Sleepy, creepy Joe Biden, the serial plagiarist, now claims that the remarkable Thomas Edison DID NOT invent the light bulb (I suppose Al Gore did, just like he invented the Internet). Biden also claimed that teachers do not teach about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

Fifty years ago I graduated from both Thomas Alva Edison Junior and Senior High Schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I take his ahistorical conjectures as a personal affront and insult to me and the historical record. Later I spent 27 years as a social studies teacher at Tulsa Memorial High School (the cross town rival of Edison), many of those years teaching Oklahoma History and Economics.

From the beginning of my career I always focused and included in my curriculum detailed exploration of both inventor Thomas Edison and the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Both of my grandfathers played a minor role in that 1921 horrific tragedy. My maternal grandfather was employed by the Tulsa Police Department (he was head of the fingerprinting branch). On the night of the riot my aunt told me that a carload of men in a convertible came to their house and her father joined them. She said she could well remember seeing the barrels of their rifles protruding from the vehicle. It was the only time in his career that he went armed. The officers were assigned to protect the black residents of Tulsa from violence and injury to persons and property. My paternal grandfather was almost 20 miles away from the area of the conflagration working as a farmer. On the morning after those savage events he went out into his cornfield and found a number of people hiding there. He asked why they were there. They told him the details and how they had walked that distance to try to escape from the terror of those events. My grandfather told them that they could stay there as long as needed to ensure their safety.

All my life growing up my extended family was very close to the Eddy family. Clyde Eddy was the husband of Louise, the best friend of my Aunt Lois, who I described above. We would all spend holidays and numerous trips to the lake together. I went to school with the Eddy children. Clyde Eddy was the key witness who saw the clandestine mass burial of bodies from the Massacre in the paupers’s field area of Oak Lawn Cemetery. He was interviewed on 60 Minutes and subsequently by an untold number of journalists from around the world.

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