack on black families and black wealth in Greenwood persisted through generations,” he stressed.