At the start of the award-winning television series Watchmen, there’s a three-minute-30-second scene of destruction and terror, as a racist mob destroys a Black town.

“That really did happen,” says Phil Armstrong. “They just put visuals to what it must have been like, based on eyewitness accounts.”

Armstrong is project manager of a commission charged with commemorating the 100th anniversary of one of the largest racial massacres in American history, a two-day rampage by a white mob that devastated the all-Black community of Greenwood, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission is also the guiding force behind Greenwood Rising, an interactive history center scheduled to open later this year. Created in partnership with Local Projects, Greenwood Rising will tell the story of the historic neighborhood before, during, and after the carnage.

A preview of the site suggests that visitors are in for an emotional journey. Much of the information will likely be new to them. Until recently, it was possible to visit Tulsa and remain unaware of the looting, burning, and killing that began June 1, 1921, after Dick Rowland, a Black 19-year-old, was accused of assault.

The center’s dual focus on both the past and the vital present spotlights the real people who were, and are, affected by historic actions and inaction, says Greenwood Rising project director Lorraine Arthur Mensa.

“Right now, in this nation, there’s a lot of talk about Black trauma and focusing on stories of oppression versus telling the whole story,” says Mensa, who says it was equally important for all involved to “show Black joy at times and to show the resiliency, the work ethic, [and] the communal spirit, and to get the visitor to connect to that.”

Read the full article about commemorating The Tulsa Race Massacre by Heather Greenwood Davis at The 74.