WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will travel to Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tuesday to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, one of the worst instances of racial violence in the nation’s history.
Biden is scheduled to tour the Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa and meet with Black members of the community who survived the 1921 massacre. The event will also be attended by Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge, White House domestic policy adviser Susan Rice and senior adviser Cedric Richmond.
The president will then deliver remarks at the cultural center in mid-afternoon to address what occurred a century ago.
The massacre started on the evening of May 31 and continued into the afternoon of June 1, 1921, when a mob of white people killed several hundred Black residents and destroyed their affluent neighborhood in Tulsa, displacing thousands in the community.
In conjunction with Biden’s visit, the White House announced Tuesday that the administration is taking several steps aimed at narrowing the racial wealth gap, including an inter-agency effort to tackle racial discrimination in the housing market. The White House also said it will also “use the federal government’s purchasing power to grow federal contracting with small disadvantaged businesses by 50 percent, translating to an additional $100 billion over five years.”
The White House also noted several provisions of Biden’s infrastructure and jobs plan that it said would help address the racial wealth gap, including tens of billions of dollars for community-led redevelopment and transportation projects.
The new steps do not include a plan to address the student debt crisis, which NAACP President Derrick Johnson called “a key issue at the core” of the wealth gap between Blacks and whites in the country.
“Student loan debt continues to suppress the economic prosperity of Black Americans across the nation,” Johnson said. “You cannot begin to address the racial wealth gap without addressing the student loan debt crisis. You just can’t address one without the other. Plain and simple. President Biden’s budget fails to address the student debt crisis.”
An administration official previewing the new actions said Monday that he had no announcements to make about student debt.
Winston Wilde contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
