Keynote Presentation: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Tulsa Race Massacre

DeNeen L. Brown, a reporter at The Washington Post, will discuss the history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the Red Summer of 1919, when a reign of racist terror massacres and lynchings swept more than 25 cities across the United States. The Red Summer of 1919 set the stage for the Tulsa Race Massacre, which historians call the single worst incident of racist violence committed against Black Americans in U.S. history. After Brown’s story on the Tulsa Race Massacre was published on the front page of The Washington Post in 2018, the mayor of Tulsa announced the city would reopen an investigation into the search for mass graves that may contain bodies of Black people killed during the massacre. In 2020, scientists working on the investigation discovered a mass grave in the city’s public cemetery.