RaveWorld Literature Today.. .resists the urge to monetize the centennial anniversary of unspeakable evil by offering a more detailed account of black trauma at the hands of a lawless mob of white Tulsans drunk on the myth of racial supremacy ... Ellsworth’s recounting of the Greenwood massacre that opens the book is heartrending and mercifully brief. More impressionistic than expository, the narrative grounds the senseless violence as being enacted upon people with names and knowable histories. This approach also obliquely outlines one of the gaping holes in the Tulsa narrative that, thus far, remains otherwise invisible ... One of Ellsworth’s most valuable accomplishments in this book is to document the progressively rich pool of scholarship surrounding the massacre, serving as a kind of literature review nestled within the character sketches and vignettes that connect one generation to the next ... To his credit, Ellsworth seems all too aware of the white privilege that allowed him to research, write, and publish a history that fundamentally belonged to a community other than his own. He foregrounds his eyewitnesses and their life stories, reanimating them to speak their truths with interesting details about their complex lives, which spooled outward from the trauma that had been buried. The result is a book that feels very much of this time, when the names of those martyred by police violence are invoked as a cultural act of magic against the silence that has, for too long, prevailed.
