The Burning: Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 by Tim Madigan (review)

Over the course of two days in 1921, a mob of white Tulsans attacked the predominantly Black and flourishing Greenwood district, destroying buildings, businesses, and homes of what was referred to as Black Wall Street. This young reader's edition of Tim Madigan's adult work documents the events of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the political and cultural factors that led up to the violence, placing the event in a long line of efforts by white people to oppress Black success and wealth, either by physical assault and murder or written law. The structure is particularly effective here: most chapters begin with either an intimate introduction to a Greenwood resident or a recounting of the horrors of that day; they then zoom out to take a larger look at the historical context, tracking the problematic elements of emancipation, the rise of the Jim Crow era and the Ku Klux Klan and the cruel ripples of chattel slavery. The decades-long silence both of Black and white Tulsans on the event is also explored here with compassion, understanding that the attempt to erase trauma is a natural human instinct. Final chapters discuss the idea of reparations, the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and concludes with the simple but powerful statement, "We have a lot of work to do." An introduction by Beard contextualizes the narrative for young readers and lays out the challenges of reading about such violence; back matter includes a wealth of chapter notes, source notes, further books of interest, and an index.