Requiem for the Massacre reckons with the racial tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma one hundred years after the most infamous act of racial violence in American history.
[Young has] read Ellsworth and Madigan and done a great deal of other research. But too often that research, and his efforts to parse the meaning of the massacre in 2022, drown in a sea of digression ... I found myself thinking, There’s gotta be something coming up that’ll justify this book’s sweeping subtitle, right? But more than 100 pages in, when he describes the development of his YouTube channel and ensuing offer to join Fox Sports, I despaired ... Young attempts to make a link ... Peppered throughout the book are declarations of his rage as a Black man living in America. Like the quote above, many of them link to the massacre loosely at best. I’m not dismissing Young’s feelings — I can understand them — but they don’t function as a requiem, a solemn remembrance of the dead ... To be fair, the book isn’t all memoir ... Young shortchanges both his readers and his subject ... The pop culturing of the Tulsa massacre is a double-edged sword. It has laid bare decades of hard work by survivors, historians, activists — and yes, sometimes fiction writers — to consider its bleak place in American history. But it has also left a space to simply say 'Tulsa massacre”'and get a hearing, even if not much else follows the words. A meme is an evanescent thing; this murderous event is anything but. Young’s right about the need for requiems; I only wish his book had been a more convincing one.
A compelling, extensively researched history of Greenwood and the massacre. He argues forcefully that since then, prevailing historical narratives tailored to white sensibilities have impeded a true reckoning and meaningful reparations for the massacre and, more broadly, for the legacy of slavery in Tulsa and the country. Young writes with the storytelling power of immersive journalism and the emotional immediacy of memoir. He uses personal experience to illuminate the human impact of systemic racism, particularly in education and employment ... Young pulls no punches here, and Requiem for the Massacre will challenge every reader to examine their assumptions about race in America.
A unique synthesis of memoir and a history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre ... Ambitious, forceful ... Young interweaves a jaundiced, potent examination of his own upbringing ... The swerve toward the personal is occasionally jarring, but the author’s prose is consistently acute and his societal analysis, astute ... Arresting.
