2nd June, 2021
Joe Biden on Tuesday became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the site in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where hundreds of Black Americans were massacred by a white mob in 1921, saying the legacy of racist violence and white supremacy still resonates.
“We should know the good, the bad, everything. That’s what great nations do,” he said in a speech to the few survivors of the attack on Tulsa’s Greenwood district and their descendants.
“They come to terms with their dark sides. And we’re a great nation.”
Biden said the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and efforts by a number of states to restrict voting were echoes of the same problem.
“What happened in Greenwood was an act of hate and domestic terrorism, with a through-line that exists today,” Biden said.
White residents in Tulsa shot and killed up to 300 Black people on May 31 and June 1, 1921, and burned and looted homes and businesses, devastating a prosperous African-American community after a white woman accused a Black man of assault, an allegation that was never proven.
Insurance companies did not cover the damages and no one was charged for the violence.
Biden said one of the survivors of the attack was reminded of it on Jan. 6 when far-right supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol while Congress was certifying Biden’s 2020 election win.
The White House announced a set of policy initiatives to counter racial inequality, including plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in communities like Greenwood that suffer from persistent poverty and efforts to combat housing discrimination.
Families of the affected Oklahoma residents have pushed for financial reparations, a measure Biden has only committed to studying further.
Biden said his administration would soon also unveil measures to counter hate crimes and white supremacist violence that he said the intelligence community has concluded is “the most lethal threat to the homeland.”