National Monuments We Need
By 
I am very glad that this seems likely to happen. Hard to think of a single moment in American history more in need of official remembrance:
More than a century after it was destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the historic Greenwood neighborhood, known as Black Wall Street, could soon become a national monument.
A bipartisan coalition in Congress, led bySens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.), has introduced a bill to make the site of the historic tragedy a federally recognized monument.
The legislation would delineate the historical boundary of the Greenwood neighborhood in North Tulsa as a national monument, part of the National Park Service network of protected sites. People on Capitol Hill with knowledge of the proposed bill say that a vote in the Senate is expected this summer. A companion bill in the House is expected to be introduced this month.
Some activists have called on President Biden, who visited Tulsa three years ago on the 100th anniversary of the massacre, to establish the monument by using his executive authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which protects cultural and natural resources of historical or scientific interest.
The Historic Greenwood District-Black Wall Street National Monument Establishment Act proposed in Congress would create an appointed advisory commission, including seven descendants of massacre victims and survivors. The aim is to preserve and interpret the history of Greenwood, Black Wall Street and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, though the details of how the history would be commemorated remain to be determined.
“Over 100 years ago, a violent mob destroyed the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our history,” Booker said in a statement. “When I visited Tulsa in 2019, I felt pain and anguish for the hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children who were murdered, the more than 1,250 homes that burned, and for the thousands of victims who survived this act of hatred.”
Obviously it is better if Congress does this, but if it doesn’t, then Biden absolutely should just create it under the Antiquites Act. That said, the fact that Lankford is on board helps a lot. That also said, this is not the first time we have seen right-wingers support historical memory of civil rights oriented sites as a way to cover up their own racism in their present politics. We saw this in Alabama with the relatively new National Park sites in Birmingham and Selma as an example in the latter years of the Obama administration. I guess you take what you can get.
I might also note that I’ve been impressed with how seriously Booker takes the job of senator. He was more than a bit of a self-promoting gladhandler early in his career, especially when he was mayor of Newark. Since his presidential ambitions went belly up in 2020, he seems to have really gotten down to work on policy issues and good for him.