The Burning

"On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous. Thirty-four square blocks of Tulsa's Greenwood community, then known as the "Negro Wall Street of America," were reduced to smoldering rubble.". "And now, eighty years later, the death toll of what is known as the Tulsa Race Riot is more difficult to pinpoint. Conservative estimates put the number of dead at about one hundred (75 percent of the victims are believed to have been black), but the actual number of casualties could be triple that. The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, formed two years ago to determine exactly what happened, has recommended that restitution to the historic Greenwood community would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional as well as physical scars of this horrific incident in our shared past.". "The Burning re-creates the town of Greenwood at the height of its prosperity; explores the currents of hatred, racism, and mistrust between Tulsa's black residents and the neighboring white population; recounts the events leading up to and including the holocaust at Greenwood. Finally, it documents the subsequent silence that surrounded the tragedy."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.