The Ground Breaking by Scott Ellsworth

THE GROUND BREAKING by Scott Ellsworth is subtitled “An American City and Its Search for Justice” and is about the Tulsa Race Massacre and its aftermath. Ellsworth, an award-winning author and formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, currently teaches at the University of Michigan. He begins this text by describing Greenwood, Tulsa’s African American district in 1921, as “a wonder, a living and breathing Black edition of the American Dream. But … it is also a mindset, a bearing, a way of engaging with the world. In an age when people of color are constantly being told that they are lesser beings, here is a community who knows that they are just as good as anyone.” In his first chapter, Ellsworth details the events of late May and June 1, 1921 – the mob violence, use of incendiary bombs to set the district on fire, the looting and killing. He then turns to the efforts he made (over 50 years later in the late 1970s) to learn about those events, including interviews and scouring primary sources like police records and newspapers from the time and a written account by Greenwood resident Mary Parrish, “easily the single most important source on the history of the riot.” Other sections of the text focus on efforts at rebuilding, searching for the graves of those who died, obtaining reparations, and getting wider attention. The Washington Post published the first national story (after 1921) in 1982 after Ellsworth’s Death in a Promised Land was published and it was more than a dozen years after that - and after the Oklahoma City Bombing - until the state legislature agreed to fund a Commission to look into the riots in Tulsa. A harrowing and truly fascinating account, THE GROUND BREAKING contains copious notes and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal ("A must-read for all who are interested in how history continues to impact the present"), and Publishers Weekly.