Sunday, 21 June_Thirteen jars filled with ash and dirt and bone rest in the basement of Tulsa’s Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church, an unsettled repose for the victims of a nearly century-old massacre that still haunts the Black residents of Oklahoma’s second-largest city.
There are no graves for Eliza Talbot, Ed Adams or 11 others. Their bodies were lost, along with hundreds, when a white mob killed and burned its way through the city’s Greenwood neighborhood in 1921, at the time one of the largest and wealthiest Black communities in the United States.
To the dismay of community leaders here and residents, and just weeks after a May 31 vigil to mark the massacre's 99th anniversary, President Donald Trump plans his first campaign rally since March mere blocks away from Greenwood on Saturday.
The rally will occur a day after Juneteenth here which commemorates when a Union general went to Texas in 1865 and announced the Emancipation Proclamation had freed enslaved people, more than two years after it was issued in 1863.
“Trump’s presence will cast a huge shadow over these events,” said Rev. Robert Turner of the Vernon A.M.E. church, which was rebuilt after it was burned down during the 1921 attack.
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