The Nation Must Awake is Mary E. Jones Parrish’s first-person account of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which she compiled along with the recollections of several dozen others. With meticulous attention to detail that transports readers to those fateful days, Parrish documents the magnitude of the loss of human life and property in Tulsa’s Black community.
Spurred by word that a young Black man was about to be lynched for stepping on a white woman’s foot, a three-day riot erupted that saw the death of hundreds of Black Oklahomans and the destruction of the Greenwood district, a prosperous, primarily Black area known nationally as Black Wall Street. The murdered were buried in mass graves. Thousands were left homeless, and millions of dollars in Black-owned properties were burned to the ground. The incident, which was hidden from history for decades, is the single worst episode of racial violence in the United States.
The Nation Must Awake is being published for a wide audience for the first time. We talked with Anneliese M. Bruner, Parrish’s great-granddaughter, who wrote the afterword.
Q. When did you first hear of the Tulsa race massacre?
A. I was home in California for the 1993 holiday season, and my father, who was Mary Parrish’s grandson, took me aside to say that I was the matriarch of the family. He gave me a copy of the 1923 book and told me his maternal grandmother had written it, but he didn’t say anything about the Tulsa disaster. I had not learned about this pivotal event in any American history class. He wanted to see if there was anything I could do with the story, to help get it out there.
Q. In their introduction, John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth write that there seemed to be a kind of amnesia in Tulsa about the massacre. When did you realize how important Mary Jones Parrish’s book was for preserving history?
A. We have more emotional distance from it, and the people who endured or perpetrated it are dead. It is easier for us to talk about it than it would have been for either group. Certainly the trauma response for survivors was high. And in concert with the perpetrators’ apparent lack of accountability, the political terror mechanism would have worked to silence people for decades. My father didn’t talk about the massacre even after he gave me the book, and I took my cue from him. Justice continued to be denied, and I can imagine that people grew weary of talking about it and revisiting the trauma narrative that was without resolution. Today we understand trauma differently and the importance of telling your story and being heard and understood. For the first time, the stories of so many are being told and explained for a broad audience, and some of those who survived have a voice at last among all the people. The grief process had no outlet, so I believe people bottled it up. But unexpressed grief and rage are expressed in myriad ways.
Q. What would you like non-Black people to remember as they read this book?
A. I would like everyone, especially non-Black people, to understand that Tulsa did not happen in a vacuum and without contemporaneous political context. The world had emerged from war, a major pandemic had swept the globe, many Black people had become educated in the years since enslavement, and the promise of full civic participation was something they embraced. They had a self-sufficient and proud community. They were living the American dream of reward for hard work. But the American nightmare of racialized animus and envy took that from them in a moment of White rage. Absent that pervasive and defining element in American society, where could our country be? One step forward for us has consistently been met with backlash, as the great Nina Simone immortalized in her song “Backlash Blues.” The challenge is to cultivate a humanity within that makes an event like Tulsa impossible, not to ask what Black people can or should do.
Q. In your afterword, you essentially pose the question, Why isn’t Mary Jones Parrish remembered for her contributions to preserving a major historical event? Do you have an answer to this?
A. It is common for works by unknown or less known people to be appropriated by those who have a platform. Because of her sex, her race, and the systemic suppression of the Tulsa story, Mary Parrish has not been centered over the decades. Other names emerged and were rightfully celebrated for their work on Tulsa, but not hers. And her work showed that she was a capable spokesperson for herself. We can only ascribe her near erasure to patriarchy and the general silencing of the Tulsa story. Had the capture and dissemination of the story been valued, Mary Parrish would have been a more pivotal figure.
Q. How has the Tulsa race massacre affected America, and particularly the African American community?
A. Knowledge of the massacre provides a roadmap for a country still grappling with its sense of self. It is not open for debate that there is a huge gap between our ideals and our practice. With issues as fundamental to democracy as voting and civil rights still being litigated, square one is catching up with us again. The urgency of asking the country to confront and reconcile the Tulsa story mirrors the task of asking it to face the long-standing bias, abuse, and violence ingrained in our institutions. When resilience is lauded but a reckoning for the abuse that necessitates that resilience is not required, justice is not truly served. African Americans need support in our struggle to heal ourselves and move forward, and we should not be shy about expecting and asking for it in whatever form.
Q. Do you know anything about Mary Jones Parrish’s process of making this book?
A. I have heard her work called recollections, probably because it wasn’t printed until 1923. But I take issue with that assessment. We have to remember that Mary Parrish was a master of the secretarial sciences and knew shorthand thoroughly and completely. I am confident that she took her contemporaneous notes in shorthand and was able to transcribe the interviews on her typewriter verbatim from reporting done when the events were fresh in the minds of her interviewees. The ads in the 1923 book are like the ones in the church programs we grew up seeing when an event needed to be financed. It likely took time to assemble the funds to pay for publishing. Mary Parrish’s agency and intrepidness were remarkable as she persisted in bringing her book to publication.
Q. John Hope Franklin ends his foreword with the statement that Tulsa has never truly confronted the massacre and its implications. How do you think this might be remedied?
A. Tulsa, like America, needs to embrace all of its history, not just the flattering parts. That kind of self-examination is only possible from a place of humility. Tulsa, like America, needs to decide if it is big enough to humble itself, apologize, and make amends. The sequelae of injustice and inequality will never “be remedied.” Actual people have to decide to remedy it. Only with that mindset can Tulsa and America begin to construct a way of being that lives up to their promise. We have the resources to do it, but marshaling the will requires that most difficult of moral attributes—authentic humility.
Q. Mary Jones Parrish sums up the first part of the book with a section titled “Lessons of the Disaster.” Do you think the lessons she outlines still apply today?
A. The author warns that unchecked mob rule threatens to destroy the peace of a civilized society through violence and disregard for what should be intrinsic social norms. Beyond that, the complicity of corrupt elected officials and uneven enforcement of the law are corrosive to the social order because they undermine the social contract that requires people to behave according to their best instincts. She names Russia and Europe as places where the social order collapsed, with Bolshevism and fascism ascending. We should absolutely heed this warning today.
Q. What kind of social and cultural damage is caused by forgetting an event as significant as the Tulsa race massacre?
A. A moral void continues to be possible when such a history is ignored and erased. The massacre is an American crucible wherein a profound reimagining of our country can happen. It is a discrete event where we can find issues of race, class, governance, capitalism, nativism, law enforcement, media, education, community, and so on all colliding. Honestly assessing the forces that led to Tulsa provides a microcosm of the American social and political landscape. Heeding the lesson of Tulsa will be key to articulating a vision for a better America.
