Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Although The Washington Post began to dig into the history of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre earlier, it was HBO’s 2019 fictional limited series “Watchmen” that really turned the spotlight on this shameful forgotten piece of American history.

On the 100th anniversary of white mobs setting fires to the Greenwood neighborhood, leaving 10,000 Black people homeless and killing anywhere from 39 to 300, multiple TV specials will chronicle one of the worst individual incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.

History Channel’s “Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre” (8 p.m. Sunday) and National Geographic Channel’s “Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer” (9 p.m. June 18) are joined by PBS’s “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten” (9 p.m. Monday, WQED-TV).

PBS’s 90-minute documentary, directed by Jonathan Silvers, follows Washington Post reporter DeNeen L. Brown, who has been covering efforts to uncover the history of this sordid episode since 2018.

“Much of Black history was left out of our textbooks in the schools in the United States, deliberately left out of textbooks,” she said in a February virtual press conference during PBS’s portion of the Television Critics Association winter 2021 press tour. “Many students who went to school in Oklahoma were not taught about this massacre that occurred in their hometown.”

Brown said there was a deliberate attempt by city leaders of the era to make sure details of the massacre did not get out.

“After the massacre occurred, many of the civic leaders and city leaders in Tulsa deliberately set out to cover up the massacre. They called it an embarrassment,” she said. “When I was reporting on the story at the University of Tulsa, the curator there told me that when he arrived in 1980 to the University of Tulsas archives, he found that someone had gone through the magazines and all of the periodicals and used a razor to cut out any article that mentioned the massacre. … Many of the white people would not talk about it because their grandparents were perpetrators in the massacre. Many of the Black people often whispered about it because some had a fear that it might reoccur.”

Greenwood had been dubbed “the Black Wall Street,” a prosperous neighborhood. That all changed on May 31, 1921. In PBS’s film, an elderly man recalls being present as a child when white men burst into his family’s home and set the curtains on fire, burning his house to the ground.

Silvers said he embarked on making the documentary for PBS to expose a buried truth both figuratively and literally.

“Figuratively, in the suppression of the history of the massacre and the injustice done, not merely to the victims and survivors, but to the generations that followed,” he said, “and the literal search for the victims, the mass graves possibly linked to the massacre in several locations that have since been discovered.”

Like many Americans, Silvers only learned of the Tulsa Race Massacre recently.

“It was deeply shameful to me as a human-rights journalist for three decades to learn about this massacre only two years ago,” he said, citing Brown’s Washington Post articles as his introduction. He wanted to make a film on the subject to build awareness not only on the centennial of the massacre but also as the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer approaches.

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