Oklahoma, “where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain” (and where many strange and unsettling things also have happened), takes center stage as today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp, issued on June 14, 1957, to mark the 50th anniversary of Oklahoma becoming the nation’s 46th state. Issued in conjunction with Oklahoma’s Semi-Centennial Exposition, which ran from April 22 to November 16 of that year, the stamp has a map of the state, a picture of an arrow piercing an atom, and the phrase “from arrows to atoms,” which was supposed to reflect Oklahoma’s evolution from the frontier days before statehood to the new frontiers expressed by atomic energy during the 1950s. (For some inexplicable reason, my father’s stamp album has two who pages of the stamp, including one with an envelope almost totally covered in those stamps.)

The stamp, of course, doesn’t provide any reference to two other notable aspects of the state’s history. The first is the state’s origins. In the 1830s, Oklahoma was at the end of “The Trail of Tears.” That is, when approximately 60,000 Native Americans who were living the southeastern United States were forcefully relocated, most wound up in Oklahoma, which was supposed to be their new permanent home. However, in 1889, in response to growing pressure from would-be settlers, the United States opened the land up for white (and black) settlers. (The plight of many of the Native Americans who remained in Oklahoma is, in part, the subject of David Grann’s best-selling book “Killers of the Flower Moon.”).

The second is the state’s sad history of race relations, notably the Tulsa massacre of 1921, in which mobs killed as many as 300 residents and totally destroyed the city’s Greenwood neighborhood, which, at the time, was one of the nation’s most prominent and thriving black commercial districts. This massacre, of course, has been in the news because the person currently occupying the White House wanted to give a major speech in Tulsa on June 19th. The choice of Tulsa was bad enough but the addition of June 19th, made it even worse because that’s the day celebrated by many as the end of slavery in the US. (Why June 19th when the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves had gone into effect in January 1863? Because, it wasn’t until June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger read it out loud in Galveston, Texas, that the Emancipation Proclamation had become law in every state that had been part of the Confederacy.)

The stamp, of course, predates the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh, a white supremacist, who, in retrospect, wasn’t an anomaly but was, rather, a harbinger of many of our present ills. Similarly, the stamp also predates the fact that at the onset of the current pandemic, the state’s governor did a particularly good job of denying and ignoring what science and good public health suggested about risks and needed responses. And despite its celebration of science, the state currently is among the many states seeing a sharp rise in confirmed new cases.

So the stamp doesn’t touch on the state’s troubled past. Rather, like Oklahoma!, the 1943 hit musical about the state it celebrates other aspects of the state. We, however, can reinterpret it just as the musical, it can be reinterpreted to shed that light. As Frank Rich wrote about a 2019 revival of Oklahoma!, when the show premiered in 1943, it “was greeted as jingoistic entertainment…perhaps in part because a wartime audience didn’t want to see that the musical’s celebration of the platonic ideal of Great America was qualified by a brutal acknowledgment of how cruelly America can fall short.” But, he added, the 2019 revival was “a timely refutation of the lie that America can be made great by turning back the clock to some immaculate America of the past. A great America has always been a work-in-progress. The Great America of nostalgic, reactionary fantasy, beatific and white and welcoming to all, never existed in the first place – not even, it turns out, in the bright, golden meadows of Oklahoma!”

Stay safe, be well, fight for justice and work for peace.