Oklahoma City: April Nineteenth

On April nineteenth, nineteen ninety-five, at nine-oh-two in the morning, a truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The explosion killed one hundred sixty-eight people, including nineteen children, most of them in a daycare center on the building's second floor.

It remained the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in United States history until September of two thousand one. The attacker, Timothy McVeigh, was a United States Army veteran who had chosen April nineteenth deliberately: it was the second anniversary of the federal raid at Waco, Texas, and the two hundred twentieth anniversary of the battles at Lexington and Concord. He understood himself as acting against a tyrannical government in the tradition of the American Revolution.

The people he killed were federal employees and their children. The Oklahoma City National Memorial now occupies the site of the building. One hundred sixty-eight chairs are arranged on the reflecting pool, smaller chairs for the children.

An elm tree that survived the blast stands at the edge of the memorial and is called the Survivor Tree. Seeds from it have been distributed to communities that have experienced mass violence. The memorial is quiet and specific and very well designed.

It does not flinch from what happened. The city rebuilt around it. Oklahoma City before the bombing was not a city that people outside Oklahoma paid much attention to.

After the bombing, the way the city responded, the emergency response, the community cohesion, the long process of rebuilding and memorialization, became a model that other cities have studied. The chairs on the reflecting pool are lit at night.