On this edition of In Black America, producer/host John L. Hanson Jr. speaks with Anneliese M. Bruner, the great-granddaughter of Tulsa race massacre survivor Mary E. Jones Parrish, and author of the afterword of The Nation Must Awake.
On the evening of May 31, 1921, Parrish was reading in her home when the Tulsa race massacre began. Parrish’s young daughter, Florence Mary, called the journalist and teacher to the window. “Mother,” she said, “I see men with guns.”
Bruner talks about her great-grandmother’s first-person account, along with the recollections of dozens of others compiled immediately following the Tulsa massacre. She also discusses why this book is important, what she felt when her father gave it to her and how the elements of its racial injustices are still replayed in the streets of America today.