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Dubbed “Black Wall Street,” the northern section of Tulsa was home to dozens of Black-owned businesses, including hotels, restaurants, law firms and medical practices.

Despite its prominence, the massacre was little known, if at all, in most parts of the country, until the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was created in 1997

he seeds of violence were planted on the morning of May 31, when the Tulsa Tribune reported that 19-year-old Black shoeshine Dick Rowland had attempted to assault Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white elevator operator in the Drexel Building in the white part of town.

The Tribune’s overdramatized account of what happened — the story headline read “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator” — sparked the forming of a lynch mob outside the Tulsa County Courthouse, where Rowland was in custody.

A group of roughly 25 Black men from Greenwood went to the courthouse armed to stop the mob from taking Rowland, only to be turned away by authorities.

Later, after the white mob continued to grow and a larger group from Greenwood returned, a scuffle broke out, followed by gunfire

It’s a “striking example of how our institutions, particularly policing but not only policing, have played a role over our history in enforcing systemic racism and brutality against Black Americans,” Rep. Steven HorsfordSteven Alexander HorsfordTulsa marks race massacre centennial as US grapples with racial injustice Gun violence: Save the thoughts and prayers, it's time for Senate action Democrats offer bill to encourage hiring of groups hard-hit by pandemic MORE (D-Nev.), second vice chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, told The Hill.

Tulsa police appointed hundreds of white men and boys “special deputies,” even supplying some of them with guns.

The white mob had razed more than 1,200 houses across 35 city blocks, looting hundreds more. The prosperous business district of Greenwood was destroyed.

As many as 300 people died, historians say, though the exact number is unknown due to mass gravesites. The destruction displaced about 10,000 Greenwood residents.

In total, more than $1.8 million of Black property was destroyed, more than $27 million by today’s dollar.

The staggering economic loss was never recovered by Black Tulsans and is seen as a key factor in the stark racial wealth disparity in the city 100 years later.

Restorative justice, also known as reparative justice or reparations, was one of the recommendations of the Oklahoma commission’s 2001 report.

Steps toward justice, the commission said, could take the form of direct payments to the survivors and their descendants, a scholarship for descendants, economic development in Greenwood and a memorial for the massacre victims.

The 100-year anniversary includes events hosted by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which spearheaded the building of Greenwood Rising, a $30 million history museum and center that will fully open in July.

Many advocates have argued that the centennial commission hasn’t done enough to raise up the voices of the survivors and their descendants, but Horsford said he doesn’t want that to detract from the importance of the weekend.The focus should be on “what caused the massacre and those who contributed to it and the systemic reasons for it,” Horsford said.

The conference, moreover, took place against the background of many new commemorative publications, including the Australian historian Prof. Christopher M. Clark’s account of World War I’s origins, titled “The Sleepwalkers.” An astounding global success, Professor Clark’s book has prompted a substantial revision among historians of the war’s causes. Whereas in the past German nationalism and bellicosity were singled out as disproportionately culpable, Mr. Clark lays equal blame on the other great powers, France, Russia, and Britain.

Furthermore, he argues that Princip was directly or indirectly an arm of Serbia’s intelligence services, not a Bosnian teenager acting on his own. Mr. Clarke also links Serbia’s expansionist campaign at the beginning of the 20th century, and its brutality, to the ethnic cleansing and war crimes of the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.

The Serbian news media has rallied to the country’s defense with headlines like “Austrians Planned the First World War a Year before the Murder of Ferdinand”; “Vienna had a War Plan in 1913”; and “We are not to Blame for the War.”

“I admit that I wholly underestimated the passionate approaches to the topic and its meaning for today’s politics in the region,”

Mr. Bieber said that Serbs had overreacted to the Clark book and to the intention of the conference. “Clark doesn’t blame Serbia for the war, but rather the Great Powers — all of them,” he said. “Clark is hard on Serbia, more so than most historians, but in Serbia his theses are deliberately misread,” he added, attributing this to domestic politics.

The controversy around the conference, Mr. Bieber wrote in a recent essay in Balkan Insight, suggested that forthcoming commemorations would “not be shaped by reflecting on the past, but by making use of the past for the present.”

Without the United States, the Allies, at best, would have fought to a stalemate.

Perhaps now the war’s centennial will encourage Americans to reexamine their nation’s part in the Great War. Perhaps they’ll rediscover that America’s role was, in fact, indispensable.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us

Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire

Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom

It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst

Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.

In every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.

the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true “founding fathers.” And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than us.

Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs, astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved people would never be treated as such.

Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing. They were legally tortured, including by those working for Jefferson himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the highest profits for the white people who owned them.

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.

With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery. Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.

we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it

The Constitution contains 84 clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold implications for slavery. The Constitution protected the “property” of those who enslaved black people, prohibited the federal government from intervening to end the importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20 years, allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved and forced states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run away seeking refuge

The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by racist science and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a belief that allowed white Americans to live with their betrayal.

By the early 1800s, according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not, “had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of black inferiority.”

The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a “slave” race. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy

This belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race, became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a lie.

now Lincoln was blaming them for the war. “Although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other ... without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence,” the president told them. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.” Black Americans had long called for universal equality and believed, as the abolitionist Martin Delany said, “that God has made of one blood all the nations that dwell on the face of the earth.” Liberated by war, then, they did not seek vengeance on their oppressors as Lincoln and so many other white Americans feared. They did the opposite.

The South, for the first time in the history of this country, began to resemble a democracy, with black Americans elected to local, state and federal offices. Some 16 black men served in Congress

These black officials joined with white Republicans, some of whom came down from the North, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equitable tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in public transportation, accommodation and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of American institutions: the public school.

Led by black activists and a Republican Party pushed left by the blatant recalcitrance of white Southerners, the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see.

The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments.

Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle

White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand, thanks in significant part to the progressive policies and laws black people had championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they forced black people back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.”

black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded black people almost entirely from mainstream American life — a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.

Despite the guarantees of equality in the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 declared that the racial segregation of black Americans was constitutional. With the blessing of the nation’s highest court and no federal will to vindicate black rights, starting in the late 1800s, Southern states passed a series of laws and codes meant to make slavery’s racial caste system permanent by denying black people political power, social equality and basic dignity.

This caste system was maintained through wanton racial terrorism. And black veterans like Woodard, especially those with the audacity to wear their uniform, had since the Civil War been the target of a particular violence

As Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi said on the Senate floor during World War I, black servicemen returning to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Giving a black man “military airs” and sending him to defend the flag would bring him “to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.”

Many white Americans saw black men in the uniforms of America’s armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride. Hundreds of black veterans were beaten, maimed, shot and lynched

During the height of racial terror in this country, black Americans were not merely killed but castrated, burned alive and dismembered with their body parts displayed in storefronts. This violence was meant to terrify and control black people, but perhaps just as important, it served as a psychological balm for white supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way

If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse

Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.

As the centennial of slavery’s end neared, black people were still seeking the rights they had fought for and won after the Civil War: the right to be treated equally by public institutions, which was guaranteed in 1866 with the Civil Rights Act; the right to be treated as full citizens before the law, which was guaranteed in 1868 by the 14th Amendment; and the right to vote, which was guaranteed in 1870 by the 15th Amendment.

In response to black demands for these rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.

For the most part, black Americans fought back alone. Yet we never fought only for ourselves. The bloody freedom struggles of the civil rights movement laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle.

This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that excluded women, Native Americans and black people, and did not provide the vote or equality for most Americans. But the laws born out of black resistance guarantee the franchise for all and ban discrimination based not just on race but on gender, nationality, religion and ability

It was the civil rights movement that led to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which upended the racist immigration quota system intended to keep this country white

to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good. We are the most likely to support programs like universal health care and a higher minimum wage, and to oppose programs that harm the most vulnerable. For instance, black Americans suffer the most from violent crime, yet we are the most opposed to capital punishment

Our unemployment rate is nearly twice that of white Americans, yet we are still the most likely of all groups to say this nation should take in refugees

as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did

“Out of the ashes of white denigration, we gave birth to ourselves.” For as much as white people tried to pretend, black people were not chattel. And so the process of seasoning, instead of erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: In the void, we forged a new culture all our own.

Today, our very manner of speaking recalls the Creole languages that enslaved people innovated in order to communicate both with Africans speaking various dialects and the English-speaking people who enslaved them.

Our style of dress, the extra flair, stems back to the desires of enslaved people — shorn of all individuality — to exert their own identity

The improvisational quality of black art and music comes from a culture that because of constant disruption could not cling to convention.

Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream society, are themselves an act of resistance. Our last names belong to the white people who once owned us. That is why the insistence of many black Americans, particularly those most marginalized, to give our children names that we create, that are neither European nor from Africa, a place we have never been, is an act of self-determination

We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

It is common, still, to point to rates of black poverty, out-of-wedlock births, crime and college attendance, as if these conditions in a country built on a racial caste system are not utterly predictable. But crucially, you cannot view those statistics while ignoring another: that black people were enslaved here longer than we have been free.

Black people suffered under slavery for 250 years; we have been legally “free” for just 50. Yet in that briefest of spans, despite continuing to face rampant discrimination, and despite there never having been a genuine effort to redress the wrongs of slavery and the century of racial apartheid that followed, black Americans have made astounding progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans

Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures and from white America, we forged this nation’s most significant original culture. In turn, “mainstream” society has coveted our style, our slang and our song, seeking to appropriate the one truly American culture as its own.

seasoning, in which people stolen from western and central Africa

In the United States, this story is perhaps best exemplified by Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross and one of the most celebrated figures in the nation's history. Her lifesaving work on Civil War battlefields and her lasting contributions to the betterment of society are a reminder of how much a determined woman can do.

In this historic year of celebrating the 19th Amendment giving women the power of the vote, I'm still a believer in Bella's prediction because I have witnessed what can happen when women bring forward the full scope of our experiences as mothers, daughters and sisters, individually and collectively, to redefine power by how we use it and share it. From negotiating peace to leading toward climate justice, we have, as a global women's community, the opportunity to fully actualize Bella's faith in us.

Although recent victories against these companies are encouraging, there is a long fight ahead of us still, and Rachel will continue to inspire. Because she never gave up, and she succeeded in banning DDT despite the vested interests of corporations and the government—despite the fact that she was secretly battling the cancer that killed her. In addition, I was always supported and encouraged by my mother.

My first reaction to learning about Claudette Colvin was, "How did I not know about her until now?" In 1955, Claudette was 15 and living in Montgomery, Alabama. On her ride home from school one day, the driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white woman. Claudette refused, and two police officers dragged her off the bus in handcuffs.

When I first met Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, I was a young, single mom on public assistance and food stamps. I was active in the community—serving as president of the Black Student Union, volunteering with the Black Panther Party, while raising two young boys. The time I spent on her campaign deeply impacted my life.

As soon as she finished her speech, I offered to do anything I could for her campaign. But when she asked me if I was registered to vote, I admitted that I was not. She was not pleased. She looked at me and said: "Little girl, you can't change the system if you're on the outside looking in. Register to vote."

Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm remains an inspiration to little girls and women everywhere, including myself, reminding us to strive for what's possible, unburdened by what's been. As my mother—another hero in my eyes—used to say, "You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last."

When the New York Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights passed 10 years ago, I knew I was both witnessing a massive historical achievement in that moment and riding the crest of a longer historical arc, lifted up by millions of women who have been fighting for respect and dignity for generations.

Along with nearly one thousand other women from all over the world, I traveled to Brussels in May of 1989 for the first-ever international peace conference convened by women. Proudly hanging on the front of the European Parliament building was a banner: "WOMEN: GIVE PEACE A CHANCE."

One of the people who has inspired me is Mariame Kaba, one of the nation's leading prison abolitionists and the founder of the organization Project NIA, which works to end youth incarceration. She's truly remarkable. One of the attributes I most admire about her is the resilience she embodies and the genuine sense of hope she exudes. She is deeply principled and warm hearted in her pursuit of justice. She said something years ago that has stayed with me: "Hope is a discipline." When things feel bleak, I come back to these words to maintain perspective and to persevere.

In 1962, after two years studying chimpanzees, I went to Cambridge University to read for a PhD in ethology. There I was told there was a difference in kind between humans and other animals, that only we humans had personalities, minds, and emotions. But I had learned that this was not true from my childhood teachers, my wonderful mother and my dog, Rusty! So I refused to comply with this reductionist thinking. Eventually, because the chimpanzees are so similar to us biologically as well as behaviorally, most scientists accepted that we are part of the animal kingdom. But I received much criticism.

Amelia Earhart broke the barrier for women in aviation, then Jackie Cochran founded the WASP, a WWII Women Pilots Service, paving the way for Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

And finally, suffragists rallied and marched for women's equality starting in 1848, seeking the basic right to vote and assure their voices were counted. It took over 50 years before their dream was realized and none of the brave early leaders lived to celebrate or exercise this important right. It opened so many doors for the next steps to true equality.

More than 20 years ago in Beijing, Hillary Clinton stood in front of the United Nations World Conference on Women and declared that "human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights." Although Hillary's history-making speech was directed at the world, it felt like she was speaking directly to me. At the time, I was a young lawyer, but Hillary's words forced me to ask myself tough questions about what I was doing to make the world a better place.

During times of uncertainty, it's important to reach for inspiration as a way to stay connected to what's possible. I'm grateful for my own mother, Lynette Schwartz, who taught me from a young age to always expect the unexpected and be prepared for the things that you cannot see. When I was growing up, I used to think that my mother was unnecessarily worried about everything and overly prepared. Her advice and habits have become especially helpful in the last few weeks as uncertainty spreads. Because of her, our home has become a sanctuary for those who don't have the same.

The women of color who founded the movement we carry forward today are my inspiration. Their persistence to be seen and heard gives me strength to carry on in uncertain times. The term "women of color" was born in 1977 in Houston, Texas, at the first and only National Women's Conference. There, among more than 20,000 mostly white women, a cadre of Black, Latina, Asian American and Native women redefined the women's agenda to include race, class and solidarity. They inspired entire generations of us to step fully into our collective leadership and power. Now women of color—a majority of women in several states—are leading progressive reforms as voters, organizers and courageous elected leaders.

I can still remember standing with my mother, Ann Richards, on the floor of the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. It was the first time we'd done anything like this together. As State Treasurer of Texas, Mom had been asked to give a speech seconding Walter Mondale's nomination for the presidency, and she asked me to go along. Even though her speech was the next day, it was the furthest thing from our minds while we waited for Mondale's running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, to take the stage. That night, she would become the first woman ever nominated as vice president on a major party ticket.

As a young girl impacted by over-policing and over-incarceration in my communities, I was particularly grateful when I learned about the abolitionist movement that helped support enslaved Africans to gain their freedom. I would learn and relearn the brilliant story of Harriet Tubman—a young enslaved woman who would free herself from slavery and eventually free so many others including her entire family. This kind of bravery helped me assess the life I was living and created a courage in me that translated into the work I currently do today.

In my life, I have had many moments of self-doubt when I have felt that I lacked the knowledge, the background, the expertise necessary to deal with vexing issues. Most women have had such experiences.

Born into slavery and orphaned as a young woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an uncompromising and courageous voice for race and gender justice. She resisted not just the terror of racism and the suffocation of sexism, but also the conventions that artificially limited advocacy against these "isms."

When I wrote "American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country" an observation jumped out: in many instances in the remarkable progress of women in history, the first barrier breakers worked for years to be recognized in their fields, but never saw their success.

We went out into one of the tiny rice-paddy villages, a cluster of six tin open-sided lean-to huts. It's a day's trek, by minibus from the little town of Bontoc, then by foot up and down steep hillsides and across fragile rope bridges, then teetering along thin strips of earth that divide the paddies. Finally we sit on the mud floor of one of the huts, drinking peanut coffee from a shared tin cup. Urban Filipinas speak English, some Spanish and only a little Filipino (Tagalog); the tribal people of the North have their own languages. One woman translates.

Later that afternoon, each of us clutching at the ropes of a swaying bridge, my activist translator shouted to me that somehow, she must find the funding to start an adult literacy program for the women of this rice paddy. And so we all did. But Gunnawa is always with me. Because all of us need to know how to read the signs that tell us where we are. So we can know where we're going.

The design, restoration of the original park and construction of the new memorial will cost $42 million; the commission has $1.4 million left to raise.

Critics — many of whom fought Mr. Fountain’s concept with every tactic available — say the structure falls short in marrying a historically significant park with a big-dream memorial.

“The real question is: Did the memorial leverage the power of place in which it now resides?” said Charles A. Birnbaum, the president of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, who tried to have the park added to the National Register of Historic Places, which trimmed the memorial planners’ large-scale plans.

Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas, tried for years to expand the memorial effort on the National Mall before he retired. Congress considered transforming the District of Columbia War Memorial, at the end of the mall, into a national monument.

“I was doing very myopic, classical male figurative sculpture derived from Hellenistic art,” Mr. Howard said. “Neither one of us was ready. It is just insanity. You are entering into this process that could take away 15 years of your life.”

Mr. Howard said he was conscious of making the sculpture visually engaging but also educational. “My client said, ‘You have to make something that dramatizes World War I in a way in which visitors will want to go home and learn more about it,’” he said.

Accuracy gave way, however, to artistic license. The piece, which depicts Black, Latino and Native American soldiers, blurs the reality.

While Mr. Howard changed the helmets of the Black troops to reflect that, he said he was unmoved by the broader argument. “You had segregation in the Army ” he said in an interview. “However, on the battlefield, there is no distinction.”

As such, even if Black soldiers were depicted in a way that was historically incorrect, he said, “they needed to be treated as equal stature.”

The memorial is unlikely to quell longstanding criticism that too many monuments in Washington focus on war and death.

“There are stories that have been marginalized that could have been celebrated and sobering stories of the reality of the war experience that could more effectively honor sacrifice,” said Phoebe Lickwar, who was a landscape architect in the early stages of the project.

he had never intended to “diminish the voice of any Black American.” Still, he added, “I should have recognized how what I said and what I did could be interpreted by many of you.”

Mr. Lankford and other Republicans had claimed that by challenging the election results, they were exercising their independence and acting in the interests of constituents who were demanding answers.

In a joint statement that night with Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, Mr. Lankford called on “the entire Congress to come together and vote to certify the election results.”

Mr. Lankford has faced calls from Black leaders to resign from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which is designed to commemorate the racist massacre in the city’s Greenwood district, an affluent Black community known as Black Wall Street. The massacre, which took place 100 years ago this spring, was one of the worst instances of racist violence in American history. A white mob destroyed the neighborhood and its Black-owned businesses, and up to 300 residents were killed.