ABSTRACT
The reverse-racism trope emerged again after World War II, when segregationists denounced the simple demands for nondiscrimination in public accommodations as assaults on Whites’ civil rights. Likewise, the Southern Manifesto against school desegregation, signed by dozens of White lawmakers, framed widespread resistance to the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in terms of defending White heritage and the well-being of vulnerable White schoolchildren. But the comfort of a ban on whatever conservatives imagine critical race theory to be will further deny students and scholars the chance to understand the past. The massacre in Tulsa a century ago is just one telling example of how the convergence of law, institutions and individuals enabled diabolical attacks on American citizens. Teachers would be further discouraged from mounting a broader inquiry into the massacre's legal backdrop—the laws that corralled Blacks into certain neighborhoods and that shored up the economic segregation of professions.
