| The Outsiders, Tulsa, and race | |
| Posted by: wmorrow 11:17 am EDT 05/04/24 | |
| In reply to: The Outsiders and Tulsa. - portenopete 08:21 pm EDT 05/03/24 | |
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| I haven’t yet seen THE OUTSIDERS, but I’m looking forward to going, at least in part because it’s set in my hometown, Tulsa, during the period when I was growing up. Here are a few thoughts: Tulsa in the ‘60s was sharply segregated. I went to school in an area that was a mixture of social classes, mostly middle- to lower- working class (including “working poor”). There were hundreds of kids, K to 6th grade, but not one Black kid in the entire school. At my high school there were maybe five, and they were all exceptional students: good grades, and never in any trouble. The attack on Black Wall Street was never mentioned in any school I attended. A girl I knew in high school told me recently (via Facebook) it was discussed in one of her classes, but I wasn’t there. I found out about it quite by accident, at age 15, while flipping through a history book. There was a section devoted to what was termed The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. I thought: “Why have I never heard about this?” Turns out, both my parents knew about it. It was never spoken of. And while the city was tense after Dr. King was assassinated, there were no riots. One last thing. We all knew about the novel “The Outsiders,” and we knew the author, S. E. Hinton, was a local girl, not much older than we were. Along about 1970, the book was pulled from our school library, supposedly due to harsh language. So, someone acquired a paperback copy, which was passed around. Several of us read it. The best way to get a kid to read a book is to ban it. |
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