(A picture from the work, “The Boys’ Book of Battle-Lyrics.)

While the current regime claims we focus too much on the history of slavery, in Oklahoma, the City of Tulsa is continuing its efforts to find the bodies of victims of racial violence.

https://www.kosu.org/local-news/2025-10-15/more-tulsa-race-massacre-victims-could-be-found-as-city-begins-fifth-grave-excavation

It’s an effort that could take weeks, Mayor Monroe Nichols said during a press conference at City Hall. Forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield and archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck joined Nichols as he gave an update on the city’s progress.

“This groundbreaking work from our archaeological and genealogy teams is a great mark of success and it tells us where we are, certainly in the right place and on the right track,” Nichols said. “The latest report from the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey gave us very detailed information as to what we believe we have left at the Oaklawn Cemetery.”

The destruction of “Black Wall Street” and the deaths of so many of our black citizens deserve remembrance. That such horrors happened are matters of fact and history which we ignore at our peril.

A free and great people does not fear its history. It embraces its past with a willingness to change and improve.

Ethics and Morality demand that we remember the crimes and mistakes of the past in the hope that we are now a better people who have found a better moral compass and a greater responsibility toward our fellow human beings.

Let us pay attention to the great words of one of our greatest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentiment to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride; how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet, let us hope, it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us, and the intellectual and moral worlds within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Lincoln didn’t just talk about having more money but assumed that social and political health were also of great importance. He could not have spoken truer words. While we live in an age of the most disgusting and degrading money grubbing and corruption, he calls us to be a great people with an unwavering committment to doing what is right.

James Alan Pilant