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.
"My experience was common: (U.S.) History was mostly written by white people about white people like me, while the history of Black people -- including the horrors of Tulsa -- was too often left out," he added.
Tulsa was never more than a city on the prairie. The Oklahoma Land Rush got some paragraphs in one of those school years, but the 1921 burning out of the Black population that lived there was never mentioned, according to the essay.
"Today, I think historically based fiction entertainment must portray the burden of racism in our nation for the sake of the art form's claims to verisimilitude and authenticity. Until recently, the Tulsa Race Massacre was not seen in movies and TV shows," said Hanks.
Thanks to several projects currently streaming, like "Watchmen" and "Lovecraft Country," this is no longer the case. "Like other historical documents that map our cultural DNA, they will reflect who we really are and help determine what is our full history, what we must remember," he added.
Schools in the United States now should teach the truth about Tulsa and stop the battle to whitewash curriculums to avoid discomfort for students, according to the essay. Enditem
