WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will take part in a remembrance of one of the nation’s darkest — and largely forgotten — moments of racial violence when he helps commemorate the 100th anniversary of the destruction of a thriving Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Biden’s visit Tuesday, in which he will grieve for the hundreds of Black people killed by a white mob a century ago, comes amid a national reckoning on racial justice. And it will stand in stark contrast to the most recent visit to Tulsa by a president, which took place last year.
Biden will be the first president to participate in remembrances of the destruction of what was known as “Black Wall Street.” In 1921 — on May 31 and June 1 — Tulsa’s white residents and civil society leaders looted and burned to the ground the Greenwood district and used planes to drop projectiles on it.
