President Joe Biden on Tuesday slammed efforts to 'erase' the Tulsa Race Massacre from history and used the occasion to make a plea for racial income equality and improved voting rights. Biden was in Tulsa to mark the 100th anniversary of the Black Wall Street Massacre, when white rioters killed African Americans and looted businesses in the prosperous black neighborhood of Greenwood in 1921. 'My fellow Americans, this was not a riot. This was a massacre,' Biden said after meeting with the three living survivors of that event. 'Among the worst in our history but not the only one. And for too long, forgotten by our history.' Ahead of the trip, the White House said Biden was visiting the city to make sure the massacre, one of the worst - and largely overlooked - acts of racial violence in American history, was not forgotten. He is the first president to mark the occasion. 'Just because history is silent, it doesn't mean that it did not take place. And while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing,' he said. 'Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they can't be buried no matter how hard people try.' 'I come here to help fill the silence. Because in silence, wounds deepen. As painful as it is, only in remembrance do wounds heal,' he noted. 'We memorialize what happened here in Tulsa so it can't be erased. .. We simply can't bury pain and trauma forever.' He urged Americans to remember the occasion and learn from it. 'We do ourselves no favors by pretending none of this ever happened or doesn't impact us today because it does still impact us today. We can't just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know. We should know the good, the bad, everything. That's what great nations do. They come to terms with their dark sides,' the president said.