Brad recommended holding the rally on June 19. He loved Friday night events, but rallies those nights were rare because the campaign often had to find open days between concerts, basketball games, and other traveling road shows that had been booked months in advance. Brad floated the date inside the campaign, but not to an extensive circle. No one on Brad’s team flagged that day—or that combination of time and place—as potentially problematic. Had Brad bothered to ask Katrina Pierson, the highest-ranking Black staffer on the campaign and a close friend of Brad’s, she could have told him that June 19 was Juneteenth, a significant holiday for Black Americans that commemorated the end of slavery.
She also would have told him that Tulsa, as most Black Americans are well aware, had been home to one of the bloodiest outbreaks of racial violence in the nation’s history. She’d have explained that it had only been two weeks since Floyd had been killed, that protests over police brutality, which disproportionately had fatal consequences for Blacks were still boiling over across the country every night, and that holding a rally in the middle of a civil rights crisis on Juneteenth in the same city as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was unwise.
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