By editor
Originally published on Sun April 15, 2012 9:27 am
Jo Anne Wallace is the vice president and general manager of KQED Public Radio in Northern California.
In 1921, when my mother was 5 years old, there was a race riot in her hometown of Tulsa, Okla. Scores of black men, women and children were threatened and killed by mob violence. It was provoked by the rumor of a sexual encounter between a black man and a white woman on an elevator in one of Tulsa's tall, downtown office buildings. The prosperous black community of Greenwood on the northern edge of Tulsa was also decimated by the violence.
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