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In Person – Scott Ellsworth
November 12, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Join Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice in a discussion of the suppressed history of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In an interview with TCC Assistant Professor of History Kevin Clayton, author and educator Scott Ellsworth explains how the massacre was covered up and the determined efforts of individuals to ensure that this history did not simply disappear, including the on-going efforts to uncover unmarked graves.
Space is limited and advanced registration is strongly encouraged for this free event. Visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-scott-ellworth-tickets-185092084407?aff=erelexpmlt to register.
About The Ground Breaking
- 2021 National Book Award Longlist
- 2022 Carnegie Medal Nonfiction Longlist
- One of The New York Times’ “11 New Books We Recommend This Week”
- One of Oprah Daily’s “20 of the Best Books to Pick Up This May”
- One of The Oklahoman‘s “15 Books to Help You Learn About the Tulsa Race Massacre as the 100-Year Anniversary Approaches”
- A The Week book of the week
As seen in documentaries on the History Channel, CNN, and Lebron James’s SpringHill Productions
More than one thousand homes and businesses. Restaurants and movie theaters, churches and doctors’ offices, a hospital, a public library, a post office. Looted, burned, and bombed from the air.
Over the course of less than twenty-four hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map–and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than fifty years. But there were some secrets that would not die.
A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre. It also unearths the lost history of how the massacre was covered up, and of the courageous individuals who fought to keep the story alive. Most important, it recounts the ongoing archaeological saga and the search for the unmarked graves of the victims of the massacre, and of the fight to win restitution for the survivors and their families.
Both a forgotten chronicle from the nation’s past and a story ripped from today’s headlines, The Ground Breaking is a page-turning reflection on how we, as Americans, must wrestle with the parts of our history that have been buried for far too long.
Scott Ellsworth is the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Game, winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He has written about American history for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, he is also the author of The World Beneath Their Feet and Death in a Promised Land, his groundbreaking account of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Scott lives in Ann Arbor, where he teaches in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.
