1921 Survivors of the Tulsa-Greenwood Race Massacre Testify Before Today’s Congressional Hearing

 

Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa-Greenwood Race Massacre, including 107-year-old Viola Fletcher,  100-year-old Hughes Van Ellis and 106-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle, testified before a  hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties today.  Their painful testimony of the atrocities committed at that time and its erasure from historical memory brought to light the importance of our current issue on the “Ethics of Memory.”   

Here is a link to a video of the testimony given at the congressional committee hearing:  Continuing Injustice: The Centennial of theTulsa-Greenwood Race Massacre

House panel advances bill HR 40 to form a reparations commission

 

As we continue to publish articles for our most recent issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy on “The Ethics of Memory: What Does it Mean to Apologize for Historical Wrongs,” we wanted to alert our readers to another attempt by the Congress to advance a bill to form a reparations commission to study the lingering effects of slavery and the social and economic injustices that followed.   The bill that was voted on by the House Judiciary Committee also proposes a national apology for the harm that was done. Readers will remember our earlier posts where we reported on earlier attempts to pass such a bill.  We will continue to follow this more recent attempt in later posts.

See “In a historic vote, a House panel advances a bill to form a reparations commission” in the New York Times, April 14, 2021.