Race massacre in 1921 in Tulsa - Greenwood area - Black Wall Street. The fight to uncover the mass graves and the justice of reparation. Got a little long. Lots of books on this topic but the author was very involved for years, well-researched as he wrote a 248 page govt. paper on the topic. ( )

One hundred years ago a young black man got onto a Tulsa elevator. Something caused the female operator to scream. The man ran away. It was assumed that he had harassed the woman and was arrested.

Just the previous year, a lynch mob had hung a white prisoner. Now, they gathered to deal out that same justice. Armed WWI veterans from the black community came to protect the jail. With passions high, fights broke out, and twenty-four hours later, the entire black community of Greenwood had been destroyed and unknown numbers murdered.

Scott Ellsworth was a Tulsa native who was shocked when he learned this history. The story had been repressed; there were missing police reports and archival newspapers edited by scissors. Ellsworth has spent his lifetime studying and researching the Tulsa Race Massacre, his dissertation becoming the definitive history Death in a Promised Land.

The Ground Breaking takes readers into the aftermath of the massacre, how the Greenwood community rebuilt, the repression of memory that amounted to denial, the search for the victims buried in unmarked graves, and the quest for reparations. The deep impact of the incident is evident in the stories told by the survivors Ellsworth interviews. For a hundred years, the controlling interests of the city have pushed to let the past be the past, while the activists who sought to unearth the incident were vilified.

I felt the suspense build as the project strove to investigate the probable and rumored locations of mass graves.

This is more than a history of a moment in time. It is the story of a thriving community that was destroyed and how it remade itself and was destroyed again. It is the story of the people who persisted in resurrecting a repressed history that continues to haunt the families of victims. We may try to bury the past because it looks bad, but we can not negate the legacy that haunts the families of the survivors.

This is more than the story of a city and a moment in time. It is the story of those who persisted in resurrecting the truth, and it is the story of America’s deep rooted denial and its cost. We may try to bury the past, but its legacy still haunts us.

I received a free book from the publisher through Goodreads giveaways. My review is fair and unbiased. ( )