Tom Hanks is urging Americans to learn about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and stop efforts to whitewash American history, writing in a guest essay for The New York Times.
June 4, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
Falling Awake, 2018Credit.Richard Finkelstein/Robert Mann Gallery
By Tom Hanks
Mr. Hanks is an actor and filmmaker whose projects include historical works like “Band of Brothers,” “The Pacific” and “John Adams” and documentaries about America from the 1960s to the 2000s.
I consider myself a lay historian who talks way too much at dinner parties, leading with questions like, “Do you know that the Erie Canal is the reason Manhattan became the economic center of America?” Some of the work I do is making historically based entertainment. Did you know our second president once defended in court British soldiers who fired on and killed colonial Bostonians and got most of them off?
2021-06-04 15:05:49 GMT2021-06-04 23:05:49(Beijing Time) Xinhua English
NEW YORK, June 4 (Xinhua) The truth about the mass killing of Black people in Tulsa, and the repeated violence by some white Americans against Black Americans, were systematically ignored in the United States, a phenomenon that must be mended and reversed, said U.S. actor and filmmaker Tom Hanks. For all my study, I never read a page of any school history book about how, in 1921, a mob of white people burned down a place called Black Wall Street, killed as many as 300 of its Black citizens and displaced thousands of Black Americans who lived in Tulsa, Okla, he said in an guest essay published online by The New York Times on Friday.
NEW YORK, June 4 (Xinhua) The truth about the mass killing of Black people in Tulsa, and the repeated violence by some white Americans against Black American