I’m ashamed and somewhat embarrassed to say that I had not heard of the Tulsa race massacre until I was in my mid 40s.  I always considered myself someone who understood American history, but it wasn’t aware of the Tulsa massacre until I started to talking frankly with a few friends/work associates who were Black.

Baltimore, where I worked, was in the middle of a number of historical anniversaries running over the course of years:  the 200th anniversary of the Star Spangled Banner’s writing and the 150th anniversary of the Baltimore riot that produced the first deaths of the Civil War.  One of my friends was completely antipathetic about these events, explaining to me the city rarely celebrated events in Black history.

Of course, I had heard of Black History Month–but I never really understood that there was a record of Blacks in the United States that had rarely, if ever, been taught in schools.  I went to a virtually all-white grade school and an virtually all-white high school–literally, the only minorities we had were Asian-Americans.  There was a time, in fourth grade, where two black sisters enrolled in my parochial grade school; they lasted all of two weeks before transferring out. 

One of the events I had never heard of were the Baltimore riots of 1919:  a handful of soldiers, likely drunk, from nearly Fort Meade were walking through a Black neighborhood in the city when one of them was allegedly struck by a bottle.  The soldiers called out the Black residents, using slurs and threats.  Police were called and the soldiers were escorted out of the area.   They returned hours later with some of their comrades–stories put the brigade at 40-60 armed soldiers–who began firing at any Black person they saw:  man, woman or child.  Thankfully, they were likely so drunk they didn’t hit anyone.

Trucks full of police arrived and again escorted the troops back to Fort Meade, about 20 miles away.  Less than an hour later, a third wave of soldiers–estimates put the number at 100–came back to the neighborhood, where they were met by a line of police, who fired on them and beat them with clubs, quickly subduing the mob.

Unlike Tulsa, the Baltimore riot of 1919 didn’t result in any deaths.  Only six of the soldiers were arrested.  Baltimore’s Black population called for more charges, but the incident was swept under the rug, called an episode of “military misconduct.”  It’s not written about in history books; it was told to one of my friends by his grandmother who lived through it.

And that’s how, for generations, Black history was kept.  Through personal accounts and family lore.  Few Black community-centric newspapers existed to document these events, and the white-majority newspapers barely covered them.

I started doing some research online about these events–beginning, as most do in the age of the internet with Wikipedia–to find there was a category for “White American riots in the United States,” currently listing 127 episodes where white Americans took up arms against Blacks, Native Americans, Latino immigrants and Asians.  That number seems woefully low given the history of nation, particularly the fact that more than 4,000 Americans were lynched in the US, many after rioters pulled prisoners from jail cells.

My grade school and high school textbooks, likely like yours, didn’t give much space to race relations in the United States.  The Civil War was covered in about a week and a half in a US history class in ninth grade (with a full class dedicated to Gettysburg because we were within a 40-minute drive of the battlefield).  The Civil Rights movement?  Maybe part of a 50-minute class.

That was the “advantage” of being a white kid in a white suburb:  you weren’t confronted with facing the unfavorable racial history of the United States.  We didn’t learn about the long history of racial injustice because it was messy, violent and disturbing.

This lack of acknowledgement, in my opinion, provides the framework for understanding the pervasive ignorance and denial about “systemic racism” in the United States.  If it wasn’t taught in school, it didn’t happen.  They didn’t do it, so it doesn’t exist.  They didn’t see it happen themselves, therefore it obviously doesn’t happen.

But we do need to document them.  Just as historians are recording stories from World War II veterans as “The Greatest Generation” fades, so too must we capture these events–and teach them.

In the past decade or so, educators have made a push to include more of the diverse history and culture of the United States in the classroom, through literature, history and social studies courses.  This is the “liberal takeover” of education decried by conservatives:  facts and history that they disapprove of discussing because it shows the true past of the nation, warts and all.

How are we to strive to be a “more perfect union” if we do not acknowledge what needs to be fixed?