James T. on Tulsa

Kudos to Sykes for having launched the career of James T. Harris.   It's part of a fast-fading legacy.

Harris moved from multi-seasoned Milwaukee to mono-seasoned Phoenix, and had a couple of very smart observations on the Tulsa Massacre.

...James T. Harris (Phoenix-based KFYI, 550 AM) was asked why he thought the Tulsa, Okla., race riot of exactly 100 years earlier had been widely ignored until recently.

Harris, a black man who previously was a high-school history teacher, said that the instructional materials he himself had used lacked this information, so he had to come up with it for his own students.

But why had it been lacking? Harris said there were facts that the establishment preferred to ignore, such as the role played by the Ku Klux Klan because it was allied with the Democratic Party.

(Indeed, the intellectual “progressive” Democrat Woodrow Wilson, an open racist, had ended his eight years as president of the U.S. only three months before the Tulsa riot.)

The riot also attacked the prosperity of “Black Wall Street,” Harris said, the local black entrepreneurs and successful middle class who, he pointed out, had attained their status without the government programs that today are declared to be absolutely necessary for black advancement....

James T.'s explanation of that historical lacuna make sense.  They're probably not the only reasons, and it would be interesting to know what the others are.