Remembering the Tulsa Race Massacre

Fierce contributor Anneliese M. Bruner is a writer and great-granddaughter of Tulsa race massacre survivor and author Mary E. Jones Parrish, whose contemporaneous eyewitness account, "The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921," helped to preserve the truth of what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from May 31 to June 1, 1921.
Bruner will be the 2022 Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture speaker at Trinity University in Washington, D.C. The event will be live-streamed at 7 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 20, on Trinity’s Tiger Network.
"The first time I looked at the book my father gave me in the 1990s, this photo spilled out. It was neatly folded into the front of the book, waiting to reveal the devastation that hiwte vigilantes unleashed on Tulsa's Black Wall Street in 1921," Bruner said.
"I marveled over it, eager to know what it meant in my life. On learning that the book's author, Mary E. Jones Parrish, was my great-grandmother, I felt confused and betrayed that no one had told me about her, even though she died well after I was born.
"My quest to know more about her life and work has been a central part of my life since. Her tenacity in preserving her own life and the life of her young daughter, Mary Florence Parrish (Bruner), made my life possible. I will forever honor her."

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