President Donald Trump is going to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of a 1921 racist massacre set off by white animosity, on June 19, the Juneteenth vacation celebrating the Black emancipation from slavery and the continued struggle for liberty. He’s preparing a rally while Americans take part prevalent anti-racism demonstrations, which he opposes. And he’s going so he can talk up his record on race to his mostly white voter base.
The rally next Friday will be Trump’s very first considering that suspending major campaign events due to the coronavirus pandemic and the first because international protests began after the police killing of George Floyd, a Black guy, in Minnesota.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Thursday that he’s holding the rally on Juneteenth because “it’s a significant day to him, and it’s a day where [he] wants to share a few of the progress that’s been made as we look forward and more that requires to be done.”
The rally, in other words, will be a location for the white president to speak to a mainly white crowd about all of the great he’s done for Black people. If it follows Trump’s patterns in speaking about race, he will offer a self-congratulating speech about how he has, as he’s fond of saying, “done more for the Black community than any president given that Abraham Lincoln.” There will be talk of the Black joblessness rate, a talking point now made moot; his metropolitan Chance Zones, which have so far enriched only white billionaires; criminal justice reform, which came as he rolled back Obama administration cops reforms; and he’ll declare that he “ saved” historically black colleges and universities.
It is “almost blasphemous,” CeLillianne Green, a historian and poet, told The Washington Post
And, “more than a slap in the face to African Americans, it is obvious racism from the greatest office in the land,” Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) tweeted about Trump’s hijacking of the symbols of Tulsa and Juneteenth.
Trump’s campaign means to use these symbols of Black injustice and Black freedom to offer his reelection regardless of the reality that he’s the most openly racist U.S. president in modern history. He will provide this speech not from behind his desk at the Oval Office, where he would exist as president of all Americans, however to his fervent and mostly white fans at one of his notorious rallies, which have at times displayed racist violence that he motivated.
His audience is not the country at big, not to mention Black Americans, however the white pro-Trump faithful Trump’s political success has actually been buoyed by a racist white reaction based in bitterness of the election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, and the country’s altering racial demographics. Similar animosities of Black gains led whites to burn Tulsa’s Greenwood District 99 years ago.
The Greenwood Massacre
On May 31, Tulsa celebrated the 99 th anniversary of the Greenwood Massacre The massacre, formerly known as the Tulsa Race Riots, occurred when a white mob, aided by policeman, eliminated as much as 300 people as they damaged a crucial Black business district.
The Black organisation district in the segregated neighborhood began with the opening of a grocery store in1905 It ended up being known as Black Wall Street.
In 1919, 380,00 0 Black American soldiers got back from World War I. They were identified that their sacrifice for their nation need to be rewarded with freedom in your home.
” We return,” W.E.B. DuBois wrote about Black veterans in 1919.
White America fulfilled them with closed fists Even prior to Black veterans returned home, racist politicians were warning that their patriotism was a threat to white supremacy.
” Impress the negro with the truth that he is safeguarding the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his task to keep the symbol of the Nation, it is but a shor