This op-ed by People For the American Way President Ben Jealous was published in The Nation on June 15, 2021.
History is contested because the telling of history is powerful.
President Joe Biden brought eloquent leadership to a national commemoration of the 100th anniversary of a massacre in Tulsa, Okla., this month. In 1921, hundreds of Black men, women, and children were murdered, and a thriving community was destroyed in a singular racialized mass murder.