President Donald Trump’s long racist history will gain another notch on his belt when he resumes holding his official campaign rallies by flying to the city of the “single worst incident of racial violence in American history” on a Juneteenth, a sacred day celebrating the end of slavery.
Trump was to deliver a speech on race relations, but that may have been canceled after a report by journalist April Ryan revealed the address was being crafted by Stephen Miller, a top Trump White House advisor and a white nationalist.
Trump now will deliver a speech Thursday on law and order and policing.
Next week, on Friday, June 19 – which just happens, coincidentally, to be Juneteenth – the President will board Air Force One and jet off to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where 99 years ago this month anywhere between dozens and hundreds were horrifically slaughtered in the Tulsa Race Massacre.
“The Trump campaign’s choice of Tulsa on Juneteenth is curious given the city’s history,” The Washington Post noted. “The worst single incident of racial violence in U.S. history occurred in Tulsa in 1921, when mobs of whites killed dozens of African Americans, injured hundreds and destroyed a black neighborhood. Trump’s announcement comes as thousands protest racial injustice across the United States.”
In addition to the lives lost, nearly 7000 were wounded and had to be hospitalized or housed in large facilities. 35 square city blocks of what was called at the time “Black Wall Street,” for its affluent population, were burned to the ground, at a loss of wealth in modern day terms of over $30 million.
Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day, is a day celebrating the end of slavery. On that day in 1865, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was finally read to slaves in Texas, the last Confederate state to announce the proclamation – two and a half years after it had been signed.
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