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On January 10th, the U.S. Department of Justice published a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A departmental investigation determined that the attack was “very systematic and coordinated and transcended mere mob violence.” Although it admitted that “there are no current paths for prosecution for these crimes,” the department welcomed the findings that “we will take this catastrophic federal event in depth into consideration.” Victims of the massacre. ”
“Up to this day, the Department of Justice had not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially described the horrifying events that took place in Tulsa,” Civil Rights Attorney General Kristen Clark wrote in the report. It was announced. “This report breaks that silence through rigorous examinations and complete accounting of one of our country’s darkest episodes. This report also faces insurmountable obstacles, justice and truth. reflects our commitment to the pursuit of the company.”
Just two weeks later, the department took significantly different actions regarding the historical record of violent riots. A searchable database of all cases caused by January 6, 2021 has deleted a searchable database of all cases attacked against the capital. US lawyer for the District of Columbia.
Of course, these surprisingly incongruent behaviors were delimited by the transfer of power. President Donald Trump’s inauguration moved swiftly to commute to pardon, prison sentences and demand litigation firing for more than 1,500 people charged with a crime in January. . According to Axios, Trump’s generous order, “Fuck it, release everything, release everything,” a generosity that even some Republicans a wave of anger and criticism I urged it. “Forgive us for those attacking police officers. You’ve always said you’re sending the wrong signal to the public,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
The database deletion occurred more quietly, but in itself deserves a notification. It shows the Trump administration’s intention to not spare further consequences for their role in the riots to the president’s supporters, but to erase it from the record – that was the Greenwood massacre that existed. Farewell to throw it into the mist of confusion and forgetting.
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As some have pointed out, this push into recent history has been a part of countless dictatorships, ranging from the memories of the Chinese Communist Party’s Tiananmen Square massacre to the “destroy” of opposition in the 1970s. It has a confusing response. At the same time that the administration is trying to whitewash American history teachings, more generally, Trump issued an executive order on January 29th entitled “Radical Indoctrination from Kindergarten to High School.” . Schools that teach the country that it is “funny racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory” will “promote patriotic education in line with applicable law.” orders that federal resources should be prioritized to do so. One Wonder: Are you allowed to teach the Tulsa Massacre?
However, deleting the database is also troublesome for another reason. It undermines the ability to consider the January 6th event in all its complexity and peculiarities.
A few days after Riot was immersed in the over 500 smartphone videos she shared with the Parler Social-Media app, I realized the complexity because of the essays that accompany editing Propublica’s video Trove. What struck me more than anything else about the video was the pure diversity of motivations, profiles and behaviors they exhibited. Yes, from afar, the mob seemed to envision a unity of a single, organized, massive amount of purpose that was bent towards destruction.
However, when viewed in close-ups of the video, heterogeneity emerged. Young woman wearing a puffy jacket and pompom hat, middle-aged woman who could come directly from a business lunch, young man removes black tactical equipment under wooden covers and wears a red maga sweatshirt Trump supporters pull by as merely something. Some people were pleading for people who were slandering police officers and slandering them (“You’re embarrassed, you should fuck pansies”) (“Don’t throw shit at the police!” “Don’t hurt the cops!”) Thank you to the cops who had arrived in the scene (“Blue! We love you!”). Someone broke the windows. The moment swayed from the sailor carrying pitchforks towards wide-eyed tourists. (“This is the state capitol,” the awestruck guy tells his young female companion.
This was a great necessary condition for the four years of effort by the Department of Justice. It is about drawing distinctions to assign individual accountability. By pondering countless videos and other evidence, investigators focused on hundreds of people who could be identified as inciting and inciting the most violent. There was Daniel Rodriguez. He watched on camera drive a stun gun around Officer Michael Fanone’s neck. He was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. There was Thomas Webster, a former New York City police officer and a member of the Marine Corps. He’s now 10 years. There was Peter Schwartz, a Pennsylvania welder, who attacked police with a chair and a chemical spray. He won 14 years.
Thomas Webster at the January 6th rally
Former New York City police officer and Marine member Thomas Webster waved a metal flagpole at the officer. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was pardoned in January. Credit: Get by Propublica
Inevitably, some of the results were ripe for a second guess. Kerstin Kohlenberg, a former US correspondent for the German Die Zeit newspaper, recently reported on the case of 34-year-old Stephen Randolph of Kentucky. The Capitol injures police officers in the process. Others in the same group received much more gentle writing. Trump and his allies may have chosen to comb the case by chance and only to forgive the accused they can claim.
But that’s not what Trump did. Instead, he himself took up the widest brush possible and wiped it all out clearly. In doing so, he removed the defendant from the hook. But in another sense, the massive pardons and deletion of the database took him away all participants of the individual institutions, personalities and periods of January 6th. In a way, he rendered them what the most enthusiastic Castigation on the other side cast them from the start like a heartless mob.
I was in Tulsa at the end of Trump’s first week, as if I had a chance. I went to the Greenwood Rising Museum. This tells the story of the rise of the neighbourhood and its sudden destruction. Despite the lack of documentation of violence, it is a powerful presentation. Oral history snatches from survivors perform in video simulations of firefights and arsons. Before and after the photo, captures roughly tied erase of the neighborhood’s thriving commercial core with an attack first and subsequent city updates.
One of the museum’s central preconceptions is the guiding attempts by white residents to downplay the massacre by framing it as a “black uprising” with Tulsa authorities. Decades later, the museum says many in Tulsa had little awareness of its occurrence. This cover-up had lasting consequences for Greenwood survivors. Greenwood survivors were denied insurance claims from the destroyed home, not to mention citizen compensation in all forms.
What the Parler saw during his attack on the Capitol
Even today, many Black residents of Tulsa wonder whether the calculations represented by the Department of Justice investigations have not included any type of substantial compensation. In a statement in response to the report, Lessy Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, the last two living survivors of the massacre, said: “Even so, they said, “I feel relieved to see one of the biggest cover-ups in American history crashing.”
And now, back to Washington, the federal government has embarked on a whole new cover-up of another day of great violence. This time, the erasure is not very successful. After all, there are all the videos that live on the ProPublica website, but many of the deleted databases can be found on Internet Archive’s Wayback machine. (And Propublica is one of 10 media organizations that jointly sued the federal government in an attempt to obtain 14,000 hours of surveillance footage from January 6th.)
But for the time being, at least those who are trying to maintain a record of one of the darkest days in recent US history, like Greenwood survivors and other explosions of violence around the world, They will do so directly against themselves. government.
Alex Mierjeski and Agnel Philip contributed to the research.
