Don't blame Trump for lack of historical perspective

You will never hear me say anything nice about Donald Trump.

It has nothing to do with politics. Trump has been a joke to me since I first heard of him more than 30 years ago. He has fewer human qualities than any human being I have ever known.

When he originally scheduled his Tulsa campaign rally for this Friday, folks were outraged that he scheduled it for Juneteenth, the day celebrating the end of chattel slavery in 1865.

They compared it to Ronald Reagan kicking off his 1980 presidential campaign just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.


They were particularly angered at the choice of Tulsa, where June 1921 saw one of the worst race massacres in U.S. history. A white mob burned the Greenwood district, at the time one of the most prosperous African-American neighborhoods in the U.S. More than 300 people were killed.

Trump said he had never heard of it, also saying he had never heard of Juneteenth.

Tulsa Greenwood District 1921

Now as I said earlier, you will never hear me say anything nice about Donald Trump.

But you know who else had never heard of the 1921 massacre before the last few days?

Me.

I would not rate my knowledge of U.S. history on par with college professors or the best authors who earn their living writing about history.

But I read consistently, and I have a good memory. About 20 years ago, my son Virgile was preparing to take the exam in AP American History for college credit. We purchased a study guide and I worked with him. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I knew the answers to 75-80 percent of the questions, even though it has been at least 35 years since I had taken a history course.

But I knew nothing of Greenwood, and I had never heard of the 1934 lynching and riots that led to the burning of Rosewood, Fla., until the 1997 movie about it starring Jon Voight, Ving Rhames and Don Cheadle.

Want to know other things that weren't taught in American History classes half a century ago?

Well, how about the Trail of Tears? Or the fact that the U.S. violated almost every treaty between Native Americans and the Great White Father in Washington.

Or the incarceration of the Issei and the Nisei in the early days of World War II?

Juneteenth didn't become a holiday until 1980, in of all places, Texas.

Trump said the other day that African-Americans should thank him because until he brought it up, no one had even heard of Juneteenth.

I'm certainly not willing to agree to that. Trump is almost certainly the most racist president we have had since Woodrow Wilson, but for him it's less about hating minorities than it is not liking anyone very much.

But at least we get a good history lesson telling us that maybe we were never that exceptional after all.

That's a good thing.