Works of Mary Jones Parrish Curated by Anneliese Bruner
The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 sprang from Events of the Tulsa Disaster.
On the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Trinity University Press released a new edition of the contemporaneous account of the catastrophe that intrepid teacher and reporter Mary Jones Parrish wrote and published. Although Parrish has largely been overlooked and ignored by public history, scholars of the massacre and of the time were aware of the significance of her work. Parrish's account is the primary source for all scholarship about the subject of the massacre to this day. The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 records the individual stories of other survivors; makes a partial financial accounting of the losses sustained by Black businesses and citizens; addresses the global impression that such a gross violation of democratic ideals creates; lays out her own analysis of the causes and remedies for such violence; and calls on the country to end mob violence and terrorism against its Black citizens. Parrish's great-granddaughter, writer Anneliese Bruner, crafted a powerful essay for a new afterword, and the foreword and introduction were provided by Tulsa-born scholar Dr. Scott Ellsworth and renowned scholar of Black history, Dr. John Hope Franklin, posthumously.
The Little Red Book became The Nation Must Awake in 2021 after a violent mob attacked the Capitol Building much as a violent mob destroyed North Tulsa's Greenwood District 100 years before.