Scott Ellsworth

One hundred years ago a young black man got onto a Tulsa elevator. Something caused the female operator to scream. The man ran away. It was assumed that he had harassed the woman and was arrested.

Just the previous year, a lynch mob had hung a white prisoner. Now, they gathered to deal out that same justice. Armed WWI veterans from the black community came to protect the jail. With passions high, fights broke out, and twenty-four hours later, the entire black community of Greenwood had been destroyed and unknown numbers murdered.

Scott Ellsworth was a Tulsa native who was shocked when he learned this history. The story had been repressed; there were missing police reports and archival newspapers edited by scissors. Ellsworth has spent his lifetime studying and researching the Tulsa Race Massacre, his dissertation becoming the definitive history Death in a Promised Land.

The Ground Breaking takes readers into the aftermath of the massacre, how the Greenwood community rebuilt, the repression of memory that amounted to denial, the search for the victims buried in unmarked graves, and the quest for reparations. The deep impact of the incident is evident in the stories told by the survivors Ellsworth interviews. For a hundred years, the controlling interests of the city have pushed to let the past be the past, while the activists who sought to unearth the incident were vilified.

I felt the suspense build as the project strove to investigate the probable and rumored locations of mass graves.

This is more than a history of a moment in time. It is the story of a thriving community that was destroyed and how it remade itself and was destroyed again. It is the story of the people who persisted in resurrecting a repressed history that continues to haunt the families of victims. We may try to bury the past because it looks bad, but we can not negate the legacy that haunts the families of the survivors.

This is more than the story of a city and a moment in time. It is the story of those who persisted in resurrecting the truth, and it is the story of America’s deep rooted denial and its cost. We may try to bury the past, but its legacy still haunts us.

I received a free book from the publisher through Goodreads giveaways. My review is fair and unbiased.… (meer)

Ellsworth's book is primarily a collection of the histories that brought us to the moment in 1944 when the historic secret game occurred. The fact that the game is described in Chapter 19 is a clue to his true focus: where did all these people, and the cultural environment in which they interacted, come from? We learn about James Naismith, Phog Allen, Eddie Cameron, and other figures in the history of hoops, but we also learn about the young men who found their ways to the North Carolina College for Negroes (now NC Central University, one of the sixteen campuses of the University of North Carolina), their young and innovative coach John McLendon, and the team of white Duke medical students who traveled across town to take them on in secret. In learning about their backgrounds, we visit Kansas, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and other states, and encounter notables including Pauli Murray, Gerald Ford, and a tomboy named Bess Wallace, who would soon marry Harry Truman.

Ellsworth paints an attractive picture of Hayti, the successful black district of Durham, and a critical picture of the Jim Crow laws and customs that dominated the South. His portrait of Dr. James Shepard, first president of the North Carolina College for Negroes, is ambivalent: Shepard was a known and dedicated non-boat rocker; should he have fought racism more forcefully? Overall, the book is an enjoyable presentation of a little-known event that provides an opportunity to explore the cultural context of the South, particularly North Carolina, in the years leading up to and during WWII. Highly recommended to those with an interest in that history and/or the history of basketball.… (meer)