June 3, 2021 1:03 pm A contemporary photograph shows the ruins of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Okla., after a white mob and local law enforcement attacked and killed hundreds of the neighborhood's Black residents, June 1921.(Library of Congress) Advertisement (JTA) — My grandpa once told me a story about when my great-grandparents were on a steamship emigrating from Ukraine to Cuba in the 1920s, shortly before my grandpa was born. As the story went, my great-grandmother saw a Black man for the first time and she screamed and hid. My grandpa told the story to me only once, when I was probably about 10 years old, but the image of my great-grandmother seeing a Black man and screaming stuck with me.