RJ Young

Requiem for the Massacre: A Black History on the Conflict, Hope, and Fallout of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre RJ Young

With journalistic skill, heart, and hope, Requiem for the Massacre reckons with the racial tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma one hundred years after the most infamous act of racial violence in American history

More than one hundred years ago, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma perpetrated a massacre against its Black residents. For generations, the true story was ignored, covered up, and diminished by those in power and in a position to preserve a racist status quo. Blending memoir and immersive journalism, RJ Young shows how today Tulsa combats its racist past while still remaining all too tolerant of racial injustice. A collage of Black lives one hundred years after the massacre shows how things have changed and how they have not. Requiem for the Massacre includes interviews from survivors of the massacre and their descendants, as well as research from historical archives at the Greenwood Cultural Center, the University of Tulsa, and other sources, culminating in current efforts to excavate an empty sunken patch of land believed to be the site of an unmarked mass grave of victims of the massacre.

As the United States is in the throes of Black Lives Matter demonstrations spurned by the killing of George Floyd, and as Tulsa heads into the next one hundred years, Young's own reflections thread together the stories of a community trying to heal and trying to hope.