Parents' Guide to Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer

This is an essential documentary that clearly shows how the events of the Red Summer a century ago have a direct impact on contemporary American life. Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer does so much more than what passes for "historical documentaries" on cable these days. Instead of simply telling what happened and leaving it at that, this documentary goes to great lengths to show the viewer why knowledge of history is so vitally important, and how the massacre perpetrated by White people in Tulsa against the property and citizens in a thriving African American community there, in the words of one of the interviewees, "did not happen in a vacuum." As the documentary makes clear, what happened then led to and informed the civil rights movement of the 1960s as well as the more recent Black Lives Matter protests.

It shows how historians do so much more than simply teach basic historical facts, devoid of all meaning or context. It shows how investigative journalists can work to help uncover and force us to quite literally uncover truth that was intended to be buried and forgotten by civic leaders who would prefer not to reckon with injustice. It shows how community leaders work to ensure that elected officials do more than give speeches or other empty gestures. The pain of the past is very much the pain of the present, and while this is difficult to face, it's something that is even more painful and damaging to ignore, because, 100 years later, that pain has not gone away. Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer is a powerful documentary, one that shows how the past informs the present, and how confronting and learning from the past, no matter how difficult that may be, provides the opportunity and hope for a better future.