Reviewed by: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History by Karlos K. Hill Ben Davidson The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History. By Karlos K. Hill. Foreword by Kevin Matthews. Greenwood Cultural Center Series in African Diaspora History and Culture. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 274. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6856-2.) In the foreword to Karlos K. Hill's stunning The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History, Oklahoma state senator Kevin Matthews writes that "Karlos Hill and the photos he has drawn together here tell the truth in a unique, compelling way" (p. xi). W. E. B. Du Bois also mused on the importance of truth to historians: "shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?" (Black Reconstruction [New York, 1935], p. 714). In collecting and organizing this collection of often harrowing images, Hill asks not only about the truth of the Tulsa Massacre, but also how photographs of the violence have served multiple truths over time. Most of the images were produced by white photographers, at least some of whom saw the scenes depicted as triumphant. Is it even possible, then, that these artifacts might be used to tell a different story in 2021? Hill successfully answers this question in the affirmative, making a number of key contentions: that the photographs support scholars' recent shift from the terminology of "riot" to that of "massacre"; that Tulsa is likely the most photographed event of racial violence in U.S. history; and that these photographs and the accompanying narratives provide evidence of the ongoing need for reparations. In six chapters composed of photographs accompanied by descriptive captions and selections from remembrances of survivors, Hill takes the reader through the horror and chaos of Tulsa in late May and early June 1921. Having combed through approximately 500 photographs of the massacre, Hill selected approximately 150 images as especially powerful and informative. A scholar with expertise in the history of lynching, Hill draws a comparison between photographs of the violence in Tulsa and postcards of lynchings collected by white spectators. Indeed, a key argument of this book is that this "extensive race massacre photo archive exists because so many white participants desired to visually represent and share with other whites their role in the violent destruction of the Greenwood district" (p. 8). Presenting and preserving an array of important archival materials alongside this historiographical intervention about the place of the Tulsa Massacre within a longer history of white supremacist violence as spectacle, Hill has produced a work that scholars of racial violence, photography, spectacle, and U.S. history more broadly must grapple with. I especially appreciated Hill's attention to Black children as those who lived with experiences of the massacre over the longest stretch of time. Chapter 6 opens with a quotation from Ruth Dean Nash, a massacre survivor who was not quite six years old in May 1921: "'I was so traumatized by that riot, I don't remember much about anything, except for my terror. I'll never forget that'" [End Page 418] (p. 224). Chapter 6 also presents a different set of images: contemporary photographs of massacre survivors placed above narrative memories of their experiences. The contrasts between these more recent images and those from 1921 highlight the "grit and resilience of the Black survivors," to use Hill's own description (p. 7). Though The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre should be valued by scholars for preserving and collecting these images and for its historiographical importance, Hill's "ultimate goal with this book is to pay tribute to the victims and survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre" (p. 16). Hill has met this goal in profound ways, and I have no doubt that this book will remain deeply meaningful to descendants of survivors. The photographs in this book contain endless stories and will thus undoubtedly be useful to a wide range of readers as they seek to "tell the truth" about a horrific and all-too-ordinary moment of racial violence (p. xi). Ben Davidson Saint Michael's College Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association