Summary of Tim Madigan's The Burning

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In The Burning (2001), Tim Madigan shines a spotlight on one of the least talked about and most tragic racial conflicts in the history of America, the burning of the Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Burning explores how an encounter between a black man and a white woman in an elevator led to the torching of an entire area of a city in one single night, May 31, 1921. As many as 300 people were slain as mobs of whites wiped out a neighborhood that had been dubbed “America's Negro Wall Street.”

The Burning meticulously plots the events that preceded, constituted, and followed the torching of the prosperous black area. Madigan covers the tragedy from all of its angles, offering a clear picture of what happened and why.