I didn't learn about the Tulsa massacre until a few years ago, when The Washington Post ran a feature article on it. How does stuff like this get buried?
Everyone knows about the atrocity at Kent State, Ohio, 40 miles south of Cleveland, when jittery 19-year-old members of the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of demonstrating college students, killing 4 and wounding 9, on May 4, 1970? A Neil Young song, an iconic photo -- everyone knows about Kent State.
But how many people know about what happened in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a couple of years earlier? It was South Carolina highway patrolmen, not the National Guard, but they opened fire on about 200 student protesters on February 8, 1968. 3 were killed, 28 wounded.
Didn't know about that one, huh? Do you think it could be because the student protesters were black?
Ugly stuff gets shoved down the "memory hole":
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
That's George Orwell, 1984. Convenient device, that memory hole.
Anyway, click here for an article about the many racial atrocities committed in "Red Summer," 1919. Warning: it's painful to read.
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