“….in 1921, not everyone in Tulsa was pleased/with these signs of Black Wealth — undeniable proof that that African Americans could achieve just as much, if not more than, whites. All it took was one elevator ride,/one seventeen-year-old white elevator operator/accusing a nineteen-year-old Black shoeshine man/of assault for simmering hatred to boil over.”.
This is the background of “UNSPEAKABLE: The Tulsa Race Massacre” by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Floyd Cooper (Carolrhoda Books, $17.99), a picture book explaining the forces that led to one of the deadliest race-related attacks in American history.
It is set in Tulsa, Okla., in a community called Greenwood, whose residents “descended from black Indians, from formerly enslaved people, and from Exodusters, who moved West in the late 1800s fleeing the violence and racism of the segregated South.”
There were 10,000 people living in a 35-square-block area where train tracks divided the black and white communities. The author sets the stage for the tragedy by showing why Booker T. Washington called the area the “Negro Wall Street of America,” later Black Wall Street, a thriving community with nearly 200 businesses, a separate school system where some say the Black kids got a better education than white, and a prominent doctor.
Then, a white elevator operator accused a Black man of assaulting her and, when he was sent to jail, a newspaper prompted readers to “nab” him.
Fearing the teenage boy would be lynched, 30 armed Black men rushed to rescue him. A mob of white men sparked rumors that the Black community planned to attack. The white mob stormed into Greenwood and up to 300 Black people were killed. Greenwood was destroyed.
Today, Tulsa’s Reconciliation Park remembers victims of the massacre and recalls the role of African Americans in Oklahoma history.
Weatherford’s prose is elegant and easy for youngsters to understand. Cooper’s illustrations show a range of emotions on the faces of Greenwood’s Black residents. “Unspeakable,” published by a Minneapolis-based publisher, earned starred reviews from six major literary journals. Booklist called it “(a) must have.”