MOTHER JONES (1837 – 1930)

"Whatever the fight, don't be ladylike."These are the words of the woman Teddy Roosevelt once called "the most dangerous woman in America" - when she was 87 years old.

Mary Harris Jones, or "Mother Jones", was born May 1, 1837, to tenant farmers Richard Harris and Ellen Cotter Harris in Cork, Ireland. . Fleeing the horrors of the potato famine, her family resettled in Toronto when she was just 10 years old. She trained to be a seamstress and a teacher. Her training as a teacher led first to a position in a convent in Monroe, Michigan, then in Chicago and finally in Memphis Tennessee, where, on the eve of the Civil War, she married George E. Jones, a union foundry worker and started a family.

But in 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept through the city, taking the lives of her husband and all four children. A widow at 30, she moved back to Chicago and built a successful dressmaking business — only to lose everything in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Jones then threw herself into the city's bustling labor movement, where she worked in obscurity for the next 20 years. By the turn of the century, she emerged as a charismatic speaker and one of the country's leading labor organizers, co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

She traveled the country to wherever there was labor struggle, sometimes evading company security by wading the riverbed into town, earning her the nickname "The Miner's Angel." She used storytelling, the Bible, humor, and even coarse language to reach a crowd. She said: "I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I said, if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator." Jones also had little patience for hesitation, volunteering to lead a strike "if there were no men present."

By the age of 60 Jones had created the persona of Mother Jones. She claimed to be older than she was and began wearing outdated, black dresses. She referred to the male workers for whom she advocated as “her boys”.

A passionate critic of child labor, she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York with banners reading, "We want to go to school and not the mines!" At the age of 88, she published a first-person account of her time in the labor movement called The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).

She died in Silver Springs, Maryland, on November 30,1930, at the age of 93 and is buried in a miners' cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois.

MOTHER JONES, the magazine, was first published in 1976. It was, of course, named after Mary Harris Jones, also known as Mother Jones, the Irish-American trade union activist, socialist advocate, and avid opponent of child labor.

For more about Mother Jones go to  to  www.motherjones.com/about    You can read a more extensive biography of this remarkable woman.

Top: Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jovita Idar, Maya Angelou
Middle: Gerda Lerner, Gloria Steinem, Winona La Duke, Lillian Hellman
Bottom: Betty Soskin, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Marjory Stoneman Douglas ​

The National Women’s History Alliance, which spearheaded the movement for MARCH being declared National Women’s History Month, has announced the women’s history theme for 2023, “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories.”

Throughout 2023, the NWHA will encourage recognition of women, past and present, who have been active in all forms of media and storytelling including print, radio, TV, stage, screen, blogs, podcasts, and more. The timely theme honors women in every community who have devoted their lives and talents to producing art, pursuing truth, and reflecting the human condition decade after decade.

From the earliest storytellers through pioneering journalists, our experiences have been captured by a wide variety of artists and teachers.  These include authors, songwriters, scholars, playwrights, performers, and grandmothers throughout time. Women have long been instrumental in passing on our heritage in word and in print to communicate the lessons of those who came before us. Women’s stories, and the larger human story, expand our understanding and strengthen our connections with each other.

As in previous years, the Alliance, which is centered in Santa Rosa, California, will encourage local communities throughout the country to use the year’s theme to guide their own celebrations.  The NWHA will popularize national efforts through on-line celebrations, a special magazine and thematic products that recognize and honor these brave, accomplished and influential women who told – and continue to tell – our stories.  Today and over the years ahead, their dedication and shared desire to give voice to the voiceless are critical to keeping us informed, entertained and aware.

For more stories of remarkable women, see HERSTORY on womensvoicesmedia.org

FLASH  OF  GENIUS

  By Anastasiia Carrie

 A few years ago, Jean Rosenbluth was visiting her mother at a nursing home in Pasadena. The occasion was a holiday party, and Jean and her husband were seated with her mother and another couple. It came up in conversation that the man sharing the table was a history of science professor, specializing in physics.

“Oh, my mother was a physicist,” Jean said as she introduced her mother. “This is Arianna Rosenbluth.”

The professor was stunned. “Wait, the Arianna Rosenbluth?” Arianna smiled shyly and kept eating her lemon meringue pie.

Arianna Wright Rosenbluth, who received a master’s degree in physics from Radcliffe College in 1947, was one of five scientists who created the revolutionary Metropolis algorithm—the first practical implementation of what are now known as the Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, go-to tools for solving large, complex mathematical and engineering problems.

Over the years, these methods have been used to simulate both quantum physics and markets, predict genetic predisposition to certain illnesses, forecast the outcomes of political conflicts, and model the spread of infectious diseases. It was Rosenbluth who found a way to get early computers to use the Markov Chain method, creating a blueprint that others followed.

“Arianna’s impact would last for a long time,” says Xihong Lin, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who used Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to analyze a large set of COVID-19 data from Wuhan and to calculate the infectiousness of the virus. The methods have also helped specialists evaluate the effectiveness of quarantine and stay-at-home measures.

“Without Rosenbluth, I don’t think the field of Markov Chain Monte Carlo would go that far,” says Lin, referring to the role of the Radcliffe-trained scientist in enabling wide use of the tool across disciplines. “Implementation is critically important. That’s why her contribution is a landmark and really should be emphasized—should be honored.”

The paper that Rosenbluth coauthored—along with her then-husband, Marshall Rosenbluth, Edward and Augusta Teller, and Nicholas Metropolis—was published in 1953, but the algorithm’s origin story remained a mystery for five decades. In 2003, Marshall shared his memory of the achievement during a conference celebrating its 50th anniversary. The researchers developed the tool to illuminate how atoms rearranged themselves as solids melted, he said. Marshall did most of the conceptual work, and Arianna translated their idea into a computer algorithm—a task that required a fundamental understanding of physics and computer science, and also creativity.

By all accounts, Rosenbluth, who died of COVID-19 complications in December at age 93, was brilliant. She earned her PhD in physics at Harvard at 21 and in her short career worked under two physicists who went on to earn Nobel Prizes. And yet she effectively quit science in her late 20s, leaving her job at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to be a stay-at-home mother. She rarely spoke about her time in the lab—although she sometimes mentioned to her children how irritating it was that her ideas were overlooked because she was a woman trying to make it in a male-dominated field. Other times, she would lovingly describe MANIAC I—the Los Alamos machine that she used for computing the Metropolis algorithm.

“She was ahead of her time,” says Pierre E. Jacob, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences and a professor of statistics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, whose work involves Markov chains and probability modeling. In his syllabus, he renamed the Metropolis algorithm the Rosenbluth algorithm after reading about Arianna’s death.

“Better late than never,” he says.

Star on the Rise

Growing up in Houston, Arianna Wright was a mystery to her parents.

“Her mom and dad had this genius child, and they kind of didn’t know what to do with her,” says Mary Rosenbluth, one of Arianna’s four children. Leffie (Woods) Wright was confused by her quiet and introspective daughter, who didn’t care for fashion and rules but loved reading, especially fantasy books like L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. Mary recalls a newspaper article among her mother’s things that described Arianna as a child genius.

“It kind of struck me,” she says. “Here’s this girl growing up in suburban Houston, and she was just so different from everybody else.”

Arianna received a full-ride scholarship to Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston and took a bus to her classes. She earned her bachelor’s when she was 18, with honors in physics and mathematics. During her college days, she fenced against men as well as women, winning city and state championships. She qualified for the Summer Olympics in 1944, but World War II led to the cancellation of the games. She qualified again four years later but couldn’t afford to travel to London.

At Harvard, Arianna was rejected by one potential advisor because he didn’t take female PhD students, says Alan Rosenbluth, Arianna’s oldest child and a retired physicist. That was not uncommon. “Women were discouraged every step of the way,” says Margaret W. Rossiter, a Cornell historian of women in science. But Arianna forged ahead, in 1949 becoming just the fifth woman to earn a PhD in physics from Harvard.

She accepted a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Atomic Energy Commission to study at Stanford University, where she met Marshall at a tea party. He valued intelligence in people above all, says Mary, and Arianna was clearly very intelligent. They married in 1951 and moved to Los Alamos, the national laboratory in New Mexico that was established during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb.

Los Alamos and Family Life

At Los Alamos, Arianna became adept at using MANIAC I, a big, fragile, and hard-to-operate machine that belonged to the first generation of computers. Computational jobs at the time were considered clerical and usually held by women. Arianna stood out.

“She had an exceptional background,” says James E. Gubernatis, a retired Los Alamos physicist who has written several articles about the history of the Metropolis algorithm. “Very few people knew how to code these machines, and fewer had PhDs.”

As Arianna developed the skills to operate MANIAC I, she worked closely with scientists to translate their ideas into something a computer could execute. Her gifts were complex and rare. To make these old machines do anything useful, says Nicholas Lewis, a historian at Los Alamos, one needed to be creative. “It’s really a testament to just how smart and inventive people like Arianna Rosenbluth had to be to get useful physics out of these very primitive machines.”

In 1952, Arianna verified analytic calculations for the first full-scale test of a thermonuclear bomb—a project on which Los Alamos was concentrating much of its energy and resources. A year later, she collaborated with Marshall, the Tellers, and Metropolis on “Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines,” published in the Journal of Chemical Physics. The groundbreaking innovation at the heart of the work became known by the name of the contributor who just happened to be the first listed, says Gubernatis. The authors of the paper moved on and never used the algorithm again. Arianna became pregnant with Alan and quit her job. When an opportunity opened up for Marshall in San Diego, the couple left Los Alamos in the past.

“Here was obviously a very talented individual who didn’t really have the kind of career where that talent could be displayed,” says Gubernatis. “Unfortunately, that was the way things were at that particular time.”

Years later, when the family lived in Princeton, New Jersey, Arianna did independent research on mathematical knots. When Alan asked her if she wanted to publish her work, she said no—the thrill of solving a problem was enough. Mary remembers her mother as a voracious reader whose life of the mind extended to penetrating insights on the fiction of J. D. Salinger. “I guess we didn’t realize when we were growing up with her just how brilliant she was,” she says. “Just way above our heads.”

After her divorce from Marshall, in 1978, Arianna moved back to California, where she lived close to Jean.

“In a sense, she was a victim of the era that she was born into,” Jean says. “Women just didn’t work after they had a family. I think my mother really loved her work, and having to give it up was a big blow for her. As much as she loved her family, I think she really missed her work. I think as a result, none of us children were that close to her growing up, simply because she was not the world’s happiest person at that time.”

Still, Arianna seemed content in her later years. She read, traveled, and enjoyed birdwatching. When her health started to decline, she moved to assisted living. The letters and diaries Jean found while packing up her mother’s house went into the trash, as Arianna had instructed.  "Some people would probably kill me, but that’s what she wanted.”  She also found notebooks filled with math problems and computer codes from the independent research Arianna had done over the years. Some of those Jean kept.

Anastasiia Carrier is a New York–based freelance journalist and a recent graduate from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

 Published in Harvard’s Radcliffe Magazine, May, 20, 2021

For more stories of remarkable women, see HERSTORY on womensvoicesmedia.org

After teaching an evening typewriting class, Mary E. Jones Parrish was losing herself in a good book when her daughter Florence Mary noticed something strange outside. “Mother,” Florence said, “I see men with guns.” It was May 31, 1921, in Tulsa. A large group of armed Black men had congregated below Parrish’s apartment, situated in the city’s thriving Black business district, known as Greenwood. Stepping outside, Parrish learned that a Black teen-ager named Dick Rowland had been arrested on a false allegation of attempted rape, and that her neighbors were planning to march to the courthouse to try to protect him.

The thirty-one-year-old was an eyewitness to the Tulsa Race Massacre, which left as many as three hundred people dead and more than a thousand homes destroyed. Though Parrish had previously found success in Tulsa as an educator and entrepreneur, the massacre compelled her to become a journalist and author, writing down her own experiences and collecting the accounts of many others. Her book “Events of the Tulsa Disaster,” published in 1923, was the first and most visceral long-form account of how Greenwood residents experienced the massacre.

When the attack faded into obscurity in the ensuing decades, so did Parrish and her small red book. But, since the nineteen-seventies, as the event slowly gained national attention, Parrish’s work became a vital primary source for other people’s writings. Yet her life remained unknown, even as the facts that she had gathered—such as several firsthand accounts of airplanes being used to surveil or attack Greenwood—became foundational to the nation’s understanding of the massacre. She was, quite literally, relegated to the footnotes of history.

As the centennial of the race massacre approaches, a raft of documentaries, along with a new thirty-million-dollar museum, are poised to make the story of Greenwood more widely known—and financially lucrative—than it has ever been. But the Black Tulsans who preserved the community’s history risk being forgotten, particularly the women who did the foundational heavy lifting. It’s not just Parrish—Eddie Faye Gates, an Oklahoma native and longtime Tulsa educator, continued Parrish’s work by interviewing massacre survivors more than seventy years later, recording their perspectives in books and video testimonials.

History lessons draw power from their perceived objective authority, but if you drill to the core of almost any narrative you will find a conversation between an interviewer and a subject. In Greenwood, Black women such as Parrish and Gates were the ones having those conversations. Now descendants of both women are working to insure that their legacies are recognized. “She was a Black woman in a patriarchal, racist society, and I think bringing all those elements together tells you exactly how she’s been erased,” Anneliese Bruner, a great-granddaughter of Parrish, said. “It’s convenient to use her work, but not to magnify and amplify her person.”

In 1921, Mary E. Jones Parrish was a relative newcomer to Tulsa. Born Mary Elizabeth Jones in Mississippi in 1890, she spent some time in Oklahoma in her early adulthood, giving birth to her daughter Florence in the all-Black town of Boley, in 1914. (In 1912, she had married Simon Parrish.) Soon after having Florence, Parrish migrated to Rochester, New York, where she studied shorthand at the Rochester Business Institute.

Parrish was called back to Oklahoma, where her mother was ailing in the town of McAlester. Six months after Parrish arrived, her mother passed away. Around 1919, 

Parrish settled in Tulsa, attracted by the friendly faces and collaborative enterprises in Greenwood. The neighborhood was home to two movie theatres, a jeweller, a small garment factory, a hospital, a public library, and many restaurants, dance halls, and corner dives. In her book, Parrish describes the thrill of stepping off the Frisco railroad and into a world of Black-owned businesses and well-kept homes. She dubbed the community the “Negro’s Wall Street,” one of the first documeted uses of a now iconic phrase. “I came not to Tulsa as many came, lured by the dream of making money and bettering myself in the financial world,” she wrote, “but because of the wonderful co-operation I observed among our people.”

She opened the Mary Jones Parrish School of Natural Education on the neighborhood’s most popular thoroughfare, Greenwood Avenue, and offered classes in typewriting and shorthand. She was one of many female entrepreneurs in the neighborhood who never received the same level of renown as their male counterparts. “When we talk about Greenwood, it usually is a very male-focussed story,” Brandy Thomas Wells, a professor at Oklahoma State University who specializes in Black women’s history, told me. “The day-to-day activities of those businesses depended upon the invisible labor of women.”

During the massacre, Parrish lost everything. But, instead of leaving town, she remained in Greenwood. As the neighborhood smoldered, she immediately realized how important it was to bear witness to what had happened to her community. The attack destroyed the offices of Tulsa’s two Black-owned newspapers, the Tulsa Star and the Oklahoma Sun; the former never resumed publishing. The city also had two white-owned newspapers—the Tulsa World and the Tulsa Tribune—which published stories blaming Black people for their own community’s destruction. There was little space in the city for Black residents to explain what had happened to them in their own words.

Several days after the massacre, Parrish was approached by Henry T. S. Johnson, a Black pastor who also served on a statewide interracial commission aimed at improving race relations. At the commission’s behest, he asked Parrish to interview survivors and write down what they had endured. Parrish was intrigued. “This proved to be an interesting occupation,” she wrote, “for it helped me forget my trouble in sympathy for the people with whom I daily came in contact.”

Parrish collected first-person accounts from about twenty massacre survivors. Collectively, their stories captured every major phase of the attack and its aftermath. Some had fled northward in the middle of the night, amid torrents of gunfire. Others were snatched from their houses by members of the white mob and taken to internment camps situated around the city. Nearly all returned to find their homes either burned or looted. “I feel this damnable affair has ruined us all,” Carrie Kinlaw, a survivor who rescued her bedridden mother during the shooting, told Parrish.

Parrish’s book challenged many of the false narratives that Tulsa city officials had spread about the massacre. The planes that circled above Greenwood, the authorities claimed, were used only for reconnaissance. Parrish and her sources said that they witnessed men with rifles climb aboard the aircraft and fire down on Greenwood residents. The white-owned newspapers cast the massacre as an aberration caused by supposedly mounting lawlessness in the city. Parrish said that the violence fit a broad pattern, and she connected it to recent attacks on Black communities in Chicago and Washington, D.C., during the Red Summer of 1919. She also proposed policy solutions that might help prevent such disastrous events in the future, including the passage of a federal anti-lynching measure. Parrish’s work placed her in the tradition of other pioneering Black female journalists, including Ida B. Wells, an anti-lynching 

crusader, and Mary Church Terrell, who criticized the convict-lease system prevalent in the Deep South. “Just as this horde of evil men swept down on the Colored section of Tulsa,” Parrish wrote, “so will they, some future day, sweep down on the homes and business places of their own race.”

Parrish’s hundred-and-twelve-page book was published in 1923, two years after the massacre, thanks in part to the nine hundred dollars that Greenwood residents raised to help cover the printing costs. It was greeted with little fanfare. Few copies were printed, and the publication appeared to garner no mention at all in Tulsa’s white newspapers. (The Oklahoma Sun probably discussed it, but few issues of the paper from those years exist today.) Copies of the book sat in the closets and chests of local historians and massacre survivors, dug out on occasion as proof of what had happened.

Parrish left Tulsa in the mid-nineteen-twenties, to become the head of the commerce department at a high school in Muskogee, Oklahoma. She returned in the mid-nineteen-thirties, but then seems to have disappeared from the public record. According to Bruner, her great-granddaughter, Parrish died in Oklahoma in the early nineteen-seventies. During her lifetime, Parrish did not receive the recognition for her writing that she deserved. “The onus is not on Parrish,” said Wells, the Oklahoma State University professor. “The act of forgetting has little to do with Black people, because the story of the massacre in Greenwood was very much alive.” Decades after the massacre, another Black female writer would recognize the importance of Parrish’s work and expand on it.

                                          *****************************************************

As a teen-ager, Eddie Faye Gates spent her summers in the rebuilt Greenwood of the nineteen-forties, when the community proudly promoted itself as “a symbol of racial prominence and progress.” She enjoyed gazing at the downtown skyline from the swing on an aunt’s grand front porch and drinking free sodas at a drugstore on Greenwood Avenue owned by an older cousin. In 1954, Gates and her husband honeymooned at the nearby Small Hotel, where celebrities such as Louis Armstrong were regular guests.

Gates’s affection for Greenwood and the North Tulsa area dovetailed with her long-standing interest in history. Born in 1934 to a family of sharecroppers in rural Oklahoma, she decided at the age of five that she wanted to be an educator. When her family moved to North Tulsa, in 1968, Gates became the second Black teacher at Edison Senior High School. At the time, her children were not allowed to attend the school because of lingering segregation policies. As Gates taught history, she experienced the effects of society’s resistance to learning from it. “There is no need for any person to waste another ounce of energy in denying that racism exists in this country, and in the world,” she wrote in her memoir, “Miz Lucy’s Cookies: And Other Links in My Black Family Support System.” “Let’s get on with this recognition process.”

In the late nineteen-nineties, Gates was appointed to the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, a state-sanctioned task force charged with investigating the 1921 massacre. She spearheaded a nationwide campaign to identify massacre survivors scattered around the country. The commission ultimately located a hundred and eighteen of them, living as far away as California and Florida. Having retired from teaching, Gates made it her mission to interview as many survivors as possible. The work became all-consuming, filling multiple books that she authored and dominating family conversation every Sunday evening around the dinner table. “It really got into her soul,” Gates’s son, Derek Gates, told me.

Gates conducted video interviews with dozens of current and former Greenwood residents, asking them to recall the most traumatic event of their lives. Some of the interviews took place in people’s living rooms, others at nursing homes. Parrish’s subjects had been as old as ninety-two during the massacre; Gates’s were children or teen-agers at the time, but their memories remained vivid. “Some of them had never talked about what had happened, not even to their own families—but they opened up to her,” Derek Gates said. George Monroe, who was only five years old in 1921, told Gates that four white men with torches burst into his family’s home and set the curtains aflame, as he and his siblings hid beneath a bed. “Everything in and around was burning,” Monroe said. “That’s what I remember more than anything else.”

Many of Gates’s interviews are now available on YouTube, where they’ve collectively been viewed more than seven hundred thousand times. Kavin Ross, a longtime family friend who grew up in Tulsa, helped her record the testimonials. “You can read all the books you want to—to hear it firsthand, like I did and Ms. Gates did, it’s even more powerful,” Ross said.

Like Parrish, Gates advocated for policies that would provide justice for the people she interviewed. She supported reparations for massacre victims and pushed the riot commission to do the same. After the panel called for reparations, the state of Oklahoma rejected its own commission’s recommendation. When massacre survivors travelled to Washington, D.C., in 2005, to petition the Supreme Court to hear a reparations lawsuit, Gates was with them. The Supreme Court declined to hear the group’s case. After those setbacks, the story of the race massacre again lay dormant for years.

Today, the work done by Parrish in the nineteen-twenties and Gates in the nineteen-nineties forms the bedrock for books, documentaries, and a renewed reparations push that, a century after the massacre, is experiencing a groundswell of support. But, in Greenwood, that support never wavered. Ross’s father, Don Ross, a former state representative, lobbied the Oklahoma legislature to launch the riot commission, which provided Gates with the resources she needed to conduct her many interviews. The interviews, along with a series of elegant portraits of massacre survivors, are preserved in the Greenwood Cultural Center, which was built after years of advocacy by Don Ross and the former state senator Maxine Horner. Kavin Ross noted that, as national-news crews and documentarians descend on Greenwood for the centennial, many local historians and community leaders are not getting the credit they deserve. “I’m seeing all these folks that’s coming from out of nowhere telling the story, but they are not acknowledging their source,” Ross told me, referring to his father, Gates, and others. “Those were the true fighters who kept this story alive all this time.”

Last year, Gates’s family donated much of her research to the Gilcrease Museum, in North Tulsa. (Gates, now in her eighties and in deteriorating health, declined to be interviewed.) The museum’s Gates collection includes over six hundred photographs, over fifty hours of video footage, and handwritten notes from her time on the riot commission. Interviews between Gates and the Greenwood elders, which transport viewers to an earlier time, are the highlight. “She wanted to give these people dignity and allow their stories to matter,” Derek Gates said. “Her whole deal was, ‘It matters what you had to live through.’ ”

Though the Gates collection is anchored by the massacre, it also includes images and oral histories about daily life in North Tulsa across decades. Gates dedicated much of her later years to investigating Greenwood’s darkest days, but she was just as passionate about preserving the history of the thriving mid-century community of her youth. “She did this out of a passion to tell North Tulsa’s story,” Autumn Brown, the lead researcher for the Gilcrease’s Gates collection, said. “She saw a need to document this history and, because of that passion, she embarked on such a laborious task. That’s no small feat.”

Anneliese Bruner, Mary E. Jones Parrish’s great-granddaughter, has been striving to make her ancestor’s work more widely known since her father handed her his copy of “Events of the Tulsa Disaster,” in 1994. Bruner’s father, she recalled, told her, “Now you’re the matriarch of the family.” She said that work became more urgent after she saw the parallels between the Tulsa Race Massacre and the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, which Gates wrote about for the Washington Post. She has partnered with Trinity University Press to publish a new edition of Parrish’s book, under the title “The Nation Must Awake,” a line taken from the volume. On Memorial Day weekend, Bruner, who wrote a new afterword to the book, will return to the city where Parrish’s life was upended, to mark the centennial of the massacre. “Here is my opportunity to reiterate what my great-grandmother has said, to resurrect her memory,” Bruner told me. “I think my ancestors were speaking to me, and I had prepared myself and was ready to heed the call.”

The parallels Bruner noted between the world that Parrish described and the country today include mob violence and public displays of racism endorsed by those in power. The continued resonance of Parrish’s work speaks to the keenness of her insight in the aftermath of one of America’s darkest chapters. “What I’d like for people to understand is the cyclical nature of history unless we do something about it,” Bruner told me. “And that’s why I think she said, ‘The nation must awake’ to these influences, these forces, these recurring themes in human interaction.”

THE NEW YORKER      May 28, 2021

AUTHOR:  Victor Luckerson is a journalist in Tulsa who is writing a book about the city’s Greenwood district, and a newsletter about neglected Black history called Run it Back.