This is a reissue of a book that came out in 2001, I had known nothing about this story and was taught nothing about this in any of the history classes I took even in college. That being said at times it was a difficult book for me to finish because it is still difficult for me to understand the hatred that humans can do to one another. I had worked in violence so I am used to the scenes but it is still mind-boggling, and then for some to justify what happened. Any way a book that needs to be read and one that needs to be in people's homes so we can remember.

This reissue/expanded version of THE BURNING was an excellent piece of well researched history that needed to be told. Outside the local area, I found that this event was almost unknown. I have shared the book and the history with my family, friends and reading circle.

Like many, I did not learn about the Tulsa massacre in school like I should have. Heck, I didn't even know about it until I was in my 30's. A tragic and absolutely terrifying part of America's history that needs to be taught at length in our schools.

This is a much needed deeper dive into the Tulsa Massacre than we have been given in schools- of course, a one sentence ad in a newspaper would be deeper than we have been teaching in schools. It was a good introduction and an easy read, as far as such a subject can be called easy. I look forward to even more in-depth examinations.

The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 is the first time I have read anything about this event in time. It is a must read. Five stars.

Although the contents of this book is very triggering for African Americans, It is a very powerful read. It recounts one of the worst and deadliest events in the United states. It took me a while to get through the book, because it broke my heart to read what some of our ancestors went through. I had heard bits and pieces of what happened in college, but not to the magnitude of what was brought to light in this book.. And to think, with the re edition coming up around the 100th commoration of that horrid event makes it just the more sorrowful. Phenomenal read

A powerful history of an event that was, until recently, completely unknown to me. Race and violence, for someone who grew up in Texas and Louisiana is sadly, not a new issue. The complete and organized destruction of an entire district in a modern US city is an event that cannot be forgotten. I was in Tulsa years ago for an academic conference and knew nothing. I attended a major university in a neighboring state (Kansas) and while there was a lot of history associated with both pre-Civil war violence and modern court cases ending desegregation, the violence in Tulsa, what one could only call ethnic cleansing, was simply a non-event, in that it was almost erased from historical memory. Madigan's book and others on these violent, murderous episodes in our history must be read if we are ever to truly be a free nation.

I, like many others, did not know about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. It took almost 100 years for the actions of that week to come to light. This book is a necessary read. The fact that no one knew or acknowledged it for that long is a travesty. I'll keep it short. This was a incredibly well written and emotional read. It took me far longer than it would have normally taken me. Sometimes it was just too hard to continue. I'm glad that I read this and I will be buying a physical copy of this and other books that were mentioned. I recommend you do the same. Remember that Black Lives Matter and we still have a long way to go.

This updated version of The Burning was released weeks prior to the 100 year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. It’s very timely also because of the current conversation about racism in the US. Most of our high school and college history courses skip right over this chapter of overt, no apologies racism in the US and move on to segregation and civil rights.

The author shares so many detailed firsthand accounts from survivors of the massacre that I couldn’t put the book down until that person’s story was told and then I had to sit on that info so I could process it. It seems surreal that enough white people got together, pulled some things along the lines of what would happen in Nazi Germany, and got away with it because the large majority of them didn’t see a problem with it.

It’s important that books like this one, James Loewen’s books (Sundown Towns, Lies My Teacher Told Me), and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the US find their way into the hands of the next generation so they can get a full, unedited picture of history to go along with what’s been sanitized and handed to educators.

Thanks to St. Martin’s Griffin and NetGalley for this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have lived in the Tulsa area for more than forty years. Although I had heard the Tulsa Race Riot, now commonly called the Tulsa Race Massacre, mentioned a few times, I first learned much about it when reading Tim Madigan’s 2001 The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Now reissued with a shorter title in time the centennial, The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 includes Madigan’s new Afterword, which begins by discussing the first episode of HBO’s The Watchman. Set amidst 1921 Tulsa’s violence and chaos, the episode led to social media shock as viewers’ Internet searches awakened them to the fact that they had just viewed a TV recreation of one of the most shameful events of American history—one that almost no one had heard of before that episode and which they initially assumed was fiction. Madigan continues to describe how the episode also opened the eyes of Tulsa’s young white Republican mayor, G. T. Bynum, who has since taken an active role in Tulsa’s search for unmarked graves. Further reflecting on our contemporary racial climate, Madigan’s Afterword speaks of the deaths of unarmed black men such as Trayvon Martin and George Floyd which set off the Black Lives Matter Movement, and of a race massacre episode airing on 60 Minutes days before President Trump announced his controversial 2020 Tulsa campaign rally during the pandemic as the city prepared for the massacre’s 99th anniversary.

Organized into sixteen chapters, The Burning brings to life the events leading up to the burning of Tulsa’s 35-square block Greenwood District, the white-led destruction and massacre, and its aftermath. When Dick Rowland, a young black shoeshine boy, was accused of accosting a white elevator operator—a charge she would never formally bring—the accusation set white Tulsans in motion against their Greenwood neighbors north of the railroad tracks. Once a prosperous middle-class residential neighborhood and business district nicknamed Black Wall Street, Greenwood was reduced to ashes the night of June 1, 1921. Looters and arsonists terrorized the neighborhood, many carrying guns and surprising Greenwood residents in their sleep. While some managed to sound alarms and flee, leaving homes and nearly everything they owned behind to be stolen or burned, others were not so lucky.

Basing his research on hundreds of sources ranging from newspaper accounts to unpublished interviews of massacre survivors, his own interviews of survivors’ descendants who had heard the family stories, National Guard Duty Reports, and the official report of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission (February 2001), Madigan includes detailed chapter-by-chapter notes at the back of the book, explaining how he learned much of the information and including brief additional anecdotes. Among them are accounts of then President Warren G. Harding’s White House initiation into the KKK, using the White House Bible, and Veneice Dunn Sims’ account of buying a new blue dress for the spring 2000 Booker T. Washington High School prom so, now in her nineties and chosen honorary Prom Queen, she could wear a dress similar to the blue one she has planned to wear to her 1921 prom cancelled due to the Tulsa Race Massacre.

I have read several adult or teen/young adult novels dramatizing the catastrophic events that started Labor Day weekend 1921: Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Magic City (1997), Rilla Askew’s Fire in Beulah (2001), Jennifer Latham’s Dreamland Burning (2017), Evan Ramspott’s Water Darling (2020), and Randi Pink’s Angel of Greenwood (2021). All are well worth reading. For non-fiction, however, I highly recommend Tim Madigan’s The Burning. As Larry Cox of the Arizona Daily Star writes, “The story of Greenwood is written in such chilling detail and clarity that one can almost smell the smoke and hear the cries. This is historical reporting at its best.”

My thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Griffin/St. Martin’s Publishing Group, and Tim Madigan for an Advance Reader Copy of the centennial edition.

The Burning by Tim Madigan is the most straight forward account of the burning and looting of Greenwood that I’ve read in that he takes the reader as best he can into the events of those days in 1921 and often times as he talks about the evidence is not exactly out in the open. This gave the book more of a human touch and intimacy as compared to Scott Ellsworth’s Breaking Ground (another very good book on the topic) which because it delt with the efforts to uncover the story felt more distant from events.

I at least got a sense of the terror and fear that the residents of Greenwood must’ve felt as the social and economic order that they had always known was torn away and in many cases they struggled just to survive the night. I think there was a greater sense of brutality achieved by putting this material up front as opposed to the pieced together narrative some accounts have chosen to take.

I also thought he did a fair job adding in the more contemporary updates and investigations at the end without disturbing the account of the event itself. If you’re looking for a book on the Tulsa Race Massacre start here.

The Burning by Tim Madigan is a powerful story of racial violence that occurred in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This is an eye-opening account of that violence and the events that led up to it.

Madigan's book is a very readable narrative about the events of a hundred years ago. The focus here is not on large, abstract ideas, but individual people's stories. Those stories help to connect the story of Tulsa at the beginning of the 1920s with the wider narrative of African American history.

He definitely puts the story of Tulsa into context of the "nadir" period, looking at the lead up and repercussions of the violence. The rise of Klan gets mentioned, which was interesting to tie into the story. The last section of the book focuses on the remembrance of the event; I was glad to see that this got some attention, even in the first edition of the book.

There's definitely a lot to digest, and if you want some even more delightful nuggets of information, the chapter notes that Madigan has included detail some interesting stories and anecdotes about the history.

This work is being republished with a new after forward nearly twenty years later, and the intervening time has shown that when history isn’t grasped then it is prone to repeat itself. The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 has just entered the mainstream consciousness of Americans in light of renewed racial tensions, with this reviewer like others hearing about it first in the TV series Watchmen and then in the news. The story unfolds powerfully through a series of narrative stories, shedding light on this forgotten but important part of American history.

I read this book almost 20 years ago and it's still as powerful now as it was then.

Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Riots are not talked about. Even growing up in Oklahoma, it wasn't taught - or even it is was - it was in Oklahoma History which was taught by a coach.

It's a tragedy that still has an impact on modern society today.

Thank you to Tim Madigan for this updated afterwards and to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

As a Canadian, I hadn't really heard about the Tulsa race riot or maybe I did but I don't remember.
Anyway, I found this book very interesting and well written that I just couldn't stop reading.

I do recommend this.

This is our history, whether we like it or not. We cannot rewrite history [though some are currently trying], but we can continue to learn from it and grow and teach and become better people. What happened in Tulsa in 1921 is nothing short of horrific [one of the survivors who also survived the battlefields of France, said what he saw that day in 1921 was worse than anything he had seen overseas. THAT says a lot right there], and we truly need to work to make sure something of that magnitude never happens again.

I first became aware of the Tulsa Race Massacre when the former President chose to go to Tulsa on Juneteenth for a rally [and we ALL know what kind of rally he loved to have] and was shocked because I had never heard of it. Started doing research and found this book by Mr. Madigan and immediately put it on my TBR. Fast forward a year and this came up on NG with a new afterword and I took the opportunity to request it so I could read it and learn more about this horrific time in history. IF WE DO NOT LEARN, we cannot ever help prevent. WE. MUST. KEEP. LEARNING.
What I read shocked and horrified me - I cannot even imagine what it must have been like on that night and what it has been like for the years after for the survivors; having to keep silent for years and years. I can only hope that now that this atrocity is fully out in the open, the people of Tulsa can truly move forward and heal.

Thank you to NetGalley, Tim Madigan, and St. Martin's Press/St. Martin's Griffin for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Burning
The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
by Tim Madigan
St. Martin's Press

I want to thank the publisher and NetGalley for letting me read this book. It's the 100 year anniversary of this carnage and I hope no one forgets this. Some didn't even know about this at all until 1970 when the book was first printed because the event was covered up so well.

This book is a wealth of information about before, during, and after the massacre. It follows several people personally from before, during, and after. It describes the society at the time, what was leading up to this. The layout of the town, the daily routine of the people, what was changing. It also discussed the trigger that set everything off.

It also discussed the rise of the KKK and how it came to be, how it morphed into what if it is now. How is changed the lives of everyone when it was shown as a savior to whites in the movie, 'Birth of a Nation'. The rise of hate, the lust for not just killing, but torture and killing.

It was hard to read this book but I wanted to know the truth. That is something hard to come by these days. Even if it's not what I want to hear, I need the truth. Unfortunately I see a comparison of then and now. The rise of not just the hate but the lust of hate! Not just here in America but across the world. We were never a compassionate people but why can't we learn from our mistakes like this event in the book! A horrible massacre that killed hundreds of innocent people.

I recommend this to all people that have a sliver of hope left for mankind. This book is packed with information and clarity as to the explosive, damaging rage and hate has in our communities. May we become better than this.

Great book and a must read for history buffs.
This book vividly describes a terrible and tragic event. It safly also seems it is a little known incident from our past. I hope anyone interested in changing social norms reads this book. Truly an eye opener.

This book was first published in 2013 and in the years since, its value has only increased, The Afterword in this new edition ties the events of 1921 with today's racial struggles. It tell the story of the attack by white Tulsans on the Black residents of their segregated city on June 1, 19211. The Black sector was referred to as the Black Wall Street due to its prosperity and was known locally as Greenwood. It was populated by hundreds of middle class Black citizens who had built a thriving business center with a theater, banks, markets and shops of all sorts, churches, and schools. This thirty-five square block town provided livings for its African-American residents and some crossed the racial line and worked in white Tulsa. It is not known for sure what sparked the disaster but many white Tulsans thought a black teenager who was in an elevator with a young white woman made advances or touched her. This and other rumors spread like wildfire and overnight on June 1, 1921, war broke out, largely incited by the KKK. White Tulsans invaded Greenwood, randomly shot and beat Black citizens, and burned the businesses and homes of the residents. The number murdered is not known exactly but is thought to be at least three hundred. The bodies were dumped in pits without coffins or identification. In recent years, support has built for the search, excavation, and burial of the remains of these victims and some skeletal remains have been located.
This holocaust was little known even by residents (particularly white) of Tulsa until this century, and the author tells how he learned of these events as a journalist. He was assigned this story by his editor and he was able to locate several elderly Black survivors of Greenwood who told him their stories. Those interviews plus extensive research developed into this book. Tim Madigan has written a vivid account of what he learned, and this book has an eyewitness immediacy. It is a story all Americans should read.