Anneliese Bruner

This book is unique in having captured firsthand the terror of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. As a descendant of the author, Mary E. Jones Parrish, I was gifted the family copy of the book by my father, William W. Bruner Jr., when I was 35, not much older than Mary Parrish when she and her daughter, my paternal grandmother, survived the massacre while living right on Greenwood Avenue. Like her, I accepted my charge to keep alive the story of what happened during that terrible time. The book is a national treasure. My adaptation, The Nation Must Awake, published on the centennial of the disaster in 2021, incorporates her original text along with so much more information.