January 6, 2021 Marked the Christian Epiphany, but U.S. Insurrectionists Hijacked the Date to Proclaim Their Own Message
The date became a notorious reminder to continually defend democracy to keep it
January 6, 2021 marked the day Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 U.S. presidential election was to be certified. A day that should have seen the usual peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next instead turned into a melee at the U.S. Capitol between Donald Trump’s virulent supporters and the idea of America itself. Trump’s minions were willing to seize and hold power through the brute force of mob violence directly targeting the heart of U.S. democracy. As I watched on Twitter in real time, the mayhem that unfolded that day turned my thoughts to the mob violence unleashed on Tulsa’s Black Wall Street in 1921. This correlation was instinctive for me because my ancestors witnessed and survived the Tulsa race massacre. Living in Washington, DC, I witnessed the insurrectionist attack. Although my life was not endangered, January 6 led directly to a new beginning for me 100 years after Tulsa.
Prompted by the tumult of January 6, I wrote an article for the Washington Post about my personal connection to 1921’s Tulsa Race Massacre. I described how the violent attack on the United States Capitol in 2021 transported me back, in my mind, to the time of that pivotal event in American history, and explored the precipitating antagonisms in Tulsa that remain potent in contemporary America.
Three years ago, most people knew very little about the Massacre, its causes, and its aftermath. Spurred by my article, Dr. Scott Ellsworth contacted me to say that he had used the historical account written by my
great grandmother, Mary Jones Parrish, as a primary source for his yearslong scholarship on the Massacre. He told me he had wondered for decades whether she had descendants, and if we were aware of the magnitude of her contribution to the historical record.
That meeting put me in touch with Trinity University Press, which invited me to write the afterword essay for their centennial reprint of Mary Parrish’s account of Black Wall Street and the disaster that befell the thriving African American district at the hands of a white mob. The newly selected title, The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, derives from Great Grandmother Mary’s writings in which she admonishes the country to awaken to the threat to democracy itself, not just to Black Americans, of the vigilante zeal that led to lynchings, pogroms like Tulsa, and other brutalities. “The nation must awake to what [mob rule is] costing it. … The rich man of power and the fat politician who have maneuvered to get into office, and even our Congress, may sit idly by and say, ‘What can we do?’ … The time is fast approaching when you will want to do something and it will be too late.” The warning is prescient and clear. Laws must apply and be enforced equally, and no one can be allowed to operate extra judicially. Preserving any semblance of democracy depends on constant vigilance by everyday people working against powerful interests who seek to undermine it for their own gain.
