The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
At the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Trinity University Press released a new edition of the contemporaneous account of the catastrophe that intrepid teacher and reporter Mary Jones Parrish wrote and published. Although Parrish has largely been overlooked and ignored by public history, scholars of the massacre and of the time were aware of the significance of her work. Parrish's account is the primary source for all scholarship about the subject of the massacre to this day. The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 records the individual stories of other survivors; makes a partial financial accounting of the losses sustained by Black businesses and citizens; addresses the global impression that such a gross violation of democratic ideals creates; lays out her own analysis of the causes and remedies for such violence; and calls on the country to end mob violence and terrorism against its Black citizens. Parrish's great-granddaughter, writer Anneliese Bruner, composed a powerful essay for a new afterword, and the foreword and introduction were provided by Tulsa-born scholar Dr. Scott Ellsworth and renowned scholar of Black history, Dr. John Hope Franklin, posthumously.
Originally titled Events of the Tulsa Disaster, the family heirloom that became The Nation Must Awake had a long journey to republication in 2021.
Bruner was sitting at home on January 6, 2021 scrolling through what was then Twitter to see the news of the day. What she saw shocked her: People were scaling the walls of the Capitol Building, trying to enter the building where the vote in the 2020 Presidential Election was being certified to declare Joseph R. Biden Jr. President. Supporters of the outgoing president, Donald Trump. were hell bent on overturning the results of an election that their candidate lost. Bruner, a Washington, DC resident, thought immediately of 1921 Tulsa and how a mob, displeased with due process, ignored the law and sought its own perverted version of justice by trying to lynch 19-year-old Dick Rowland who had been arrested for an alleged assault (Rowland was later found innocent) on elevator operator Sarah Paige. Bruner wrote an article for The Washington Post that drew parallels between the disturbances in the two cities.
That article brought her together with Trinity University Press and The Nation Must Awake was published that same year.