
Last week, the actor Tom Hanks responded to calls for a more robust accounting of America’s racial history by penning a piece in the New York Times about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. “For all my study,” Hanks conceded, “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.”