His remarks will come a day after the Juneteenth holiday and during a period of nationwide protests and discussions over racism.
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The Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington, a virtual event modeled after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last organizing effort, begins online.
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President Trump will speak in Tulsa, the site of a horrific race riot.
President Trump rarely talks about injustice or violence against black Americans, but the issue will be hard to ignore on Saturday night during his first rally in more than three months.
His remarks will come one day after the Juneteenth holiday and during a period of nationwide protests and discussions over systemic racism. And they will be given in Tulsa, Okla., the site of one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history.
On May 30, 1921, the Greenwood district of Tulsa was a thriving black community, a rarity in an era of lynchings, segregation and a rapidly growing Ku Klux Klan. By sunrise on June 2, Greenwood lay in ruins, burned to the ground by a mob of white people, aided and abetted by the National Guard.
The death toll may have been as high as 300, with hundreds more injured and an estimated 8,000 or more left homeless.
Local officials, seeing a public-relations nightmare, expressed contrition and said they would rebuild the community. Instead, they destroyed documentation and spent the next 50 years pretending nothing had happened. Those who were there went silent, generations of children grew up oblivious, and anyone who dared raise the subject was told in no uncertain terms: We don’t speak of that here.
Today, both the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum and the Oklahoma Historical Society will discuss the massacre in detail, and the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission is working to commemorate the 100th anniversary next year. But the wound remains open.
Black Tulsans, segregated into Greenwood, had built a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street. Thirty residents owned grocery stores there in 1921, said State Senator Kevin Matthews, a Democrat who represents Tulsa. There were restaurants, hotels, theaters and transportation services run by black entrepreneurs.
“That’s what people don’t know,” Mr. Matthews said. “We had that kind of prosperity in 1921. This was Black Wall Street for a reason, and it was burned down and destroyed for a reason.”
Mr. Trump’s rally was originally scheduled to fall on the Juneteenth holiday. He moved it to Saturday after public pressure and quiet lobbying.
Following a relatively quiet night in Tulsa, Trump supporters assembled Saturday morning near the arena where Mr. Trump is slated to hold his evening rally, adding to the voters who had staked out his event for days as they camped in lawn chairs and tents in a line that stretched for several blocks.
The mood among many supporters was exuberant as they awaited the president’s return to the campaign trail after months without rallies amid the coronavirus outbreak. Some attendees already knew each other from previous Trump events and reunited with old friends, others played music or struck up chants of “four more years!”
Tulsa health officials have expressed concerns about conducting the rally in a large, indoor arena while coronavirus cases in Oklahoma are on the rise. For months, the virus has disproportionately affected African-Americans across the nation.
Vice President Pence was set to arrive in Tulsa Saturday afternoon, and Mr. Trump a couple hours later. Mr. Trump’s team is hoping to fill the 19,000-seat BOK Center in this deep-red state even as he faces plunging poll numbers nationally, and in key battleground states.
President Trump is scheduled to attend two events in Tulsa: He will deliver brief remarks at what the White House called a “Great American Comeback Celebration” event, and then he will attend the rally inside the BOK Center.
Minnesota lawmakers failed to compromise on police overhaul measures.
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Political leaders in Minnesota promised sweeping reforms after George Floyd’s killing turned their state into a focal point for nationwide fury and grief over police killings and racism.
But those efforts collapsed early on Saturday as leaders in the Minnesota Legislature — the only one in the country where Democrats control one chamber and Republicans the other — failed to compromise on a package of law-enforcement reform measures before a special session ended.
Ultimately, legislators could not come to an agreement that reconciled the Democrats’ calls for far-reaching changes to police oversight with Republicans’ efforts to pass a shorter list of “common-sense police reforms,” which included banning chokeholds in most situations and requiring officers to stop their colleagues from using unreasonable force.
Democrats said the Republicans’ plan consisted of tepid half-steps that were already in place in most law-enforcement agencies and did not rise to the moment’s calls for dramatic action. Republicans balked at Democratic proposals to restore voter rights to tens of thousands of felons and put the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, in charge of prosecuting police killings.
Democrats in the House shared a late counteroffer, dropping those demands. And Republican leaders said they had agreed to alter arbitration proceedings when officers are accused of misconduct.
But as the clock ticked toward a midnight deadline on Friday — and then far past it — leaders of both parties blamed each other for failing to reach a compromise. The breakdown finally came just after 6 a.m. on Saturday, when both chambers adjourned without a deal.
The Legislature’s failure to pass a bill was a disheartening turn for activists who have pushed for far-reaching changes to policing, including cutting police budgets or dismantling police departments altogether to reduce the presence of armed officers in minority neighborhoods.
Some lawmakers said they hoped that Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, would call them back again next week or later in the summer to take up the issues, but activists worried that the window to change the laws was closing as the 2020 election approaches.
From Washington to Golden Gate Park, statues and monuments continue to be removed.
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In the late hours of Friday evening, statues of Confederate figures were yanked off their pedestals by cheering crowds of protesters in two Eastern cities and paraded through the streets, while on the West Coast, protesters pulled down figures from early in the nation’s history.
After several attempts, protesters in Washington toppled and set fire to a statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general whose monument has been targeted for removal by different groups for decades. The statue stood in Judiciary Square about half a mile from the Capitol.
Shortly afterward, President Trump tweeted that “the D.C. Police are not doing their job as they watch a statue be ripped down & burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!”
Earlier in the evening, in Raleigh, N.C., protesters pulled down the bronze statues of two Confederate soldiers that had been attached to the base of a 75-foot-tall monument on the grounds of the State Capitol. Pictures and video from the scene showed people pulling one of the statues off the pedestal, dragging it through the street and then hanging it from a sign pole.
And in San Francisco, videos on social media showed protesters in Golden Gate Park bringing down monuments of Junípero Serra, a Spanish priest who founded some of the first Catholic missions in California, and Francis Scott Key, the writer of the lyrics to the national anthem and a slave owner.
These are just the latest monuments associated with racial oppression to come down across the country, most of them by the orders of authorities but some at the hands of demonstrators.
Protesters have removed or defaced statues of Christopher Columbus from Miami to Boston, toppled statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — both slaveholders — in Portland, Ore., and pushed authorities to take down Confederate monuments in Alabama.
How the shooting of Breonna Taylor changed a Senate race.
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Senate Democrats thought they had it all planned out.
Maybe they could not defeat Senator Mitch McConnell, their legislative bête noire, in Kentucky this November. But by nominating Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot who earned a national following in a close 2018 House race, they figured they could keep the race relatively competitive, raise cash against the majority leader and perhaps draw some extra money for their efforts to reclaim the Senate.
Then came the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor, who was shot eight times after officers entered her apartment in Louisville with a battering ram. And suddenly everything changed.
Ms. McGrath now finds herself in a rapidly tightening race against Charles Booker, a 35-year-old African-American state representative who was tear-gassed by the police at a recent protest.
With just over a week until the Democratic primary, the fury in Kentucky over Ms. Taylor’s death, uncertainty about voting in a pandemic and a host of late endorsements from progressive leaders have provided fresh momentum to Mr. Booker’s candidacy — upending a nominating contest few in the national party were even following last month.
“I’m traveling Kentucky talking about structural racism and I’m seeing folks, even 99 percent white, putting their fists in the air because they know that we can’t let this moment pass,” Mr. Booker, clad in a “No More No Knocks” T-shirt, recounted to a multiracial audience in Lexington.
After Bubba Wallace spoke up, NASCAR banned the Confederate battle flag.
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Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr., the only black driver in NASCAR’s top racing series, has drawn widespread attention and acclaim for his stand that got the Confederate battle flag banned from races in a largely white sport.
And after years of often quiet acceptance of what he described as the sport’s “racist label,” nobody was more surprised than his mother that he had become a central figure in the sports world’s upheaval over race.
“I was shocked,” his mother, Desiree Wallace, said. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, is this my son — the one who doesn’t really care about anything but getting in the car and driving?’ I’m tripping that he’s gone from being a racecar driver to becoming a doggone activist.”
Unlike other black athletes now speaking out in a tide of conversation about race, Bubba Wallace has found his voice in a sport surrounded by white peers. Many have supported him, but others have stayed silent.
For a long time, Bubba Wallace — a 26-year-old who was born in Mobile, Ala., and grew up in the heart of North Carolina’s NASCAR country — tried to focus solely on racing. From the time he first started racing a souped-up go-kart at age 9, his main concern was simply going fast and crossing the finish line first.
As he would show up at races with his father, Darrell Sr., who is white, and sometimes his mother, who is black, he put on his helmet and blended in.
“I never saw color and never thought I was treated differently because I was black,” he said. “I was way too young to understand what a trailblazer was or a pioneer was.”
Reporting was contributed by Maggie Astor, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Katie Glueck, Jack Healy, Juliet Macur, Jonathan Martin and Campbell Robertson.
