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Mary Parrish was reading in her home when the Tulsa race massacre began on the evening of May 31, 1921. Parrish’s daughter, Florence Mary, called the young journalist and teacher to the window. “Mother,” she said, “I see men with guns.” The two eventually fled and unwittingly became eyewitnesses to the death of hundreds of Black Oklahomans and the destruction of the Greenwood district, a prosperous, primarily Black area known nationally as Black Wall Street. The Nation Must Awake is Parrish’s first-person account, compiled along with the recollections of nearly two dozen others, of what is now recognized as the single worst incident of racial violence in U.S. history.
Price: $14.99
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Imprint: Trinity University Press
Publication Date:
25 May 2021
ISBN: 9781595349446
Format: eBook
BISACs:
HISTORY / African American, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / African American Studies, HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Southwest (AZ, NM, OK, TX), HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century, HISTORY / Women
“The first and possibly only comprehensive first-person account of the event.”― POLITICO
“[Bruner is] honoring her great-grandmother’s groundbreaking journalism”― Vox
“The first and most visceral long-form account of how Greenwood residents experienced the massacre.” ― The New Yorker
"A story of survival...remains relevant a century later." ― The New York Times
"The book is more than just a historical account. It's also Parrish's plea for America to live up to the promise of democracy." ― NPR's Morning Edition
"An eyewitness account of the one of the worst events in American history has become a sleeper bestseller for Trinity University Press before the book’s official pub date." ― Publishers Weekly
"Mary documents the mind-numbingly large losses of lives and destruction of property through her own eyes and other testimonies from Black residents." ― TheRoot.com
"As a historical record, Mary Jones Parris’s book is really rich...especially like the way she itemized a list of all the lost property from the Tulsa massacre, so if ever there was a case for reparations, this is it." ― MS Magazine
"The book recalls what it was like in the moments immediately before the mob ransacked the Parrish family home in Greenwood and then takes readers through how Parrish and her young child, Bruner’s grandmother Florence Mary Parrish Bruner, escaped the violence and what they witnessed as their neighborhood burned." ― NBC.com
"Essential reading." — BitchReads
"The most important single source of the history of the massacre." — Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice
"An extremely important, frequently cited, and quite special book in that it offers a rare, first-hand account of the Tulsa Race Massacre." — Public Radio Tulsa
"[This book] has served as a primary source for almost every historian of the Tulsa Race Massacre." — Tulsa World
"Bruner makes direct comparisons between the events of Tulsa in 1921 and the America of today, writing that the white mob who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020, was a direct descendent of the 'King Mob' her great-grandmother had written about 100 years earlier." — San Antonio Report
“[Bruner is] honoring her great-grandmother’s groundbreaking journalism”― Vox
“The first and most visceral long-form account of how Greenwood residents experienced the massacre.” ― The New Yorker
"A story of survival...remains relevant a century later." ― The New York Times
"The book is more than just a historical account. It's also Parrish's plea for America to live up to the promise of democracy." ― NPR's Morning Edition
"An eyewitness account of the one of the worst events in American history has become a sleeper bestseller for Trinity University Press before the book’s official pub date." ― Publishers Weekly
"Mary documents the mind-numbingly large losses of lives and destruction of property through her own eyes and other testimonies from Black residents." ― TheRoot.com
"As a historical record, Mary Jones Parris’s book is really rich...especially like the way she itemized a list of all the lost property from the Tulsa massacre, so if ever there was a case for reparations, this is it." ― MS Magazine
"The book recalls what it was like in the moments immediately before the mob ransacked the Parrish family home in Greenwood and then takes readers through how Parrish and her young child, Bruner’s grandmother Florence Mary Parrish Bruner, escaped the violence and what they witnessed as their neighborhood burned." ― NBC.com
"Essential reading." — BitchReads
"The most important single source of the history of the massacre." — Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice
"An extremely important, frequently cited, and quite special book in that it offers a rare, first-hand account of the Tulsa Race Massacre." — Public Radio Tulsa
"[This book] has served as a primary source for almost every historian of the Tulsa Race Massacre." — Tulsa World
"Bruner makes direct comparisons between the events of Tulsa in 1921 and the America of today, writing that the white mob who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020, was a direct descendent of the 'King Mob' her great-grandmother had written about 100 years earlier." — San Antonio Report
Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish (1892–1972) was born in 1892 in Yazoo City, Mississippi. She moved to Tulsa around 1919 and worked teaching typing and shorthand at a branch of the YMCA. A trained journalist, Parrish gathered eyewitness accounts from survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and chronicled her own experience fleeing the violence with her young daughter. Those accounts were published in her book Events of the Tulsa Disaster, which was privately printed in 1922.