Rev. Jesse Jackson to be here for Tulsa Race Massacre centennial events

The Rev. Jesse Jackson has announced that he plans to be in Tulsa for the centennial and will take part in an event at Vernon AME Church.

The dedication of the historic church’s Prayer Wall for Racial Healing is set for 10 a.m. Monday. Jackson will join the Rev. Robert Turner and other leaders to pray at the event.

Although the Tulsa Race Massacre was not generally well known for decades, Jackson, who spoke with the Tulsa World by phone, first heard about it in the mid-1960s from an associate who was a descendant of Greenwood entrepreneur J.B. Stradford, whose Stradford Hotel was destroyed in the fires.

Jackson said he’s glad the terminology has changed and that the event formerly called a riot is now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.

“It was a massacre,” Jackson said. “A terrorist attack.”

“And it was a planned massacre. You don’t assemble a thousand people without preplanning,” he said.

Compounding the injustice, he added, was an accompanying “cover-up, … an attempt to distort history.”

Jackson said it’s important to understand the massacre’s place in the bigger picture historically. It happened at a time when lynchings and other forms of racial violence were prevalent.

Black Americans “were free enough to become a threat,” Jackson said. “The Jim Crow period in a way was more violent than slavery was.”

What happened in Tulsa, he added, was like “striking a match on a dry field.”

Jackson plans to be in Tulsa through Thursday, he said. In addition to the dedication at Vernon, he will attend the Remember & Rise commemoration at ONEOK Field on Monday.

Tulsa has taken good steps in acknowledging its past, but full “redemption” is more complicated, Jackson said.

“It takes more than commemoration. It takes economic activity. The government can be involved, but it takes the business community and the white churches. Everyone has a role to play.”

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