Let’s look back at a tragedy which dramatically overshadows today’s current event. It is one of the most bleak and secretive tragedies in our past. It is so secretive that my thoughtful guide in Oklahoma knew nothing about it, and I had to direct him to its site. It is the worst race riot in U.S. history.

Well, all my travel journalist colleagues seem to be doing it; so I thought it was about time for me to finally compile my own list of favorite travel destinations in 2018. I was blessed to experience such an array of edifying and diverse landscapes and cultures. Did I say diverse?

Ms Hooker, who died on Wednesday at home in White Plains, New York, thousands of miles and almost 100 years away from the riots in Tulsa, was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in February 1915. By the time she was six, the family had moved to Tulsa, where her father had “a very nice store” which “didn’t carry shoddy things.”

As I stood in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma I was amazed by the lushness of its greenery and sense of cosmopolitism. This was my first trip to Oklahoma, and in my naiveté, I had thought the whole state was one big Dust Bowl. Perhaps I had seen John Ford’s film adaption of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath too many times, but that image had been branded in my mind.

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson pushed a new piece of legislation through Congress called the "Indian Removal Act." American-Indian tribes* were to give up their lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for lands to the west in Oklahoma. Jackson said that this was for the various tribes’ protection, but there was an ulterior motive...