Sometimes the act of forgetting is accomplished through the
simple passage of time. Sometimes you have to help it along with
a pair of scissors. In the archives of the Tulsa Tribune, a now
defunct Oklahoma newspaper, two pages from May 31, 1921, have
been clipped away. Researchers believe they contained an
inflammatory news story and an editorial--"To Lynch a Negro
Tonight"--that egged on the men who set off that year's Tulsa
riot, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American
history. When students of the event went looking for those
pages, what they found was a blank space. In the history of race
relations in America, there are quite a few blank spaces. Here
are two books determined to fill them in. Riot and Remembrance:
The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy, by James S. Hirsch (Houghton
Mifflin; 358 pages; $25), is a quietly devastating account of
Tulsa's two-day convulsion of blood and of the struggle years
later to return the riot to living memory through a commission
of inquiry. Philip Dray's At