Coincidence? We think not:
Mr. Trump will return to the campaign trail on Juneteenth [June 19], an annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States and celebrated as African-Americans’ Independence Day. After weeks of protests over the killing of George Floyd in police custody, protests and marches are already planned this year for the holiday in many states.
In 1921, Tulsa was the site of one of the country’s bloodiest outbreaks of racist violence, when white mobs attacked black citizens and businesses with guns and explosives dropped from airplanes.
The announcement of the date and location of Mr. Trump’s rally led to widespread condemnation from Democratic officials, many of them black.
“Tulsa was the site of the worst racist violence in American history,” said Representative Val Demings of Florida. “The president’s speech there on Juneteenth is a message to every Black American: more of the same.”
Although often referred to as a "race riot," it's more accurate to see the events of May 31- June 1, 1921, as a massacre of black citizens of Tulsa by racist white mobs. Hundreds of blacks were murdered in the orgy of racial violence that destroyed Greenwood District, a prosperous black enclave in the city. The murderers, looters and burners were the "good" white folk of Tulsa. (You can read more about the massacre here.)“This isn’t just a wink to white supremacists — he’s throwing them a welcome home party,” said Senator Kamala Harris of California.
Not surprisingly, Bunker Boy's decided to make his bed exclusively with his base of white supremacists (after all, they already have the sheets). As is more often than not the case, he utterly misreads the country's mood in this moment in history. And as Eugene Robinson said earlier this week, Trump's "a human cleaver who knows only how to inflame and divide." So, he's going to continue to bumble his way, all the while inflaming and dividing, into a landslide defeat in November. We're more and more sure of it by the day.
(Photo: Mt. Zion Baptist Church burning during the May 31- June 1, 1921 white- on- black race massacre in the black Greenwood District of Tulsa, OK - Associated Press. There are more photos, including some grisly ones, at the link above.)
