US President Joe Biden marked the 101st anniversary Wednesday of a race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma that targeted Black residents and decimated a once vibrant African-American neighborhood.
Biden noted the vicious assault resulted in not only a major loss of life and property but was a blow to Black prosperity. He emphasized that the US "cannot bury pain and trauma forever."
"Homes, businesses, and churches were burned. A generation of Black wealth was extinguished," Biden said in a statement.
"In the years that followed, even as Greenwood worked to rebuild, discrimination was systematically embedded in our laws and policies, locking Black residents out of opportunity and ensuring that the attack on Black families and Black wealth persisted across generations," he added.
The details of the white mob's assault of the Greenwood neighborhood, which was then known as the "Black Wall Street," remain murky to this day. But it stems from allegations that a Black male teen assaulted a white female teen in an elevator.
The two-day 1921 race massacre that began on the night of May 31 left at least 100 victims dead, and scores injured when a rampaging white mob attacked the predominantly Black affluent neighborhood.
More than 1,200 homes were burned, effectively destroying years of progress. The number of dead and injured remains unknown with estimates varying wildly.
Mass graves are in the process of being exhumation to this day.
The mayhem unleashed 101 years ago also marks the only time in American history that an aerial assault was recorded on a US city as private planes were used by the mob to rain bombs and gunfire down on Greenwood.
