On the recordMay 17, 2021
I am honored to share today's Special Order hour on Black Wall Street on behalf of the Congressional Black Caucus, which is chaired by our great leader, Congressmember Joyce Beatty. I want to extend my condolences to Congressmember Beatty and her family for the loss of her husband. On May 30, 1921, a single scream in an elevator became the spark that ignited a powder keg of racial terror that set on fire Black Wall Street. A young Black man enters an elevator, and an elevator operator, a young White woman, screams, giving the impression that she had been assaulted. A local newspaper, the Tulsa Tribune, accuses the young Black man of raping the young White woman. The headline of the article was an incitement to racial violence: ``Nab the Negro Who Attacked the Girl in the Elevator.'' As a result of the incitement, a White lynch mob descended on Black Wall Street and set on fire the wealthiest Black community in the United States, reducing it to ashes. The ashes of Black Wall Street are a metaphor for the failure of Reconstruction. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there were newly emancipated African Americans who set out to build a better life for themselves and their family, only to be held back by racial terror and violence that ultimately came to be codified in the form of Jim Crow. We, as the CBC, are not only here to recite the facts of the Tulsa Race Massacre, but we are also here to reflect on the deeper meaning.…
