Housatonic Book Award Winner

Longlisted for the National Book Award and Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction

Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and Stowe Prize

One of The New York Times' “11 New Books We Recommend This Week” | One of Oprah Daily's “20 of the Best Books to Pick Up This May” | One of The Oklahoman's “15 Books to Help You Learn About the Tulsa Race Massacre as the 100-Year Anniversary Approaches” |A The Week book of the week

As seen in documentaries on the History Channel, CNN, and Lebron James’s SpringHill Productions

And then they were gone.

More than one thousand homes and businesses. Restaurants and movie theaters, churches and doctors’ offices, a hospital, a public library, a post office. Looted, burned, and bombed from the air. 
 
Over the course of less than twenty-four hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map—and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than fifty years. But there were some secrets that would not die.
 
A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre. It also unearths the lost history of how the massacre was covered up, and of the courageous individuals who fought to keep the story alive. Most important, it recounts the ongoing archaeological saga and the search for the unmarked graves of the victims of the massacre, and of the fight to win restitution for the survivors and their families.
 
Both a forgotten chronicle from the nation’s past and a story ripped from today’s headlines, The Ground Breaking is a page-turning reflection on how we, as Americans, must wrestle with the parts of our history that have been buried for far too long.

Now in paperback, the definitive, newsbreaking account of the reopened investigation into the Tulsa Race Massacre and its aftermath

In the late spring of 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, erupted into perhaps the worst single incident of racial violence in all of American history. Referred to today as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, it was an event of singular fury and devastation, during which a mob of white men and women reduced a prosperous African American community, known as Black Wall Street, to rubble, leaving countless dead and unaccounted for, and thousands of homes and businesses destroyed for good.

Now, one hundred years after that horrible day, Scott Ellsworth returns to his hometown in search of answers. But the investigation is not simply to find graves or bodies-it is a search to reckon with the darkest chapters of our country's history. Part true-crime murder mystery, part narrative history, The Ground Breaking weaves in and out of the distant past, recent history, and the modern day to tell a story of a city-and a nation-struggling to confront its greatest demons.

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