Two days. 35 square blocks of businesses and homes destroyed. At least 39, possibly as many as 300, killed. 10,000 left homeless. Death in a Promised Land is Scott Ellsworth’s exhaustive look into the events leading up to, during, and after the violence over Memorial Day weekend in 1921. Later named the Tulsa Race Massacre or Black Wall Street Massacre after the epicenter of the violence, this terrifying period was symptomatic of the racial violence so frequent in the south, but unexpected in areas where black Americans had been able to establish profitable businesses and become economic equals with white citizens. Ellsworth’s research and ability to grab the reader’s attention makes this book a must read for anyone interested in these events.
I give Death in a Promised Land 4 out of 5 stars. Ellsworth spends a great amount of time setting the scene for the events both through the economic equality and the racial bias present in the Tulsa society. He provides details I hadn’t learned in other literature about the era, but also recaps more widely known details. Ellsworth includes details about several people throughout the novel, but sometimes doesn’t go far enough to really connect the reader to the character’s motivations. With that said, this is definitely one of the more comprehensive books I’ve read about the Massacre.
This is a great book for anyone interested in American history or, more specifically, Oklahoma history. Given that this book centers around violent crime, lynchings, and brutal destruction of property and life, this book may be best directed to audiences over 16. I could see Ellsworth’s work being used as supplementary reading to a college or high school history course about this time period.
I chose Death in a Promised Land for the US States reading challenge prompt “Oklahoma”. When I started planning my reading for the year, I knew I wanted to find a book about the Tulsa Race Massacre for this prompt. I never learned about these events in my history textbooks and first heard about it in a Wondery podcast a few years ago. I was excited to see more literature and even a documentary produced about these events to bring them to the greater public minds. If you’ve never heard about this Massacre, I encourage you to pick up this book as a good place to start!
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