The Philadelphia Inquirer: Lynchings, 1921 Tulsa massacre and 8 other things school didn’t teach you about race in America

Many of the 1.5 million folks who tuned in Sunday night to watch the premiere of HBO’s transformational comic-book adaptation The Watchmen clearly had a hard time unseeing the horrific first eight minutes of the series, as the words “TULSA 1921” flashed on the screen.

An angry, chaotic mob of white people, some in ivory robes, firing rifles at random black citizens or beating them up on dusty streets, while one hurls a Molotov cocktail into a black-owned business. A young African American boy, hidden in the back of a coach attempting to flee the massacre, peers through a bullet hole to see the corpses of two black men dragged across the pavement of the Oklahoma city.

As soon as the episode ended, thousands took to the internet asking variations of the same question: Did that really happen?