Restoring the Legacy of Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish, author of the little red book that became The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish, author of Events of the Tulsa Disaste, which became The Nation Must Awake.
Anneliese Bruner was sitting at home on January 6, 2021 scrolling through what was then Twitter to see the news of the day. What she saw shocked her: People were scaling the walls of the Capitol Building, trying to enter the building where the vote in the 2020 Presidential Election was being certified to declare Joseph R. Biden Jr. president. Supporters of the outgoing president, Donald Trump, were hell bent on overturning the results of an election that their candidate lost. Bruner, a Washington, DC resident, thought immediately of 1921 Tulsa and how a mob, displeased with due process, ignored the law and sought its own perverted version of justice by trying to lynch 19-year-old Dick Rowland, who had been arrested for an alleged assault (Rowland was later found innocent) on elevator operator Sarah Paige. Bruner wrote an article for The Washington Post that drew parallels between the upheaval in the two cities.
That article brought her together with Trinity University Press and The Nation Must Awake was published that same year, the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The book is a tripartite compilation centered around the original work of Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish, Bruner's great grandmother. Parrish's daughter, Florence Mary, was Bruner's paternal grandmother.
The Mary Jones Parrish Reading Room for History Literacy and Ethics is in the works to counter historical erasure of Tulsa and, more important, broader African American history. Political winds currently afoot in the US are poised to extinguish the knowledfe of Tulsa and other significant historical events. Book banning, hostile legislation, and curriculum tampering threaten to silence the telling of narratives deemed unpatriotic, subversive, or upsetting to certain people's sensibilities.
In true authoritarian fashion, a single, top-down, apologist version of America is being thrust onto learners from an early age to shape the very memories of events in a way that coddles the powerful. This anti-democratic impulse, which would shape the memory of public events in such a way as to control and subvert freedom of thought and, therefore, freedom itself, is what the Reading Room seeks to combat. Enlightenment favors Democracy.