Known as ‘Black Wall Street’ in the early 20th century, Tulsa’s Greenwood District was home to one of the US’s most prominent concentrations of African-American businesses. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre changed that but today, Black Tulsans have once again reclaimed a piece of Greenwood.

On an unseasonably warm and sunny February weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the tidy brick buildings and clean streets in the Greenwood District are busy with families. Children’s laughter echoes through the air and you’ll probably spot the colorful Black Wall Street mural painted by local artist Chris “Sker” Rogers—but the orderly blocks hold no sign of the tragedy that occurred here a century ago.

In the early 20th century, Tulsa’s Greenwood District was known as Black Wall Street—the area had one of the most prominent concentrations of Black businesses in the United States. Greenwood was a bustling cultural and economic haven for Tulsa’s Black residents, home to a theater, restaurants, banks and doctors’ offices.

Within the 35 blocks of the Greenwood District, Tulsa’s Black community supported one another and thrived despite pervasive racism and segregation. But that all changed on May 31, 1921 when one of the worst instances of racial violence in the history of the United States occurred.

On that night, angry white mobs attacked and brutally killed hundreds of Greenwood residents, burning homes with children inside, looting businesses and destroying everything in sight. What became known as the Tulsa Race Massacre was a hate crime carried out on a massive scale, fueled by sensationalist media coverage of a supposed assault of a white girl by a Black boy in an elevator.

To understand and appreciate the spirit of Greenwood, I head to Greenwood Rising, one of the most significant recent museum openings in the United States. The museum reflects on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and is also a celebration of the resilient Black community that thrived before and after an act of domestic terrorism that is not often acknowledged in history books.

My immersive experience started with an uplifting contemporary montage video set to Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” followed by a historic timeline illuminating the rise of Greenwood.

Because Black people were not allowed to patronize white businesses, they spent their money within their own community, creating a self-sustaining city within a city. As if on cue, I stepped through a door into a vibrant 1920s barbershop, lightheartedly interacting with holographic barbers, before being plunged into the horrific violence and destruction of the overnight attack that killed hundreds of residents and left more than 10,000 Black Tulsans homeless.

While land and commercial property still isn’t back in the hands of the Black community, there are more Black-owned businesses that have opened or plan on opening soon. I continue to be inspired by the Black entrepreneurs who paved the way for me and wanted to carry on their legacy in the same place.

Venita Cooper, Tulsa Store Owner

Three Tulsans who survived that barbaric night as young children share their personal testimony and heartbreaking memories as voiceovers.

Artifacts and interactive displays acknowledge and celebrate the strong, persevering pillars of the community who helped to rebuild Greenwood—you’re left with a stirring call to action in the spirit of racial reconciliation.  A must if visiting, and while admission is free, tickets must be reserved online in advance.

Today, Greenwood is rising again. A spate of new businesses ranging from workout studios to art galleries have created a renaissance of sorts in the Greenwood District, according to local historian and author Hannibal B. Johnson.

Although the Black community rebuilt most of Greenwood in the decade following the Tulsa Race Massacre’s aftermath, it never quite reached the same levels of prosperity. Recent years however have seen promising new businesses opening.

Greenwood is now home to over 40 Black-owned independent businesses, and according to the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce, 80 per cent of these are owned or operated by women, contributing over $5 million annually to Tulsa’s economy.

“Tulsa’s historic Greenwood District is both inspirational and aspirational,” Johnson tells me. “The historical role models who created the Greenwood District and made it into a nationally-renowned Black business and entrepreneurial hub did so against great odds, not the least of which was systemic racism in its most blatant forms.

He says the indomitable human spirit they exemplified is the stuff of inspiration. “They set the bar high for future generations,” says Johnson, “offering up something to which Black Tulsans and others could, for generations, aspire.”

Around the corner from Greenwood Rising, I stop for a refreshing iced coffee at Black Wall Street Liquid Lounge, before browsing the graphic tees The Greenwood Gallery and colorful kicks at Silhouette Sneakers & Art next door, where owner Venita Cooper brightly welcomes every potential customer who walks through the door.

“Some of my neighbors are first-time entrepreneurs just like me,” Cooper says. “So we have definitely come together to help one another and support each other’s businesses.”

Cooper often hosts events with local musical artists and opening her business in Greenwood was important to her. “While land and commercial property still isn’t back in the hands of the Black community, there are more Black-owned businesses that have opened or plan on opening soon. I continue to be inspired by the Black entrepreneurs who paved the way for me and wanted to carry on their legacy in the same place.”

I notice a few ladies in chic athleisure walking out of The BluPrint Studio and I’m disappointed that I didn’t time my visit better to take an extreme hip hop class with Marquita Owens.

There’s so much optimism in Greenwood now, but it was a long hard road to make these streets feel like a safe haven and celebration of Black success once more.

The fitness studio owner and instructor lives just a few minutes away from her studio and became an instructor at the studio during her own weight loss journey before purchasing and renaming it in 2020.

“My students are a core group of locals,” she says. “It feels more like a family more than anything.” If her energetic Instagram posts are any indication, Owens is just the right balance of cheerleader and drill sergeant that her students need. “I love what I do because I get an opportunity to help people transform their lives and motivate them beyond where they see themselves.”

As daylight wanes, I stop at Fulton Street Books & Coffee, where at least 70 per cent of the books are written by or feature BIPOC or marginalized communities. I pick up Angel of Greenwood by Randi Pink, a historical fiction account of the Tulsa Race Massacre, to read on the flight home. There’s so much optimism in Greenwood now, but it was a long hard road to make these streets feel like a safe haven and celebration of Black success once more.

The smell of fried chicken wafting through the air piques my interest when I step outside again and I follow my nose to Wanda J’s, a third-generation, family-owned restaurant run by five sisters serving the best soul food in town. Here, Glory Wells and her sisters are keeping their grandmother’s legacy alive with their home cooking—their legendary chicken is based on their grandmother’s recipes—opening their restaurant in Greenwood in 2016.

Wells says she loves meeting and building relationships with her customers, both regulars or visitors, and watching them chow down. “Being a small business owner on Greenwood is a blessing,” she says. “The area has such a rich history. My sisters and I grew up in the family business, but now we are using everything we’ve learned over the years to run a business ourselves.”

Amber Gibson is a Chicago-based journalist specializing in travel, food, wine and wellness. Her work has appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, National Geographic Traveler, The Daily Telegraph and more.

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]]>The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of 'Black Wall Street'COALESCENCEWed, 05 Jan 2022 15:21:00 +0000https://tulsaworld.com/603c2033a6de590d5d368ccc:609bab40cb2fec031b3022b7:61a79bec06a62851b26fddf1

Randy Krehbiel

Greenwood Rising, the museum and history center dedicated to Tulsa’s historic Black district, finished seventh in a nationwide vote for USA Today’s Best New Attraction of 2021, it was announced this week.

“I was amazed we were even nominated … just three years after Gathering Place won,” said Greenwood Rising Interim Director Phil Armstrong. “It’s just incredible that Tulsa is back on the list for something — and for that something being some difficult history.”

The Gathering Place finished first in the competition in 2019. It was named best city park by USA Today in 2021.

Greenwood Rising is a completely different type of attraction, though. It follows the ups and downs of an African American community that once supported the putative Black Wall Street.

The downs include the 1921 Race Massacre, which destroyed 35 square blocks and resulted in deaths that many believe numbered in the hundreds.

Armstrong said Greenwood Rising’s making the top 10 indicates that a large segment of American society “seems to be ready for a subject that is uncomfortable and even sometimes shocking.”

The center, which officially opened in August, recently surpassed 20,000 visitors, Armstrong said.

“That far surpassed anything we thought we’d be doing, and it’s not slowing down,” he said.

Greenwood Rising was one of 20 attractions nominated by a panel of experts and submitted to a public vote. Totals from that vote were not immediately available.

First on the list is Skyfly: Soar America, an amusement park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. A traveling, interactive Vincent Van Gogh exhibit is second, followed by tours of Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada, a Las Vegas suburb.

Also in the top 10: The Friends Experience, New York City and Dallas; Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, New Orleans; Lauridsen Skate Park, Des Moines, Iowa; The Cloud Ladder at Kent Mountain Adventure Center, Estes Park, Colorado; Water Works Park and Pavilion, Minneapolis; and Roots 101 African American Museum, Louisville, Kentucky.

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]]>Greenwood Rising is No. 7 on USA Today's Best New Attractions ListCOALESCENCEWed, 08 Dec 2021 03:21:00 +0000https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/arts/design/best-art-2021.html603c2033a6de590d5d368ccc:609bab40cb2fec031b3022b7:61e4addac3d96a2f78941b74

Best Art Exhibitions of 2021

Ambitious museum shows in Tulsa, Richmond, and Louisville left an imprint. Jasper Johns, Maya Lin and Latino artists shone. And the high quality of gallery shows of women was dizzying and gratifying.

Most Memorable Art and Image-Makers of 2021

The year 2021 was about recovery — slow, partial, tentative, ongoing — from lockdown. Over the summer, museums and galleries rebooted, but with masking and distancing in place. After a year of social isolation, a market trend in easy-to-like figure painting had natural appeal, with portrait shows everywhere. (New York had Medicis and Alice Neel; Hans Holbein and the Obamas currently hold court in Los Angeles) But for me, many of the most memorable events were either outside bicoastal centers or in unusual locations and forms within them.

African American South

Several of the year’s most ambitious museums were in cities below the Mason-Dixon line. “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse,” an engrossing survey of work by 120 Black artists organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Va., mined a particularly rich vein of its regional subject through a focus on music: gospel, blues, free-jazz, soul, hip-hop, Mardi Gras marches, all embodied in fabulous visuals. The exhibition (now at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston) was installed just blocks from Richmond’s Monument Avenue, a residential thoroughfare once dotted with Jim Crow-era statues of Confederate heroes. In September, the last, a statue of Robert E. Lee, was craned-lifted and trucked away.

In Tulsa, Okla., a new, truth-telling monument was unveiled. Called Greenwood Rising, it’s a museum and cultural center devoted to documenting three nested narratives: the long record of racist violence in the United States; the shorter history of a once-thriving African American neighborhood in a city that, for a time, managed to escape that violence; and the explosive story of what happened when that violence finally hit. Over two successive days in the spring of 1921, the Greenwood neighborhood, known as “Black Wall Street,” was the scene of one of the largest and deadliest episodes of white-on-Black terrorism yet recorded in the United States. Greenwood Rising takes you back to that moment and place, and forward into a present that has its own traumas.

Unusual Business in Museums

During the forced closures of the past year, museums had to contemplate the future and worry about what they were seeing, including the prospect of diminishing public relevance. Some understood that the solution lay not in a return to pre-Covid routine, but in change. The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., took a step in this direction with “Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” a big, impressive group loan show dedicated to the memory of Breonna Taylor, a Louisville native killed by city police officers in March 2020. Under its curator, Allison Glenn, the show was assembled in four months — warp speed in museum-time — and created a prototype for institutional responses to history-as-it’s-happening.

New York’s Guggenheim Museum floated a different model. With a fast-tracked suite of summer shows, it turned a Modernist monolith into the equivalent of an alternative space. In the atmosphere of pandemic-induced uncertainty, its young curators filled the museum’s central spiral with offbeat wonders: the Manhattan solo debut of audio and video work by the Rwandan-born Dutch artist Christian Nyampeta; an extraordinary floor-to-ceiling video by Wu Tsang of the trans singer and songwriter Beverly-Glenn Copeland; and, for four precious days in July, a socially distanced performance called “Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy,” conceived by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson.

Climate Conscience

This was the year when public awareness of ecocide reached at least an orange alert level. Direct response from museums and galleries remained muted, with notable exceptions being “Diane Burko: Seeing Climate Change,” a solo exhibition of paintings at the Katzen Arts Center of American University in Washington (through Dec. 12); and a survey of early work by the ecofeminist artist Betsy Damon at La MaMa Galleria in Manhattan. In New York, the major statement on the theme of present and future catastrophe took place, appropriately, outdoors, in Madison Square Park, where Maya Lin’s “Ghost Forest,” a grove of dead and salvaged Atlantic white cedars, all victims of environmental damage, was installed last Spring. Surrounded by the park’s lush greenery the lifeless trees made for a starkly majestic cautionary tableau, an arboreal “Burghers of Calais.” (And when they finally came down, they were given new life by teenagers learning to build boats.)

(Read our review of “Ghost Forest” and our interview with Maya Lin.)

(Read our reviews of “Promise, Witness, Remembrance”; Wu Tsang and Ragnar Kjartansson at the Guggenheim and our interview with Allison Glenn.)

Outstanding Solos

“Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” a doubleheader retrospective divided between the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was one of the season’s most hotly anticipated blockbusters. Enough to say that it lived up to expectations. (It continues at both venues through Feb. 13.) The same went for “Titian: Women, Myth & Power” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, featuring a cycle of six monumental paintings on mythological scenes produced late in this Venetian artist’s career. Just to get these pictures together under one roof represented a staggering institutional coup, one unlikely to be repeated anywhere else anytime soon. (The show is on view through Jan. 2)

On the contemporary front, “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And” brought a long overdue career survey of a supersmart American conceptual artist and writer to the Brooklyn Museum. (A book of her essays, “Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space 1973-2019,” was a vital supplement to the show.) Company, a gallery on the Lower East Side, inaugurated a new space with “Barbara Hammer: Tell me there is a lesbian forever …” a museum-ready selection of the late, great filmmaker’s early work on paper, organized by the artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden. And in a strong solo called “Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts — celebrating its 50th anniversary — Wardell Milan showed masterly drawings of white supremacist nightmares and collaborated on a theater piece with the trans performer Zachary Tye Richardson and the sculptor Billy Ray Morgan.

(Read our reviews of Jasper Johns and Titian and our interview with Lorraine O’Grady.)

Latino/Latina/Latinx

In New York, Latino art, with its various monikers and meanings, continued to gain visibility. Four years late and not a moment too soon, a retrospective of the Chicana artist Laura Aguilar traveled from Los Angeles to the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in Manhattan last Spring. An identity-scrambling contemporary survey, “Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21,” filled a reinvigorated El Museo del Barrio. Americas Society put together an invaluable two-part historical show called “This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965-1975” (through May 14). And there was more, a lot. There will always be.

(Read our review of Laura Aguilar.)

The Speculating Class

As the Covid crisis goes on, some elements of the art world are already operating at a pumped-up version of prepandemic normal. I’m talking about the presence of private money. The year may have left museums and galleries (never mind artists) scrambling, but the collecting, speculating class grew unimaginably richer, and the VIP lounge at the top of the art world is bursting with cash. We got a glimpse of this in the triumphalist spectacle of the fall auctions, and, somewhat lower down the slope, in the gold-rush surge in NFTs, which is already starting to look like a viral pandemic of its own. (Read our coverage of the recent auctions of the Macklowe estate and a Frida Kahlo painting.)

Photojournalists on the Ground

I’ll end, though, on a high note, with a salute to some of 2021’s truly great, and often minimally rewarded, image-makers: the photojournalists, professional or otherwise, on the ground everywhere this year — the ones who caught every freakish twist of the right-wing uprising in Washington, who walked straight into the fiery furnace that is increasingly our planetary landscape and who recorded the wrenching chaos in Afghanistan, right up to, and beyond, the minute the last-exit planes took off, and who captured the collective jubilation when the Ahmaud Arbery verdict came in. No artists produced more important work.

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]]>NYTimes Most Memorable Art and Image-Makers of 2021COALESCENCEMon, 25 Oct 2021 02:21:00 +0000https://www.greenwoodrising.org/news-1/td-jakes-visits-greenwood-rising603c2033a6de590d5d368ccc:609bab40cb2fec031b3022b7:61653f38e5868e7f81b97555

Thank you to Bishop TD Jakes of the Potter's House of Dallas who took time out to visit Greenwood Rising during a recent trip to Tulsa. Kudos to AJ Johnson of Oasis Fresh Market and Rose Washington of TEDC for showcasing Greenwood and North Tulsa and its current and future economic developments.

During the night of May 31, 1921, mobs of white people stormed the thriving Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. With some individuals deputized by local officials, they burned more than 1,000 Black-owned homes and businesses and killed upwards of 300 people. The full tally of the dead is unknown because the horrific event was not investigated seriously in the Jim Crow era, and it was deliberately left out of history books in the decades that followed.

Now, the full story is being told. Greenwood Rising, a new museum that opened in the historic neighborhood in early August, explores the tragedy of the massacre in vivid ways. Through video mapping and an audiovisual depiction of the event based on oral histories of survivors, the museum reconstructs one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.

But it also tells a broader narrative about the thriving economy known in the early 20th century as Black Wall Street, including how the community developed and the systems of oppression that allowed such violence to tear it all apart.

The multimedia museum experience was designed by Local Projects, the New York–based firm known for its work on the National September 11 Memorial Museum, as well as nuanced historical venues such as Hyde Park Barracks, a museum focused on the early days and mixed impacts of colonialism in Australia.

As Local Projects founder and principal Jake Barton explains, Greenwood Rising is about more than the violence of one night. By exploring what led to the massacre, and the effects still being felt today, the museum aims to inspire action against racism in America.

Fast Company: How do you design a museum experience around a historical event that was barely recorded, and in some cases actively erased from memory?

Jake Barton: [The museum] aspires to make echoes between the past and the present, and specifically to have people rethink the future together. Within that context, one of the biggest challenges for both Greenwood as a community and for telling the story around the Tulsa Race Massacre is the incredible disparity around heritage, archives, and just telling the story of the massacre itself. It’s one thing to have the massacre, this incredible and tragic holocaust [of] that moment. It’s another to understand how the deployment of resources to bury that story, destroy that narrative, and undermine a community’s own memory of that event furthers the holocaust. There wasn’t very much for us to put on display, like a typical museum would. Nobody collected objects around the race massacre at the time. Nobody told the story accurately at the time. Nobody captured oral histories at the time. We focused on oral histories that were [drawn from] survivors, with great forethought, in the ’80s and ’90s, and that becomes the beating heart of the entire institution. We tell that chapter of the larger Greenwood story through these authentic oral histories and allow people to, in a safe way, expand their own empathetic imagination to what it would feel like to be in your home and have your neighbors come burn it down and try to kill you and your family.

The massacre itself is a major element of the museum, and you’ve re-created it quite viscerally through video mapping and an audiovisual experience. How did you figure out how to convey such graphic material to museumgoers?

It would be irresponsible to try and [make] a literal re-creation of the massacre itself, not just because of [some] facts and the figures are unknown, but because it would be far too graphic and arguably exploitative. So what we focus on are these lived memories of survivors who made their way through the massacre and who can describe some of the memories that they carried for decades. That level of powerful emotion and memory is able to communicate the horror of that moment in a way that no literal re-creation could offer. We also focus, frankly, on restoring the voice and the humanity to survivors of the massacre itself.

Long-brewing tensions over reparations for ancestors of the victims and survivors of the massacre led to the cancellation in May of a major event marking its 100th anniversary. What is it like to work on a project some people think was taking up funds that should have gone toward reparations?

It’s famously been documented that people in Greenwood itself, a generation and a half later, literally hadn’t heard about the race massacre. The destruction of memory is its own form of holocaust. The museum is a way to restore that memory, across Tulsa and across the nation, even to the extent that President Biden would come [to Greenwood] and honor the survivors of that event. Having questions and argument around reparations is front and center for that community, despite the conflict; that’s part of the job of a museum, to raise that in people’s minds. [The museum tells] a story, it’s going to be there for generations, and it raised the question of reparations in everyone’s minds quite effectively. So there’s a good argument for why you would want to build a museum, because if people don’t believe it happened or don’t know about it, of course they’re not going to want to do anything about it.

Oklahoma is a very red part of the country, and mere ideas of racial injustice and inequity are topics of highly partisan debates. How did you approach telling a historically accurate narrative in a place that may not have wanted to hear it?

Nobody wants to argue about the past. What they want to argue about is the future. And in the context of Greenwood Rising, what they’re arguing is the past is passed; let’s move forward. Whereas in our museum, we first identify what we call the “systems of anti-Blackness” that led to the massacre. We talk about the political landscape, the economic oppression, the social frameworks that led to not just a few bad apples that perpetrated this massacre, but that whole dynamic, [to a] countrywide system of different forms and layers of oppression. So we end the museum [experience by] saying, Here are how those systems exist today. Here’s voter suppression. Here’s mass incarceration. Here’s the educational divide. Here’s the wealth divide. Do you recognize these? These are other systems of anti-Blackness. So you don’t need to look at the past to be outraged at how America is treating fellow citizens. You can do that, but you should use that new understanding of what produced the Tulsa Race Massacre and pivot to today. We end specifically with asking people what concrete actions they’re going to take to dismantle or confront today’s systems of anti-Blackness. That’s really the challenge that we face. If you’re just looking at the past, you’re missing how there’s a continuum of different policies that oppress Black and brown people, and how they can and should be confronted today.

Local Projects has tackled many delicate subjects and traumatic events, most notably the 9/11 Memorial Museum. In what ways did that work inform your approach to Greenwood Rising?

One is a sensitive awareness to the diversity of psyches for visitors. For some people, going to the 9/11 Memorial Museum and, frankly, to Greenwood Rising, this is a dip into a moment of horror. If I’m a 17-year-old going to the 9/11 Memorial Museum, I cannot believe this occurred. Or if I’m a visitor who’s not from Tulsa, maybe who’s not from America, I go to Greenwood Rising and it is a shock that this happened. But at the same time, there are people living inside that narrative, who have either experienced or been exposed to that level of trauma and carried that within their own fragile human psyche. That’s a really different circumstance. So in both cases, we developed flagging and literal different pathways through the museum that allow those who self-identify as having been traumatized to attend to themselves. Even as they get the story, they’re able to exit, they’re able to avoid some of the harsher and more graphic, more challenging material in order to preserve their own experience and/or psyche. In the case of Greenwood Rising, this alternate pathway ensures that we can effectively invite school groups, [even] young children, through the experience, and that we give parents the option to secure a route for their kids that they feel much more comfortable with. That a museum is there to attempt a public witnessing, in a way that acknowledges the humanity and sometimes legitimate fragility of its visitors, just offers up another level of respect and partnership that this institution is trying to make with every visitor.

See more from Fast Company’s 2021 Innovation by Design Awards. Our new book, Fast Company Innovation by Design: Creative Ideas That Transform the Way We Live and Work (Abrams, 2021), is on sale now.

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]]>Local Projects is the 2021 Design Company of the YearCOALESCENCEWed, 19 May 2021 14:08:25 +0000https://www.greenwoodrising.org/news-1/1921-tulsa-race-massacre-prayer-room-promotes-hope-and-healing603c2033a6de590d5d368ccc:609bab40cb2fec031b3022b7:60a4a6c68fd43071e618fd49

TULSA, Okla. — We are just weeks away from the opening of Greenwood Rising, a state-of-the-art history center honoring the legacy of Black Wall Street both before and after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Julie Chin tells us there is a space in downtown Tulsa anyone can visit right now that not only shares this part of Tulsa history but promotes healing through faith.

First Baptist Church in downtown Tulsa is just a few blocks away from the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Newspaper and Red Cross reports say that back then, the Church opened a room for massacre victims seeking refuge.

Now, 100 years later, the Church is opening a new room to promote understanding, healing, and prayer.

"Let's pray over the past. Let's pray about the present. Let's pray for the future."

Down the halls of First Baptist, just beyond three doors, is a special sanctuary inviting all to listen, learn, and reflect.

“The goal of this room is to offer a space and place to talk to God and pray against the sin of racism that exists in our culture, that exists in our churches, and still exists in the human heart."

Pastor Deron Spoo is collaborating with the Tulsa Historical Society and Centennial Commission to create this room for 121 days of prayer.

This space is telling the story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre through historical records, newspaper accounts, and artifacts like a Red Cross pin dating back to 1921.

“Without the Red cross so many more people would have died or their lives would have been affected more negatively than it already was," says Spoo. "And so we have an entire wall devoted to the red cross and what they did."

The room is divided into six sections with four of them being dedicated to guided prayer.

Visitors can take an audio tour, narrated by Phil Armstrong, a long-time friend of Spoo and current project director for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission.

“The script Darren and the staff here at First Baptist would send it to me to review for historical accuracy. I pulled in Hannibal Johnson who’s written 10 books on the subject just to make sure that everything that is referenced has accuracy,” says Armstrong.

Everyone learns about the Race Massacre survivors here and is given green cards to make their struggles, yours.

“This was a card given to survivors in 1921. It was really meant to calm a white community that if everyone had these badges on, they were a mark of shame," says Spoo. "So we wear these cards today to identify with these survivors, but you also get to hear more of their story. At the end of the tour, you also get to put a face and a name with this particular event.”

The tour typically takes 20 to 30 minutes.

While there is no charge to visit, people can leave a donation for Greenwood Rising. First Baptist pledges to match up to $5,000.

“We don’t know all that our church did 100 years ago, but it’s important to us to be involved in Greenwood Rising because I want people 100 years from now to know what we did, and I want to send a clear and unmistakable message,” says Spoo.

A message that includes hope and healing through prayer.

“This is just the beginning. This is the beginning of continual remembrance, but not just remembrance, but it is the beginning of a future hope that we have better, we have better days ahead of us than we have behind us,” Armstrong says.

The prayer room is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. It runs through June 1.

If you are unable to visit the church, anyone can still take part in this experience from home. The full audio tour is available now on First Baptist's website.

The Greenwood Rising History Center building is complete. Now comes the hard part — filling it with stories.

Workers from 1220 and Local Projects will spend the next month doing just that in the leadup to the centennial commemoration of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

1220 produces and installs museum exhibits. Local Projects designs them. Or, as the company’s website puts it, “We help visitors have a social experience with art.”

“For the most part, we see ourselves as not designers of case work or graphics, but ultimately as designers of behavior,” said Jake Barton, principal and founder of Local Projects. ”We really try and architect the visitor experiences to make a larger, oftentimes argument, if not participatory experience.”

In practice, this has meant different things at different museums. And Local Projects has no lack of examples to reference. It is perhaps best known for its experience design work at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

But the company’s reach is far and wide, from its reimagining of Gallery One at Cleveland Museum of Art to the world’s first voice-activated museum of language, Planet Word, in Washington, D.C., to its immersive telling of the environmental history of Australia at the National Museum of Australia.

The common theme running through each design is visitor engagement. Don’t step into Greenwood Rising — or any Local Projects exhibit around the world — and expect to passively pass the time.

“At the 9/11 Museum, for example, we really focused on the ways in which everybody had a 9/11 story and how they would share that story at the museum and also listen to other people tell their story.” Barton said. “So we saw the museum as a real platform to gather people from around the world, which ultimately made the whole experience far more authentic and raw.

“At the Planet Word Museum, which is a totally different topic, it’s a museum of words and language, we used voice recognition so that visitors can speak and be listened to by the museum itself. The entire museum is like a giant dialogue.”

In telling the story of Greenwood, past, present and future, Local Projects relied heavily on local experts and historians. Ultimately, though, it’s community members themselves who tell the story.

“That happens on a lot of different levels, whether it is through projecting the history onto the façade of a recreation Greenwood store from 1921, or making an introductory experience which is filled with contemporary Greenwood natives, or entering into a lovingly recreated 1921 barbershop to hear three barbers from a century ago debate the politics and economics of Black and white relations as well as on Greenwood as a successful, thriving African American community,” Barton said.

With the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre less than a month away, one of the organizers of the city's official commemoration is amazed by the way the centennial is coming together — and bringing communities together. 

"This has galvanized our city. It has coalesced the private sector, the nonprofit foundations, the community," said Phil Armstrong, project manager for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. 

"There's not a sector or industry in Tulsa that has not stepped in either with checks and resources monetarily or with people or with volunteers. There's not one aspect of our city not being impacted right now ... and this is not a Tulsa thing. This is an Oklahoma thing."

The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history. Between May 31 and June 1, 1921, mobs of white residents attacked, set aflame and ultimately devastated the Greenwood District, which was at that time one of the wealthiest Black communities in the United States, earning it the name "Black Wall Street."

Several arts and cultural organizations are planning events to commemorate the centennial, with more expected to be added:

'The Greenwood Joy Experience'

Artist Dawn Tree's "Greenwood Joy Experience" is a multimedia exhibition featuring large-scale paintings, audio and visual elements and animation, all centered around the theme of joy for the African American in America. The one-hour immersive experience will show privately on select days through June 19, which is Juneteenth, at the Greenarch Building, 10 N Greenwood Ave. Tickets and information: http://www.utreep.com/greenwood-joy.

Oklahoma Contemporary's 'We Believed in the Sun' and 'Flight'

In conjunction with the centennial, Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, 11 NW 11, is celebrating the legacy of the Oklahoma City Civil Rights movement with the new exhibit "We Believed in the Sun," opening Thursday in its Mary LeFlore Clements Oklahoma Gallery. The exhibit pairs works by Oklahoma-born Ron Tarver, a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, and Ebony Iman Dallas, an OKC-based painter.

Another Guggenheim Fellow, Crystal Z Campbell’s artist-in-residence installation, "Flight," a multimedia presentation that explores the physical, architectural and cultural residues of the 1921 race massacre, will be on view May 27-Aug. 31 at Oklahoma Contemporary. Information and tickets: https://oklahomacontemporary.org. Her first solo painting exhibition, "Notes from Black Wall Street (Or How to Project Yourself into the Future)," is on view Friday through July 25 at ahha Tulsa, 101 E Archer.

Tulsa Chorale's 'The Armed Man'

Tulsa Chorale will give outdoor concerts featuring Karl Jenkins’ “The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace" at 5:30 and 7 p.m. Friday at ahha Tulsa. The performances can be attended in-person or live-streamed. Tickets and information: https://tulsachorale.org. 

Theatre Tulsa's 'Greenwood: An American Dream Destroyed'

Theatre Tulsa, billed as the longest-lasting local theater west of the Mississippi River, will perform "Greenwood: An American Dream Destroyed" at 8 p.m. Saturday and May 15 and 3 p.m. Sunday and May 16 at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center's Liddy Doenges Theatre, 110 E Second. Tickets and information: https://www.tulsapac.com/events/2021/greenwood-an-american-dream-destroyed.

Greenwood Art Project events

The Greenwood Art Project is an initiative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission that involves numerous artists working on a variety of projects, from the Dark Town Strutters Ball on May 14 to the 2021 Centennial Parade on May 29. Information: https://www.greenwoodartproject.org/upcoming.

'Love & Harmony Oklahoma' at Myriad Gardens' Crystal Bridge

Curated by Tulsa's Gathering Place, the art installation "Love & Harmony Oklahoma" is on view for free through July 31 in the Visitor Center at the Myriad Botanical Gardens' Crystal Bridge (although the rest of the conservatory is closed for renovations), 301 W Reno. The exhibit celebrates the beauty of ethnic diversity and cultural differences through photography, murals, narratives and sound.

In conjunction with the exhibit, the Crystal Bridge will host a talk about the race massacre with Oklahoma author Rilla Askew, who penned the award-winning novel "Fire in Beulah," from 6 to 7:30 p.m. May 19. Information: myriadgardens.org. 

Greenwood Theatrical Productions' 'Fire in Beulah' sneak peek

The fledgling Greenwood Theatrical Productions is working to mount a new play based on Askew's novel "Fire in Beulah," adapted for the stage by Marta Reiman, with music by Chris Combs and Johnny Polygon. An online sneak peek of scenes from the play is set for 7 p.m. May 21. Information: http://greenwoodtheatrical.org.

Philbrook's 'From the Limitations of Now' and 'Views of Greenwood'

The Philbrook Museum of Art, 2727 S Rockford Road, is hosting two exhibits that commemorate the anniversary, both on view through Sept. 5: "From the Limitations of Now," brings together local and national artists working in an array of media — from tapestries and video installations to beadwork and digital photographs — to explore America's past of violence and racial injustice and envision a changed future. "Views of Greenwood." showcases nearly 50 photographs of the Greenwood District by three Oklahoma photographers who, over the last 50 years, have explored change, loss and resilience within the neighborhood. Information and tickets: https://philbrook.org.

Tulsa Artist Fellowship Welcoming Session_Spring/Summer 2021

From a 1920’s speakeasy-themed official launch party for a new anthology to a forest preserve turned into a space for collective healing, several Tulsa Artist Fellows are addressing the centennial as part of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship Welcoming Session_Spring/Summer 2021, a series of art-centered public engagement events. The series, which takes place May through August, is free and open to the public. Information: https://www.tulsaartistfellowship.org/platform.

Fire in Little Africa in concert

Ahead of the May 28 release of its compilation album on Motown Records/Black Forum, members of the Oklahoma hip-hop collective Fire in Little Africa will perform live in concert May 21 at the Mercury Lounge, 1747 S Boston Ave. Information: https://www.facebook.com/fireinlittleafrica.

Circle Cinema's 'Tulsa Burning' screening

Circle Cinema, 10 S Lewis Ave., will host a special free screening of The History Channel's new documentary “Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre" at 2 p.m. May 22 ahead of the film's television premiere 7 p.m. May 30. The documentary was executive produced by NBA superstar and Oklahoma Hall of Famer Russell Westbrook and directed by Peabody and Emmy winner Stanley Nelson and duPont Award winner Marco Williams. The screening will include a video introduction from the directors, and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission will moderate a panel discussion with community leaders and activists following the two-hour film. Information and tickets: https://www.circlecinema.org.

'Remember + Rise'

'Remember + Rise' will be a nationally televised event to commemorate the centennial with key speakers, musicians and special guests May 31 at ONEOK Field, 201 N Elgin Ave. The event, which will follow COVID-19 safety protocols, will be free, but tickets will be required. Doors will open at noon, with the main program scheduled from 4 to 8:30 p.m. Information: https://www.tulsa2021.org/calendar/remember-and-rise.

Black Wall Street Legacy Festival

The Black Wall Street Legacy Festival is a series of events, dedications and programs, beginning with the race massacre anniversary and culminating with Juneteenth festivities. The festival will host "Watchmen" creator Damon Lindelof and writer Cord Jefferson for a conversation and screening on May 30 and PJ Morton, Grammy-winning musician and Maroon 5 keyboardist, on May 29. The festival is headlined by the last known massacre survivors — 106-year-old Lessie Benningfield “Mother” Randle, 106-year-old Viola “Mother” Fletcher, and 100-year-old Hughes Van Ellis — who will lead a procession and participate in an event honoring their legacy.  Information: https://www.blackwallstreetlegacyfest.com.

Tulsa Children’s Museum of Art grand opening and inaugural exhibit 

The Tulsa Children's Museum of Art, 700 N Greenwood Ave. on the OSU-Tulsa campus, will celebrate its grand opening at 9 a.m. June 1 with its inaugural exhibit "Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the 1921 Race Massacre: Through the Eyes of Children." Information: https://www.tulsachildrensmuseumofart.org.

'Bitter Root' comics panel 

The under-construction Oklahoma Museum of Popular Culture and the Greenwood Cultural Center are partnering to host a panel discussion focusing on the award-winning “Bitter Root” comic book series from 6 to 7:30 p.m. June 2. Panelists will include the writers, artist and editor of “Bitter Root,” published by Image Comics. The event will be free and open to a limited public audience and will be streamed. Information and registration: https://www.facebook.com/OKPOPTulsa.

Greenwood Rising Dedication

The official dedication of Greenwood Rising: The Black Wall Street History Center is set for 11:30 a.m. June 2. The state-of-the-art history center located at the heart of Tulsa’s Greenwood District will honor the legacy of Black Wall Street before and after the race massacre. Information: https://www.tulsa2021.org.

'Tulsa '21: Black Wall Street'

World Stage Theatre Company presents "Tulsa '21: Black Wall Street," a play that weaves the narrative of the historical account of the massacre with true stories of people who live in Tulsa today. Performances are slated for June 3-13 at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center's Liddy Doenges Theatre. Tickets and information: https://www.tulsapac.com/events/2021/tulsa21.

Tim Reid's Greenwood Film Series

World Stage Theatre Company will present actor, director, producer and comedian Tim Reid's Greenwood Film Series June 5 at Circle Cinema. The event will showcase Reid's documentary “Legacy of a People: The Day They Bombed the Promised Land” and his feature film “Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored,” based on the book by Tulsan Clifton Taulbert. It also will include a talkback, spoken word performance and two short films. This event is free and open to the public, but tickets must be secured at https://www.circlecinema.org.

TULSA, Okla. — If you’ve been to downtown Tulsa recently, it’s hard to miss buildings going up, and cranes dot the skyline despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Fresh, organic, cold-pressed juice comes to downtown Tulsa with Inheritance Juicery. It’s one of 20 restaurants and bars opening downtown amid the pandemic. The new location is an important goal of the juicery, which was to expand from its smaller shop in south Tulsa.

"Just getting in this central location where we can now reach north Tulsa, and east, and west," said Ashley Weber, assistant general manager at Inheritance Juicery. "Like, I think this is just hitting that kind of hub spot where everyone has access to it.”

Getting the doors open took nearly a year and a half and some pandemic delays. Now, nearly two months in, it’s busy with customers filling the seats.

“Create that environment where people just want to be here," Weber said. "And we do, we have people sit here, I mean, you can see now we have people working that have been here for hours.”

But, as Brian Kurtz, executive director for the Tulsa Downtown Coordinating Council said, this hasn’t always been the case for downtown businesses over the past year.

“One of the many unfortunate parts of the pandemic is we were finally at a point that downtown was achieving levels of visitors, levels of traffic, that hadn’t seen in a decade maybe more and that really ended overnight with the beginning of the pandemic," Kurtz said.

While restaurants closed their dining rooms and people began working from home construction downtown continued.

Including on one of the biggest projects, the 11-story building that was supposed to be the WPX Energy headquarters, until that company merged with Devon Energy in Oklahoma City. The building is scheduled to be finished by the end of the year and they’re now looking for tenants to fill it.

Just a few blocks away from there and across from ONEOK Field is a new apartment building with about 200 units and retail space is going up.

“We need a larger residential population," Kurtz said. "We need a larger daytime population. And we need more things that are going to support visitors coming down.”

The Greenwood District is doing just that.

“You come down here on weekends and people are traveling here, spending their weekend here, flying in, driving in just to walk Greenwood and see the plaques in the sidewalk where businesses used to be and homes used to be and what was there many many years ago," said Phil Armstrong, project director for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission.

Perhaps the biggest attraction in Greenwood is getting ready to open. Greenwood Rising, the museum commemorating the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, is set to open June 2, coinciding with the race massacre centennial. Armstrong said it will elevate the area even more.

“People will be able to come here and spend the entire day and just walk this historic area, learn, be educated, understand how horrific that tragedy was, but understand that there’s a hope, a vibrant future coming for the greenwood community and Tulsa as a whole," Armstrong said.

The construction continues across downtown in the arts district. The new OKPOP museum is taking shape with plans to open in the fall of next year. It will host space for singers and songwriters while paying homage to Oklahoma arts and artists.

“We hope people come in from Tulsa and from, you know, all over the country to really be impressed by the amount of creatives in film and tv and music that have come out of this state," Charron said.

As for the future of downtown, when it comes to the Greenwood District, Armstrong said they plan to work with the Tulsa Development Authority, which owns some of the land north of I-244, to continue bringing greenwood back.

“To look at, what does it mean to see those areas redeveloped for black-owned homes, black-owned businesses, to try to capture what used to be here and work with the city, work with private developers to make sure and ensure that happens," Armstrong said.

Plans are also in the works for the annex project which will include a grocery store near the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, turning downtown into a place with something for everyone.

“As we approach the recovery we’re experiencing now and in the next couple of years, really seeing downtown as a place where people are going to continue gravitating and just a strong market for us to have here in the Tulsa area," Kurtz said.

“It’s incredible, the amount of things that you can come down here and do," Charron said. "Not just visit the different museums, but check out all the cute little boutiques and restaurants that are here. This is really like a one-stop destination.”

A new history center in Tulsa’s Greenwood district recounts a grievous past while spurring future change. Before writing on a soon-to-be-dedicated building in the historic Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, you have to first tell the story of Greenwood.

One hundred years ago, one of the most horrific incidents of racial violence in United States history took place when a white mob, heavily armed by city officials, reduced the prosperous Black neighborhood into a 35-square-block expanse of smoldering rubble.

Carried out by land and by air over a span of 18 hours during Memorial Day weekend, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 left hundreds injured, thousands displaced, and an unknown number of people dead (contemporary estimates place the figure at up to 300). All of this was in a close-knit community centered around Greenwood Avenue and its booming central business district, which was known during the early-20th century as America’s Black Wall Street. Despite losing thousands of homes along with schools, churches, and innumerable businesses to the ravages of arson, aerial bombing, and looting, some residents returned to Greenwood and rebuilt.

Decades later, the community was fractured again, first by progress in the form of the desegregation of Oklahoma’s deeply segregated second-largest city, and then by the true death nail: the urban renewal projects of the 1960s and ’70s in which swaths of North Tulsa were razed to make way for Interstate 244. Today, the interstate forms the northern boundary of what’s left of Greenwood, a compact historic district on the fringes of downtown Tulsa anchored by a cultural center, a reconciliation park, and the landmark Vernon AME Church.

Up until fairly recently, very few Americans, Oklahomans included, were aware of what took place in Tulsa in 1921. Many still aren’t. The fiery decimation of a thriving Black neighborhood and the circumstances leading up to it were intentionally underreported at the time and subsequently omitted from history books on a local and national level, leading contemporary historians with the task of piecing together the events of May 30 and June 1. More recently, the Tulsa Race Massacre, a consequential historic event that remained frustratingly obscure for decades, has become an object of elevated national interest, especially as talk of reparations—not exactly a new topic in Tulsa—grows across the country. The burning of Greenwood has been harrowingly depicted in two recent HBO series, Watchmen and Lovecraft Country; meanwhile, outside of cable television, the ongoing social justice movement led by Black Lives Matter in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and other Black Americans has also forced the country to collectively confront its long and ugly relationship with racial violence. For many, this includes learning about Greenwood for the very first time.

Getting up to speed

With the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre fast approaching, Greenwood is bustling with activity as officials wrap up three major initiatives spearheaded by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission: The Greenwood Art Project, a community-driven public art scheme; the Pathway of Hope, a pedestrian corridor that symbolically stitches-up the interstate-severed neighborhood and connects John Hope Franklyn Reconciliation Park with nearby landmarks, and Greenwood Rising, an 11,000-square-foot history center with a soaring roof overhang and dynamic paneled facade at the historic gateway to Black Wall Street. All three major projects are set to kick off or be dedicated later this month and in early June as part of a larger series of centennial happenings, culminating in the nationally televised Remember + Rise event on May 31.

The Commission, which just this week came out strongly against an Oklahoma bill that restricts race education in schools, was formed in 2015 to “educate Oklahomans and Americans about the Race Massacre and its impact on the state and Nation; remember its victims and survivors; and create an environment conducive to fostering sustainable entrepreneurship and heritage tourism within the Greenwood District specifically, and North Tulsa generally.” If not vetoed by Governor Kevin Stitt, the legislation could potentially thwart the Commission’s ongoing education efforts.

Breaking ground in August of last year and set to be dedicated on June 2 before opening to the public later in the month, Greenwood Rising is, coincidentally, a vehicle for telling the story of Greenwood and the centerpiece project of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, with a $7.5 million price tag (not including the cost of exhibitions) to match. And to re-emphasize how relatively new the story of Greenwood is to many Americans, including Oklahomans, some employees of Tulsa-based Selser Schaefer Architects were not fully aware of what had unfolded in 1921 when the firm was first selected to design the project by the Commission in July 2019.

“Not everyone knew a whole lot about this,” explained Whitney Stauffer, a partner at Selser Schaefer Architects, to AN. “That’s part of the history—the fact that no one talked about it for a very long time. And so we had to get the whole team up to speed.” In familiarizing the project team with the historical significance of Greenwood, the firm brought in Hannibal Johnson, an author, historian, attorney, and authority on the Tulsa Race Massacre, to give the project team what Stauffer called a “raw and real account” so that they better understood the “magnitude of what we were embarking on.”

“Like any project, you listen to your client and you take all of that so that you can put it back into the project. This was that process and more,” added Stauffer.

Checking all the boxes

Established in 1993, Selser Schaefer Architects has completed a markedly diverse number of projects in Tulsa and beyond with an emphasis on what it calls “people-first” design. Along with retail and hospitality commissions, cultural, educational, and wellness-focused projects, as well as adaptive reuse and historic preservation, play heavily into the firm’s portfolio. Completed and in-progress projects by the firm include a throwback-y Chick-fil-A concept restaurant, the first holistic defense office in the U.S. (established by Tulsa’s George Kaiser Family Foundation), and new offices for the Tulsa chapters of both Meals and Wheels and Habitat for Humanity. The firm is also overseeing a comprehensive master plan for Tulsa’s famed Philbrook Museum of Art.

Selser Schaefer was selected for Greenwood Rising via an RFP process initiated by the Commission not only because of the firm’s eclectic and largely community-focused portfolio of projects but because of its willingness to “get up to speed,” as Stauffer had put it.

“What impressed the Commission was the fact that out of the five firms that responded [to the RFP], Selser Schaefer were the only ones that said: ‘We want to learn the history, we want to come down to Greenwood, we want to tour the Greenwood Cultural Center, and we want to learn about this before we make a presentation for the building,’” recounted Phil Armstrong, project manager of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. “They were the only ones that did that. And that was quite impressive.”

Armstrong, who leads the Commission alongside its chair, Oklahoma state senator Kevin Matthews, also noted that the firm’s dedication to inclusion stood out during the selection process. “They were able to respond to our requests of letting us know how diverse their employee base was,” said Armstrong. “We knew that this wasn’t just something that they were taking on as a next gig, if you will, but that they truly embrace inclusivity and inclusion, even in their own day-to-day practices as a company. So not only have their expertise in building multimillion-dollar projects, but they really just checked all the boxes. And so they won the bid.”

[Editor’s note: AN readers have noted a marked dissonance between the diversity of Selser Schaefer Architects’ employee base, as mentioned by Armstrong, and the composition of the firm’s staff as evidenced on its website. While SSA does operate a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Scholarship Program, AN recognizes that the above quote from Armstrong does not appear to fully support the diversity of the firm as portrayed on its website.]

Next came community engagement meetings and the finalizing of the larger Greenwood Rising design and construction team, which includes, among others, New York-based exhibition designer Local Projects, landscape architect Howell & Vancuren (also the landscape architect of the Pathway of Hope), civil engineer Wallace Engineering, general contractor Crossland Construction, and HofferWaska Creative, which is overseeing environmental graphics design. Save for Local Projects, the core project team is wholly Tulsa-based.

Including the total costs of constructing Greenwood Rising, Armstrong estimates the multitude of projects unfolding across Greenwood, including a city-led $5.3 million renovation of the Greenwood Cultural Center by Moody Nolan, a $200,000 rehab of Vernon AME Church, initial operational funds for Greenwood Rising, and other related undertakings, to cost in the ballpark of $30 million. Also included in that sum is the Pathway to Hope, a public space project led by the Oklahoma Department of Transportation that Armstrong described as “highlighting what happens when you build a highway through the heart of a community.”

Because Greenwood Rising was carried out as a private development, Armstrong noted that an effort was made to include minority-owned firms—one being Oklahoma City-based steel fabrication company Weibee Steel—in the project even if their bids came in higher than competing, white-owned firms.

An architecture that soars

Situated at the intersection of Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street, the one-story Greenwood Rising building will serve, in the estimation of Armstrong, as an acclaimed new architectural landmark for Tulsa. The building is clad in glass-fiber-reinforced concrete panels that extend upward from a masonry plinth and, per Selser Schaefer Architects, “incorporate an ascending pattern of voids representative of a commitment to the sustained presence and revitalization of the historic district.” As noted by Stephen Dinnen, project architect and lead designer, the randomly arranged facade pattern is “symbolic of individuals within a larger knitted fabric of a community.”

The facade is also light activated, with its voids “capturing daylight, creating a dynamic interplay of light and shadow,” according to the firm. At night, the building’s exterior comes alive as the facade emits different colored lights, evoking Black Wall Street’s nocturnal existence as a bustling entertainment district populated by bars, restaurants, and theaters.

The building’s pedestrian-level masonry pays homage to the intricate brickwork characteristic of the structures that lined Black Wall Street prior to its destruction.

“It’s an interesting contemporary nod that pulls out more of a three-dimensionality in the facade that existed previously throughout historic Greenwood,” explained Dinnen. “The brick is a building block prevalent throughout the history center. It was great to be able to use that and use it in a contemporary way. Because the project is really about looking forward.”

The north facade of Greenwood Rising also prominently features a quote from James Baldwin that “intentionally preempts a narrative for the exhibits inside,” noted Selser Schaefer in a project overview.

“It’s incredible how they [the architects] put in the detail of actually creating a building that looks like it’s rising,” said Armstrong. “It encapsulates the mindset of what we were trying to do inside the building […] they capture that visually on the exterior of the building.”

Roughly 10,000-square-feet of the building’s floor space is dedicated to exhibitions, which are interactive and multigenerational in nature and will include everything from holograms to large-scale installations. As visitors move through the exhibition hall, a “contextualized narrative” centered around the history of American race relations as told through the story of the Greenwood community will unfold. A key feature of the center is a concluding dialogue space dedicated to “decompressing” that includes tiered seating and tablets for visitors to write their thoughts on.

“You can be as introspective as you want to or you can reach out and begin to have conversations about what you just experienced and about what it’s going to take moving forward,” Dinnen said of the space, which can also be used for community events. “This is a space that transitions from the past to the future.”

Similarly, the spacious, bench-equipped outdoor area sheltered by a soaring overhang at the front of Greenwood Rising is meant to serve as an area for contemplation. “The whole project is about reflectance and remembrance, and healing, really,” said Dinnen.

“A story of the history of a community”

As for the status of Greenwood Rising as a history center and not as a history museum, Armstrong explained that choice was intentional from the onset.

“We’re not primarily an artifacts collection,” Armstrong said, noting that although a few Greenwood artifacts will be on display, most that are “substantive in terms of collections” are housed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

“But we’re not focused on the maintenance, care, and securing of a collection of artifacts. We’re a narrative museum experience, and we’re telling a story of the history of a community.”

Outside of Greenwood Rising and other projects overseen by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, Greenwood is a community that’s fast-changing. Currently, the National Park Service is considering a nomination to inscribe Greenwood’s historic commercial buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, which complements an ongoing $10 million restoration campaign headed by the Historic Greenwood Chamber of Commerce. Meanwhile, the City of Tulsa and the Tulsa Authority for Economic Opportunity (TAEO) recently opened an RFQ from developers to design and construct a mixed-use development project for the Evans-Fintube site, an 11-acre city-owned property on the eastern edge of the neighborhood that includes the historic Oklahoma Ironworks building, a sprawling erstwhile industrial facility. The brownfield redevelopment site is also home to the future new corporate headquarters of BMX. But much of the high-profile revitalization in and around Greenwood, which also gained a minor league baseball park in 2015, hasn’t come without what longtime Black small business owners believe to be renewed threats of erasure.

As a 21st-century evolution of Greenwood picks up speed, a landmark new building prominently situated in the historic heart of the neighborhood stands to guarantee that the story of what happened in Tulsa 100 years ago will never be at threat of being lost again.

To commemorate the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which decimated a Black community from May 31 to June 1, 1921, a new building will glow where the ruins smoldered. It is home to Greenwood Rising: Black Wall Street History Center, designed by Selser Schaefer Architects, a Tulsa firm, with exhibitions by Local Projects, a Manhattan company known for the 9/11 Memorial & Museum among other immersive installations. The center opens to the public in June.

Rectangular openings scattered along the lightweight concrete exterior will be lit by LEDs, programmable in multiple colors. In the galleries, artifacts, photos and films will span two centuries. The context of American racial violence will be represented in displays of slave shackles and a bloodstained Ku Klux Klan robe. Chairs will be arranged in a simulation of a family-owned barbershop in the Greenwood neighborhood, where Black Wall Street power brokers had congregated. Painted and neon signs will advertise stores and other businesses that had thrived nearby.

One room will be devoted to a video evoking the firestorm. Buildings will crumble as the soundtrack quotes survivors’ reminiscences of losing relatives, friends, homes and livelihoods. In the final galleries, visitors can post reflections about ways to combat contemporary racism.

Phil Armstrong, the project director for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, said the dayslong 1921 assault was long considered “Tulsa’s dirty little secret,” barely discussed among locals. (The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has devoted a new website to its holdings about the subject.) He expects more artifacts and stories to surface from friends and relatives of eyewitnesses and victims, he said, after the center opens and sheds further light on the subject.

“Tulsa feels intensely humiliated and, standing in the shadow of this great tragedy, pledges its every effort to wiping out the stain at the earliest possible moment and punishing those guilty of bringing the disgrace and disaster to this city. A city which … can be depended upon to make proper restitution and to bring order out of chaos at the earliest possible moment.”

— Alva J. Niles, president of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, on June 2, 1921, in a public statement made to press associations preceding a special meeting of the Chamber members and directors*

Most drivers heading north on Highway 75 zoom over East 11th Street with little notice of Oaklawn Cemetery below. At street level, the grounds are calm for an urban graveyard near the heart of the city. 

But traffic rumbles overhead like thunder following a lightning strike. And there, in the literal shadow of the highway, waits a patch of overturned dirt marked with yellow caution tape.

This is the site of at least one of Tulsa’s unmarked mass graves with a possible connection to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which white mobs destroyed 35 blocks of the city’s prominent Black community of Greenwood.

A full excavation of the City of Tulsa-owned Oaklawn site will begin June 1, exactly one century after what has been called one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. 

While Tulsa prepares to dig for the bodies of as many as 300 Black victims of the Massacre, racial disparities and division continue to reverberate.

Heavy in the air are many Black Tulsans’ calls for reparations: repayment of what was taken from the three remaining Massacre survivors, now ages 100-106, as well as descendants of the victims. They feel their opportunity to build generational wealth burned to the ground May 31-June 1, 1921, along with their ancestors’ homes and businesses.

For decades many Tulsans, both white and Black, were not taught about Tulsa’s Massacre. Now through popular entertainment such as HBO’s “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country,” as well as other art, film and TV projects set to release around the centennial, its injustices are being broadcast to the world.

By many counts, Tulsa’s time of reckoning is here.

Dirt is turned

Kavin Ross was in elementary school when he first saw a photo of a dead Black man whose body was burned beyond recognition. Taken in 1921 Greenwood, the image had been made into a postcard.

“They (white Tulsans) took pictures of the Massacre, and then they made postcards out of them as a reminder, an ‘If you do this again, we’re going to do this again’ type of a thing,” Ross says. “I remember as a young child looking at these pictures of the horror. I couldn’t believe it was my own hometown.”

As Ross grew up, he continued to learn about the Massacre through the work of his father, Don Ross, a civil rights activist and journalist who later served as an Oklahoma representative from 1983-2003, as well as through his own extensive research. In the early 2000s, Kavin worked with historian and author Eddie Faye Gates to record the testimonies of Massacre survivors.

Don and Kavin were involved in the “Tulsa Race Riot Commission” created by the Oklahoma Legislature in 1997, and in 1998 a limited investigation began into long-held stories of Massacre victims being buried in mass graves. But the search was discontinued by then-Mayor Susan Savage, who said she was concerned about disturbing graves to excavate the site. It was not picked back up until 2018, when Mayor G.T. Bynum announced the City of Tulsa would do its part to try to find Massacre victims.

In the meantime, Kavin Ross has never stopped investigating. In addition to writing many articles over the years, he has taken thousands of photos documenting the history of the Massacre and possible locations where the dead might be buried.

Now he is chairman of the 1921 Graves Public Oversight Committee comprised of Black Tulsans and descendants of Massacre victims, who were appointed by the mayor to oversee the physical graves investigation. Ross’ great-grandparents owned the Zulu Lounge juke joint, which sat where Interstate 244 now crosses North Greenwood Avenue until it was destroyed in the Massacre.

Tulsa “would have been ahead of the game had we looked underneath the ground of Tulsa for Massacre victims in the late ’90s,” Ross says, adding, “We would have been way ahead of the game as far as race relations in our city.”

The time certainly didn’t help the physical investigation. After 100 years of decomposition, remains will be difficult to identify, caution researchers. The best chance for DNA analysis, which would determine whether the individuals were Black or white, and could connect to descendants, may be in any teeth or long bones found at the burial site, according to forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield, part of the physical investigation committee.

The first step is determining whether those interred are, in fact, victims of the Massacre, as opposed to another event like the Spanish flu. The team, which also includes historians and the state archaeologist, will look for signs of trauma, as well as bullet fragments indicating violence, Stubblefield says.

Amy Brown, Tulsa’s deputy mayor, is the liaison between the City of Tulsa and the physical investigation and public oversight committees. She says evidence — including finding human remains and at least 12 coffins during an October test excavation — points to the Oaklawn site as a mass burial associated with the Massacre. 

Although Bynum has repeatedly called the search for the 1921 graves “a murder investigation,” feedback on his social media updates indicate some Tulsans do not support the search, which the City is funding. However, Brown is not particularly concerned.

“Ultimately, we feel like there’s a duty to carry out that work that hasn’t been carried out over the last century,” she says. “I don’t know that there’s anything we do as a city, whether it’s adding bike lanes, or sidewalks … where all Tulsans are in 100% agreement.

“We just try to do the most good we can for the most people. And I really hope that in 10, 20, 30, 100 years, Tulsans will look back and be proud of their city for doing this work in 2021.”

Prolonging Greenwood’s destitution

While the Massacre cost an untold number of Black Tulsans their lives, it also is impossible to quantify the trauma experienced by survivors. Their physical loss alone is staggering.

Approximately 10,000 Black Tulsans became homeless overnight in the summer of 1921, according to the Red Cross, which in the days following the Massacre set up relief stations and remained for seven months to serve the wounded and displaced.

In its detailed report of the disaster dated Dec. 31, 1921, the Red Cross counted 1,256 buildings burned; 314 buildings (mostly homes) looted and robbed; 183 people in the hospital, mostly from gunshot wounds or burns; and 531 people injured.

Personal property loss was estimated at $3.5 million, according to the Red Cross report. That is $51.8 million in today’s dollars.

Insurance companies cited “riot clauses” and withheld payment for damages to Greenwood homes and businesses, while City ordinances were instituted to stifle rebuilding, prolonging the destitution of Massacre survivors. Further, “No provision was made for money grants or loans, neither were any moneys available for permanent rebuilding,” according to the Red Cross. 

From internment facilities like Convention Hall (now known as the Tulsa Theater), where Massacre survivors were initially held by the Oklahoma National Guard, Black Tulsans were housed in emergency tent homes. Some Greenwood residents eventually built wooden structures with materials purchased by the Red Cross and with funding from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But by the end of the 1921, 49 families still resided in tents; 100 were reported to still need constant help as a result of the Massacre. 

According to the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report, more than 100 lawsuits were filed against the City and insurance companies. All that would have benefited Black Tulsans were disallowed. In the meantime, Greenwood was physically and economically devastated. 

Although many business owners eventually rebuilt their ventures in Greenwood, some were never the same. James Nails Sr. owned Nails Brothers Shoe Shop and Record Shop on North Greenwood Avenue, as well as James Nails Dance Pavilion, the first dance and recreation center for Black residents in north Tulsa, at the site of present-day Lacy Park.

“It’s one of the things he never got over,” related Nails’ daughter, the late Cecelia Nails Palmer, in a 1977 interview with Jan Jennings Sparks and Ruth Sigler Avery. “All of his instruments were burned in the riot in the pavilion. He owned them. He had an orchestra. All of his equipment was burned up or torn up, and he never did recover from that. In a sense he left Tulsa a very beaten and dehumanized person. … Tulsa was not a happy place for him. He was never able to become the person that he was.” 

Nails Palmer, who was 2 years old when she fled the Massacre, also described her family heirlooms, including a hand-carved piano. “I’d give anything to have it now,” she recalled. “They were destroyed during the riot. Much of the furniture came from my grandmother, and it was all handmade.”

Ross says his great-grandfather Isaac Evitts “went broke” and lost the family’s land trying to rebuild his juke joint after the Massacre. “That was my inheritance. I’ve been robbed of my inheritance,” Ross says. “Who’s to say that today I couldn’t be, right now, the owner of the Zulu Lounge? … I have fantasies to this day of someday having a Zulu Lounge on Greenwood in honor of my family’s legacy.”

Righting the wrongs

It has been two decades since the Tulsa Race Riot Commission made five recommendations to the state for restitution to the citizens of Greenwood. Only one recommendation was enacted: to build a memorial for Massacre victims. John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park, 321 N. Detroit Ave., was dedicated in 2010 to tell the story of the Massacre and of African Americans’ role in building Oklahoma.

Ignored were the Commission’s recommendations for direct payments of reparations to be paid to the survivors of the Massacre, direct payments of reparations to be paid to descendants of survivors, creation of a scholarship fund available to students affected by the Massacre, and establishment of an economic development enterprise zone in the Greenwood District. 

In September 2020, a group of attorneys led by Tulsan Damario Solomon-Simmons filed a lawsuit in Tulsa County District Court against the City of Tulsa, the Tulsa Regional Chamber, the Tulsa County Commission and others for “the public nuisance caused by (the) defendants’ unlawful acts and omissions that began with the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and continues to this day.” The suit was filed on behalf of the three remaining Massacre survivors, Lessie Randle, Viola Fletcher and Hughes Van Ellis; descendants of other Massacre victims; Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church; and the Tulsa African Ancestral Society, which also is comprised of descendants. 

The litigation alleges the defendants “exploited the Massacre for their economic and political gain” and asks for repayment of property lost in the event, as well as the development of mental health, educational and “quality of life” programs for Greenwood and north Tulsa residents, among other requests. 

The lawsuit is not the first to be filed for Massacre reparations; the most prominent was dismissed in 2003 due to the long-expired statute of limitations on civil cases.

Although many Tulsans are skeptical about the possibility of a Massacre reparations program in Tulsa, some point to historical reparations for other groups. “We paid the Confederacy after the Civil War,” says the Rev. Robert Turner, minister of Vernon AME Church. “After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, we put Japanese Americans in internment camps. But in the 1980s, under a Republican president, they got reparations. We definitely have not honored our treaties with the Native Americans, but at least they got something … The only time we have a problem with it is when it’s categorically done for African Americans. That’s the only time this country has ever had a problem with doing anything governmentally.”

If Massacre reparations are not passed for survivors in this centennial year — and if policies are not enacted to create a better quality of life in Tulsa — activist Kristi Williams says Tulsa will miss a pivotal moment.“If it doesn’t happen now, it will take some of those people to die off because I believe our younger generation coming up will get it if they don’t get it,” says the 45-year-old descendant of a Massacre victim. “I may not see it (Massacre reparations) in my lifetime.”

Other U.S. cities might be paving the way for Tulsa. Most recently Evanston, Illinois, approved a reparations program for Black residents hurt by the city’s discriminatory housing policies from 1919-69, as well as their descendants. Funded through a 3% tax on recreational marijuana, $25,000 is being paid to each eligible Black household for home repairs or as a down payment on property.

Tulsa City Council Chairwoman Vanessa Hall-Harper represents District 1 that includes Greenwood and north Tulsa. She believes a reparations program should be considered for Tulsa but says getting one passed “sure as hell is not going to be easy.”

“You can go on Facebook and look at the Tulsa World and read the (racist) comments ... That is the sentiment of Tulsa,” Hall-Harper says. “And anytime I bring something up or try to work on any initiative in my community, you’re going to always get those comments. 

“Some people say, ‘Oh, that’s just a few people.’ No, it’s more than just a few people who think that way. Because if that were the case, we wouldn’t be facing these issues that we face when it comes to the social determinants of health, education, public safety, food insecurity. You’ve got to question that, because if that were really the case, then we wouldn’t have the life expectancy gaps we have.” 

Disparities and division

To Hall-Harper’s point, significant disparities remain between Black and white Tulsans, despite the Bynum administration’s efforts to reduce the gaps through various initiatives.

According to the 2020 equality indicators report from the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Equity, residents of north Tulsa are about half as likely to earn a living wage as residents of south Tulsa, and the median white household income is nearly twice that of Black household income. In addition, large disparities exist between north Tulsa and other parts of the city regarding the availability of existing jobs in relation to where people reside. There are more than twice as many jobs in midtown than in north Tulsa. On average south Tulsans in some zip codes live nine years longer than north Tulsans, according to the Tulsa Health Department.

“This city is very divided,” says Turner, who is originally from Tuskegee, Alabama. “Ray Charles could see how divided the city is when you look at MLK (Boulevard) not even going all the way through town but stopping right at the bridge, if you look at how well people live, and if you look at the funding; the fact that we still have, in large part, segregated cemeteries. We live in two Tulsas.”

Turner believes the racial division is a consequence of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, which he correlates to the biblical account of Cain and Abel. Jealousy drives Cain to kill his brother, Abel, and hide his body — a cover-up that brings God’s curse upon Cain. The situation is not unlike white Tulsa’s jealousy of prosperous Black Wall Street, as well as its cover-up of the Massacre dead, according to Turner.

“God asks, ‘What have you done? The blood of your brother cries out to me from the ground,’” he says, paraphrasing Genesis 4. “There’s an old Hebrew philosopher who speaks about how the shedding of innocent blood curses the land until it is atoned for … Not one person has ever been charged with the crime, not one, and the debt of reparation has never been paid, and so I do spiritually feel the blood of those who were killed here in 1921 is still crying out to God. And just as Cain tried to hide the body of his brother, people here in Tulsa hid bodies in mass graves, where they’re still laying to this day.”

Although prosecuting homicides is not within the City’s purview, Deputy Mayor Amy Brown says there are several challenges to bringing criminal charges against those responsible for the Massacre’s killing. 

“To charge someone for murder, you have to have a lot of information we don’t have,” Brown says. “None of the victims at this point are identified for us. We don’t know who the perpetrators were. To prosecute someone for homicide, you have to be able to show that not only did they kill someone, but they had the intent to kill someone at the time.”

The office of Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler directed questions about murder charges related to the Massacre to the Department of Justice/U.S. Attorney’s Office. 

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office says federal prosecutors must consider jurisdiction, whether there is surviving evidence that can be used to prosecute the crimes and whether those perpetrators are still alive. The perpetrators in this case are deceased and therefore cannot be prosecuted, according to the spokesperson. The U.S. Attorney’s Office cannot legally nor symbolically charge individuals who are deceased.

Brown agrees the burden of proof required to prosecute seems nearly impossible 100 years later. 

“There is real tension between how much of this effort we can treat as a forensic homicide investigation, and then how much of it is really, just by the nature of the circumstances, going to have to be treated as an archaeological historical investigation,” she says. “That said, I think there’s still justice in doing this work. We may not be able to put a murderer in prison for killing someone, but we can hopefully tell the story for that victim and bring justice to them through this work in other ways.”

For Turner, that’s not good enough. Every Wednesday afternoon since September 2018, he has stood outside City Hall with his bullhorn, calling for Massacre reparations and legal action against the perpetrators. “I’m here seeking to remove that stench, to bring justice to those who have been slain,” Turner says, “so Tulsa can remove this curse of racism we have been plagued with for far too long.”

“All Tulsans deserve to know what happened in 1921 — especially the descendants of victims. This is a matter of basic human decency. … The only way to move forward in our work to bring about reconciliation in Tulsa is by seeking the truth honestly.”

— Mayor G.T. Bynum, Oct. 2, 2018

The Greenwood of today

For years, downtown development has encroached Deep Greenwood, the intersection of North Greenwood Avenue and East Archer Street. Towering over the last remaining historic block of Black Wall Street is the state-of-the-art Greenwood Rising history center, an initiative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. 

Supporters say the museum, which is still being completed, will honor the legacy of Black Wall Street. Some of Tulsa’s largest employers, including American Electric Power-Public Service Co. of Oklahoma and QuikTrip, have donated huge sums of money in support. The land for the museum was donated by the Hille Foundation.

But Greenwood Rising also has drawn criticism.

“That’s not what the (Black) community asked for,” Hall-Harper says. “We’ve never been (asked). The power structure, the people in authority, the people with power, influence, resources, I think they take it upon themselves to make these decisions and say, ‘See, this is what we’re doing. Isn’t this a good thing? Isn’t this great? This should get us past or closer to where we should be, or want to be in the city, as it relates to equality and justice.’ 

“I’ve heard $30 million has been raised for Greenwood Rising. What if they would have invested $30 million in Black entrepreneurship, in acquiring land and developing businesses — putting this land back in the hands of the Black community?”

Williams says Greenwood District projects have propelled downtown tourism while disregarding such needed investments. “This has been my problem with the City of Tulsa and some white people, who may mean well,” she says. “We keep talking about those buzzwords: reconciliation, healing. No one ever asked, ‘What is it that we’re healing from?’ And buildings and murals … that’s not healing.”

For its part, the City has a poor track record of engagement with Black Tulsans, Hall-Harper says. “The mindset has been, ‘We know better than you what you need and what you want, so we’ll make those decisions for you,’” she says. “That’s been how, in a nutshell, the power structure of the City has dealt with the Black community.”

Kian Kamas, chief of economic development for the City of Tulsa, agrees. “I think historically, the reality has been, we just weren’t good at that (engaging the Black community),” Kamas says. “We didn’t do it enough. We didn’t have the relationships in place for people to trust us, even when we did ask for their feedback and their opinions and their input. And then, even when we did get that feedback, we might not have listened to it as well as we should have. … We recognize we have to do a much better job at systematizing those forms of community engagement and input.”

She says her team is working with the HR&A Advisors consulting firm to develop a set of community engagement protocols and policies that will be applied across all areas of the City’s economic and community development work.

One particular project has the potential to put part of Greenwood back into the hands of Black Tulsans: the Kirkpatrick Heights Addition and Greenwood Site, which Kamas says will utilize new policy tools for Tulsa. Fifty-six acres of land flanking the campus of Oklahoma State University-Tulsa was returned to the Tulsa Development Authority in a 2018 settlement with the University Center at Tulsa Authority. Once owned by Black residents of Greenwood, the land will be developed as a result of a year-long master planning process led by a committee of north Tulsa leaders. 

“A key component of that project will really be evaluating what the governance and ownership structure look like for redevelopment of that property,” Kamas says. 

She says options under consideration include a community land trust or development corporations. The process also will look at what other cities have done to redevelop property in innovative ways that place ownership within a community and ensure all or a portion of revenue generated is reinvested back into a specific community.

Hall-Harper is hopeful strategies like these will be successful in Greenwood and north Tulsa, but time will tell whether the City’s priorities have shifted. “I’m always going to say I’m hopeful, but it hasn’t happened yet,” she says.

‘The tip of the iceberg’

Ten miles south of Oaklawn, near East 91st Street and Harvard Avenue, Kavin Ross steps through the woods into another graveyard. He calls it “another one of Tulsa’s dirty little secrets.” 

Numerous historical accounts have pointed to this, a section of the privately owned Rolling Oaks Memorial Gardens, formerly called Booker T. Washington (Memorial Gardens) Cemetery, as another possible location for graves of the Massacre victims. The site is near the largely Black community of Alsuma, centered near East 51st Street and South Mingo Road, which was annexed by the City of Tulsa in 1966. 

Above Ross, birds trill and a woodpecker hunts for a meal. The Villages at Ashton Creek gated community sits about 50 yards from the unmarked graveyard, and residents can be seen through the trees walking dogs. Traffic can be heard from the nearby Creek Turnpike. 

All around Ross, graves lay in pieces. 

“This is the resting place of somebody,” he says, pointing to one of dozens of small metal markers lacking identification. “We don’t know who they are now ... We don’t know if they were here in ’21 or years after, or even before.”

Ross, who has visited the Rolling Oaks site since 2004, has documented removal and destruction of the graves over the years. He says city leaders have long been aware of the site, but no progress has been made to secure the area, nor to identify the people buried there.

Over the past two years, the City has repeatedly requested permission to scan the area in question for geophysical anomalies using the same ground-

penetrating technology that identified the mass burial at Oaklawn. Ross and other committee members have expressed frustration at the speed of progress, at times calling for a search warrant to be issued. At press time, City officials anticipated scanning to begin at Rolling Oaks this summer.

The physical investigation also has identified a third possible location for mass graves, the Canes, a homeless encampment near Newblock Park.

“We’re just at the tip of the iceberg,” Ross says of the graves investigation. “And so, what can we do to continue the work years from now? Money is one aspect of that. ... What happens if G.T. is out of office, and then it’s somebody else, and their priorities are different? 

“I’m sure those are all conversations that are being had about how to ensure this work is continued from here, and that whoever is in charge, you know, four or five years from now, is not going to say, ‘No, we’ve done enough. And let’s move on without finding (the Massacre victims).’”

Brown acknowledges it’s a valid concern, and one Bynum’s administration has little control over. “One of the concrete things we’re trying to do at each phase is figure out: How are we building capacity among local researchers, community volunteers, local academic institutions and partnerships, so there’s a whole network of people who are invested in this work and have the skills and knowledge and experience to continue it after G.T. Bynum isn’t the mayor anymore,” she says. 

“I think one of the real challenges is that we don’t know for sure what the city’s economic situation will be in five to 10 years. We don’t know what the appetite at the state level to partner in this work might be in five to 10 years. 

“But we do know there are a lot of Tulsans who are deeply invested in this work, and many of the researchers we’ve engaged are actually the same researchers who were working with the state back in 2001. They’re already showing decades of commitment to this work, and I fully anticipate that will continue on, as well.”

Ross is hopeful that identifying Massacre victims at Oaklawn or other sites will encourage future mayors to continue the search for the City’s missing Greenwood residents. “Hopefully by that time,” he says, “it’s a process you couldn’t stop even if you wanted to.” 

*Quote excerpted from 1921 board meeting minutes the Tulsa Regional Chamber publicly released from its archives in May 2019 in an effort to openly address its historical failures related to the Tulsa Race Massacre and renew its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

The Tulsa World recently talked to 10 Tulsans who, each in their own way, have committed to telling the story of Greenwood and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre while helping raise awareness of its too-long-ignored history.

Who are they and what motivates them? What are their hopes for the centennial? Meet them here:

Mechelle Brown

Program director at the Greenwood Cultural Center

It was while working as a nursing aide to an older Tulsan that Mechelle Brown’s mother first became aware that the city had a dark chapter in its past.

“She had moved here from Arizona and didn’t know anything about Tulsa’s history,” Brown said. “Until this elderly white man she was caring for began to ramble on in his old age.”

The man’s references to “fires, shooting, killing and the smoke” made Brown’s mother curious. So she took her questions to her Tulsa in-laws.

“They told her, ‘We don’t talk about that around here — and don’t go asking anybody about it,’” Brown said.

A child at the time, the late 1970s, she still remembers overhearing that conversation.

“It stuck with me,” she said.

After growing up during that era of silence, when out of fear Black Tulsans didn’t bring up the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Brown has plenty to say on the subject today.

In fact, as a representative of the Greenwood Cultural Center, where she serves as program director and tour guide, leading tours of historic Greenwood, she’s been talking about it for the last 25 years.

“I actually refer to myself as a historical storyteller,” Brown said.

Starting at the center in 1996 as an office assistant, she learned firsthand from historian Eddie Faye Gates. Gates was giving tours at the time, and Brown got to accompany her, including once as she took civil rights icon Rosa Parks around.

The questions visitors ask have not changed, Brown said. For one, they want to know how the once-thriving Black community came to be, considering the times in which its residents were living. Then they want to know what happened after it was rebuilt — “why we don’t have Black Wall Street today.”

Something that has changed over the years, though, is the story Brown tells.

“Our knowledge has definitely evolved with new information, new photographs, new oral histories. We’re able to tell a more accurate — a more complete — story now.”

The city’s ongoing mass graves investigation — Brown serves on a subcommittee of that effort — has prompted more people to come forward with family stories, she said.

“It’s been nearly 100 years, but there’s still so much we can learn.”

Brown hopes young Blacks in Tulsa, especially, are paying attention.

“For role models they often look to athletes and musicians and artists, but we want them to know that there are people, possibly in their own bloodline, who grew up in this community that they should honor and respect and look up to.”

From business owners and attorneys and doctors to electricians and plumbers, Greenwood was home to a strong, independent people who “had a sense of pride and community spirit,” Brown said.

“That’s the part of the story that gives me a joy and that I want to make sure our children know,” she said.

Brown has no plans to stop telling that story. And with all the visitors expected during the centennial, she’s recruiting more docents to help.

For Tulsans and non-Tulsans alike, “I hope we all feel empowered and motivated by Greenwood and its resilience and strength and courage,” she said.

Rev. Robert Turner

Lead pastor at Vernon AME Church

The idea of reparations for slavery had always been consistent with the Rev. Robert Turner’s vision of America.

“When bad things happen in this country, we’re supposed to follow that up with good things to compensate for the bad,” he said.

But it wasn’t until he was studying law at the University of Alabama that Turner learned about other possible applications of the same idea.

“My professor was working on a (reparations) case out of Tulsa” related to the 1921 Race Massacre, he said. “He knew I was an advocate for reparations. He brought it up to show me that reparations work might be a direction I could go as a lawyer.”

Only one problem: By that point, Turner’s heart had begun to lean more toward ministry than law. Soon, he’d leave law school to pursue that calling.

What he had no way of knowing, Turner said, was that “by going into ministry, God would directly put me in a place where I could fight for reparations.”

And, of all places, it would be in the very city his professor had mentioned.

After pastoring several churches in Alabama, his home state, Turner moved to Tulsa in 2017, taking over as lead pastor of historic Vernon AME Church, the church most identified with the massacre.

In his four years since arriving, Turner has become an advocate for massacre survivors and their descendants. He’s injected his voice into the reparations conversation, as well, including taking up his megaphone to lead a regular weekly call for reparations in front of City Hall.

Turner was instrumental in getting the city to launch its ongoing mass graves investigation, and he’s been a vocal member of the graves committee.

He hopes the upcoming centennial will serve to honor the “faith and resilience” of the Greenwood residents who rebuilt. At the same time, the world needs to know the massacre has never been properly investigated nor justice rendered, Turner said.

“And until that happens,” he added, “Greenwood remains first and foremost a crime scene.”

Marc Carlson

Director of special collections at the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library  

As a senior history major at Oklahoma State University, Marc Carlson was having trouble coming up with a topic for a term paper.

“It was supposed to be about something that most people had never heard of,” he said. “And so my wife suggested the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.”

“I was not familiar with it. But she’d learned about it as a student at Memorial (High School).”

Working at the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library at the time, 1989, Carlson decided to start his research on the subject there.

But he immediately ran into a problem: All the massacre-related newspaper articles from 1921 were missing.

“They had been razored out of the periodicals,” Carlson said.

Whoever was behind it, he added, “I suspect wanted to make it much harder to study the topic.”

Carlson forged ahead anyway. Using interlibrary loans, he was able to acquire the missing articles. And after completing his paper, he donated them to McFarlin.

That, essentially, is how the library’s Race Massacre archive got its start, Carlson said.

Today, more than 30 years later, that archive has grown impressively. And it’s due largely to the ongoing efforts of Carlson, who later became special collections director.

“As I’ve done research over the years, I’ve been adding to it, growing it,” he said.

Carlson has put special focus on massacre-related photos and just recently made an exciting discovery about one of the more than 200 in the collection.

He believes he now knows the identity of the man in a widely circulated image of a white rioter in a cap, chewing a cigar and toting two shotguns: Fred Barker of the infamous Barker gang.

The gang had Tulsa-area ties, and Carlson said he’d “suspected that they were probably involved. But I hadn’t found any proof. Then I ran across his mugshot. I’m 95% certain.”

“They were in town, and they would’ve been all over” an event like the massacre, he said.

The discovery is one more piece of the larger story, of which a little more is learned with every passing year. Carlson and TU are grateful to have played a part in that.

“The people of Greenwood — their story deserves to be told,” he said. “I have the greatest respect for them and what they were able to achieve, both before and after the massacre.”

“My hope for the future,” Carlson added, “is that this doesn’t get forgotten again.”

Hannibal Johnson

Author, speaker, education chairman of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission

Before writing four books on the subject, Hannibal Johnson had to learn about it for himself.

“Growing up in Fort Smith, Arkansas, I knew nothing of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre,” said the Tulsa historian and attorney.

Even after moving to Tulsa in 1984, fresh out of law school, it would be a few more years before he heard or learned anything.

Johnson’s first efforts to write about the massacre came in the 1990s as a guest editorialist for the Tulsa-based Oklahoma Eagle, a Black-owned newspaper that traces its origins to the year after the massacre.

What he began to realize as he dug deeper, he said, was that the massacre was just “one chapter in a grander narrative.”

And it was that bigger story — of Greenwood’s founders and leading citizens and the “indomitable spirit” they showed — that he felt compelled to share.

Today, no one has written and spoken more widely on the history of Greenwood and the 1921 massacre than Johnson, who is also education chairman of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission.

His latest book debuted recently: “Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples with its Historical Racial Trauma.”

As more people around the world come to know the story because of the centennial, Johnson hopes the message they take away is that “our shared humanity is paramount.”

“So much turns on our ability to recognize the personhood, value and dignity of every other person in this world,” he said. “If and when we do that, our challenges around peaceable co-existence will diminish exponentially.”

Kristi Williams

The beloved great aunt who used to babysit her.

For many years, that was the primary image Kristi Williams had of her Tulsa relative Jamie Edwards.

But there was so much more to her late aunt’s life. And as Williams learned the details — especially those relating to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — her admiration for her only grew.

“We would hear the stories (about Edwards surviving the massacre), but we just didn’t know what that was all about,” said Williams, who moved from Philadelphia to Tulsa in the fifth grade.

At the time the massacre broke out, her aunt, a Greenwood resident, was with a date at the Dreamland Theater. She would end up fleeing to Claremore and didn’t return to Tulsa for several years.

Williams began learning the larger story surrounding the massacre in the 1990s, when the state’s 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission was established and the topic began to gain momentum.

“I started researching and learning and reading everything I could,” Williams said.

What spurred her to activism, she added, was when massacre survivors lost their case for reparations in 2003.

In the years since, she’s continued to advocate for reparations while taking on other issues related to Tulsa’s troubled racial past.

That included helping lead the effort to change the name of Brady Street after it became better known that early-day prominent Tulsan Tate Brady had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Currently, Williams chairs the Greater Tulsa African American Affairs Commission and is a member of the committee overseeing the city’s search for mass graves.

Williams hopes African Americans everywhere will come to feel a connection to the Greenwood story.

“I tell people Greenwood knew me before I knew Greenwood,” she said. “I think that Greenwood belongs to every Black person in the world. It was made up of people who came from everywhere.

“Oklahoma was a promised land — we came here because we wanted to be free of lynchings, to just have the safety, to build our families and communities.

“Every Black person should come here and put their feet on this soil and feel that spirit of community.”

Julius Pegues

Chairman of the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation and Reconciliation Park

Julius Pegues could’ve said goodbye to Tulsa for good.

Within four years of enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was the first Black player on the basketball team, the Tulsa native had earned a degree in mechanical engineering. From there, joining the Air Force, he trained as a meteorologist.

But with options that could’ve taken him anywhere, Pegues still chose Tulsa.

“I came back to my hometown because I loved it,” said Pegues, 85.

Loved it, he added, in spite of what he knew about it.

A Tulsa native and 1953 graduate of Booker T. Washington High School, Pegues learned about the 1921 massacre as a child from the adults in his life, including some who experienced it directly.

Two of Pegues’ uncles had built Mount Zion Baptist Church, which was destroyed by the fire. His coach Seymour Williams was also an eyewitness.

The massacre was even discussed at home, said Pegues, one of nine siblings: “While other people didn’t talk about it, in my family we talked about it.”

But “we had to be on our P’s and Q’s wherever we were in Tulsa and not say anything around the wrong people.”

Pegues is thankful that he’s lived to see a day when the events of 1921 can be discussed openly. Today, he does that as chairman of the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation and Reconciliation Park, which serves in part as a memorial to massacre victims.

Pegues said he’s looking ahead to the centennial after a yearlong battle with pancreatic cancer. He received good news in early April: His latest scans showed no cancer.

“God is good all the time,” he said. “All my friends kept me buoyed up. Love transcends everything.”

Pegues is confident that that’s true even of racism.

“Tulsa has made significant progress,” he said. “Now, we have a long way to go, but we have made significant progress in improving race relations and opportunities.”

Kevin Matthews

State senator, Chairman of the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission

As a career firefighter, state Sen. Kevin Matthews knows well the kind of destruction flames can wreak.

But a fire that consumes 35 square blocks, reducing to ashes the heart of whole community? That’s hard for even him to picture.

Harder still, he said, is accepting what sparked and then fanned it: prejudice and hate.

Matthews, who retired as Tulsa Fire Department administrative chief before running for state office, said one of the things that he takes personally about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is how government agencies that were supposed to be there for Black Tulsans were not.

“We weren’t protected by the police,” he said. “The Fire Department was held back by the local officials at that time. It disappoints me that the government would support this kind of tragedy.”

Matthews, chairman of the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, was well into adulthood before he even heard about the massacre.

A Tulsa native who’s always lived on the city’s predominantly Black north side, he was in his 30s, he said, when he first learned about it from a documentary.

“It was 1994, and an uncle of mine gave me this VHS tape. It had Tulsa Race Riot written on it. And he said, ‘You need to look at this.’”

As the images of smoke filled his television screen, “I couldn’t believe it,” Matthews said. “I thought, ‘How could I not know about this?’”

One of Matthews’ goals today is to make sure no one will ever ask that question again.

As chairman of the centennial commission, he’s excited about progress on the Greenwood Rising history center, which will be dedicated during the centennial, then open to the public in June.

“I can get emotional about these things, but we need to be intentional,” he said. “So I’m focusing on those things that we can do, and there’s a lot more that needs to happen. Telling the story is just the foundation.”

Carlos Moreno

Author of "The Victory of Greenwood"

Before writing his book “The Victory of Greenwood,” Carlos Moreno wasn’t sure he was the right person for the task.

“I didn’t grow up in Tulsa. I’m not Black — I’m Mexican on both sides of my family,” said Moreno, who hails from Santa Clara, California.

“So I really struggled with whether I was anyone who had anything to say about Greenwood.”

A graphic designer by trade, he first heard about Greenwood and the Tulsa Race Massacre in the late 1990s when he moved from Silicon Valley to Tulsa.

Looking for work, he took on some projects for Greenwood clients. It was through relationships that he made, including community elders, that he began to learn about the history in “bits and pieces,” he said.

“The story just stuck with me,” Moreno said, adding that what turned his growing interest into a passion was when he designed an Oklahoma Eagle special issue about the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission report.

He began collecting “books, articles, documentaries, anything and everything I could get my hands on about Greenwood.”

But it wasn’t until more recently — inspired by the interracial mission of his church, All Souls Unitarian — that “the idea started gelling more about how I could contribute to this conversation.”

The result was the book, which is being published through All Souls and will be available online and in local bookstores in time for the centennial.

The work is Moreno’s attempt to help readers go beyond the massacre, focusing on the pivotal figures who rebuilt the community.

“Often we look at Greenwood as a subject of pity, and that’s all it ever was or is or will be,” he said. “This horrible thing happened, but it’s not the only thing that defines Greenwood.”

Phil Armstrong

Centennial Commission Project Manager 

Attending a historically Black institution — especially one with ties to the oldest African American-run college in the nation — helped enlarge Phil Armstrong’s perspective.

“They passed on things that we did not get in our general history books in public school,” said the Ohio native, who went to Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio.

It even included some Oklahoma history. As a sophomore in 1991, in fact, Armstrong spent an entire semester studying the unique story of African Americans in Oklahoma, which once boasted the most all-Black towns in the country.

“I got fully immersed,” said Armstrong, who also learned about Greenwood and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Later on, in 1997, Armstrong moved to Tulsa for work. He was in for a surprise.

“Most Tulsans had never heard of this history,” said Armstrong, who now serves as project director of the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission.

“I was literally shocked that somebody in Ohio could come here and know more about (Greenwood and the massacre) than most Blacks or whites who were raised here,” he said.

As one of his duties with the commission, Armstrong is supervising a project that promises not only to teach that history better but to reach more people, Tulsans and non-Tulsans included.

Set to open in June, the new Greenwood Rising history center will tell the full story of historic Greenwood, from its origins in the early 1900s to the present day.

When he speaks to groups, Armstrong emphasizes that achieving true racial healing in America will take not just laws and policies but a change of hearts and minds. The museum, he believes, can be a catalyst for that.

“When people leave here, I believe they will be changed and that Tulsa and the Greenwood story will become a model,” he said. “People will go back to their communities and say, ‘Look what they are doing in Tulsa. What if we take some of that and bring that here for our community?’”

Armstrong, who just completed a final review of the center’s exhibit wing, said that as familiar as he is with the project, “it still moves me emotionally just how powerful this history is — not just the horrific nature of the massacre but how incredible this community was to survive and prosper.”

“It is incredible,” he said of the center. “I can’t wait. It’s going to be a powerful, powerful experience.”

Kavin Ross

Longtime Greenwood advocate

It wasn’t long after Kavin Ross’ family moved in that one of their new neighbors sent them a message.

“We found it the next morning — somebody had set our car on fire,” said Ross, who was 6 when his family became one of the first Black households in their predominantly white Tulsa neighborhood.

“I wondered why someone would do that while we slept,” he said. “That was my first taste of racism.”

Making a more profound impression on him, however, was how his father responded later.

Managing editor of Impact Magazine, which in 1971 published a 50th anniversary article about the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, Don Ross sent Kavin and his siblings into their neighborhood bearing copies of the issue.

“He had us go door to door selling copies,” Ross laughed. “It was pretty, pretty bold.”

“I think I was probably one of the only children to know about the massacre,” said the longtime Greenwood advocate. “And it was because of that magazine. I remember it vividly. I don’t think I fully grasped that it was about Tulsa.”

It would be several more years before that fully sank in.

Ross was living in Houston, he said, when he saw the 1993 massacre-related documentary “Goin’ Back to T-Town” and was “mesmerized by the images. And the people — I knew many of them.

“I realized that it was my heritage, too.”

Inspired to move back to Tulsa, Ross has been committed pretty much ever since to helping tell that story.

Currently chairman of the committee overseeing the city’s search for mass graves, Ross is fully invested in preserving and promoting Greenwood history. One of his proudest moments, he said, was having a historical marker erected in Greenwood honoring the legacy of Booker T. Washington High School.

He was also involved with the efforts of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission — co-founded in 1996 by his father, who had gone on to become a state representative. He worked alongside historian Eddie Faye Gates, videoing her interviews with massacre survivors.

Along with Gates, Ross also claimed as an influential friend the late historian John Hope Franklin.

“He gave me a mission. He said to make all Tulsans historians,” Ross said.

Ross hopes the centennial can help take Tulsa a step closer to fully confronting its past.

“I think we can be a jewel for the rest of the world in how we deal with it,” he said. “The world is at our front door, and they are looking at us and asking questions.”

Next month marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which saw the city’s prosperous Greenwood District, home to the historic Black-owned businesses of Black Wall Street, burned to the ground in a deadly blaze. In memory of the victims and survivors, a new history museum and memorial, Greenwood Rising, is slated to open early this summer.

It’s an important moment for a city that for decades did not acknowledge the dark legacy of the massacre and the forces of systemic racism that shaped Tulsa as it rose from the ashes. Until 2019, the state of Oklahoma did not include the massacre as a mandatory part of public school curriculums.

“It’s time for us to stop sweeping this under the rug,” Phil Armstrong, head of Oklahoma’s 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Commission, which is overseeing the museum project, told Artnet News. “Let us honor the memory of those who lost their lives and the survivors.”

The 1921 massacre in Tulsa was ignited by a news story—later disproven—that a Black man had assaulted a white woman in an elevator. But it was more fundamentally fueled by simmering resentment over the wealth of Greenwood’s residents.

In an attack that gained broad pop culture representation in HBO’s Watchmen in 2019, a white mob killed an estimated 300 Black Tulsans, destroyed the homes of 10,000 others, and caused some $200 million in today’s dollars in property damage, according to academic research.

A New Way to Present Traumatic Stories

Determining how to best tell the story of the massacre was a challenging process that evolved over time, particularly over last summer, as Black Lives Matter protests rocked the nation.

“From the onset we’ve been really sensitive to the visitorship who will be coming through, including communities that have been heavily impacted by trauma,” L’Rai Arthur-Mensah, the project director at Local Projects, told Artnet News. “In the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, I came to the team and said, ‘I have a young Black son. I’m worried about how I’m going to be able to engage with the material that we place in this museum.'”

Clearly, this called for a more sophisticated solution than a sign with a trigger warning, telling visitors to enter at their own risk.

That’s why Local Projects created two paths through the exhibition, one of which offered what it dubbed an “emotional exit” offering a less graphic telling of Tulsa’s history. The display will open for all viewers with a recreation of life in Greenwood before the massacre, including a holographic barbershop installation sharing the hopes and dreams of those who called Black Wall Street home.

Visitors will then be able to opt out of the more triggering visuals in the museum’s “Arc of Oppression” section, which details the systemic racism faced by Black Americans, particularly in Tulsa, including the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as a recreation of the chaos of the massacre itself. Projected photographs will showcase the destruction and violence of the deadly incident, paired with audio accounts from some of the survivors.

“A lot of people in the Black community don’t need to relive this history. It’s really about educating others,” Arthur-Mensah said. “So you can go through a separate path where you don’t see all the images or have to stand in the middle of the massacre as it’s happening.”

“We don’t want you to fully bypass the story. You should still understand this history, but you don’t have to trigger yourself in any way to do that,” she added. “You can find ways to educate without traumatizing.”

Regardless of what path visitors take through the galleries, they will end on a note of hope in a section titled “Journey Toward Reconciliation.” The exhibit explores how the community rebuilt after the massacre, how it was fractured again by urban renewal programs in the 1960s and the construction of a highway that split the town into two, and how it united yet again through telling its own story.

“The museum is really highlighting the history of the community and the resiliency of the people,” Arthur-Mensah said.

Community Collaboration

In telling that history, the Greenwood Rising team worked closely with the community to ensure that local voices were being heard. That included conversations with Tulsa educators, activists, and politicians, as well as a public forum that allowed the community to provide their feedback about how the story of the massacre should be presented.

“There were some hard conversations—when dealing with any sensitive materials, you won’t make everyone happy,” Arthur-Mensah acknowledged. “As designers, it is not our job to tell other people’s stories. It’s our job to provide platforms and vessels so that people can tell their stories for themselves.”

The 7,000-square-foot new museum is just one of the ways in which the community is marking the massacre’s centennial. The Tulsa Race Massacre Commission also runs the Greenwood Art Project, which will open an exhibition featuring 33 Oklahoma-based artists next month, among other programming. Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum of Art currently has two exhibitions inspired by Greenwood history.

“This has not been a bed of roses,” Armstrong admitted. “There’s been a lot of time establishing trust and rapport and credibility with the community, not only among Black citizens, but white citizens [who worried], ‘Was this just another way to try to make white citizens feel guilty for what happened a hundred years ago that they had no part in, creating another echo chamber where nothing really gets done?”

The goal is to make Greenwood Rising “a safe space for healing from racial trauma,” Armstrong added. The museum hopes to offer this not only through its exhibits, but also through additional space for community meetings and programming. The objective is for visitors to come away “not just being lightened and educated on this history, but to leave with a commitment to better racial relations within their own individual lives and take that back to their communities.”

Greenwood Rising will be located at 10 N Greenwood Ave Suite 2021, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

On May 30, 1921, 17-year-old Sarah Page, a white elevator operator who worked in the downtown Tulsa Drexel Building, accused Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoeshiner, of assault.

Although she later recanted the charge, Rowland was jailed at the courthouse. An armed white mob—some newly deputized—gathered, and lynching rumors circulated. A group of black men, some with guns, twice gathered to prevent such an event. But a firefight flared and, as survivors reported, “All hell broke loose.”

On June 1, Oklahoma Gov. James Robertson declared martial law, and the National Guard ended the killing and the looting and burning of homes and businesses in the upscale Black community. As many as six planes owned by whites dropped incendiaries—perhaps the only instance in history of one group of Americans attacking another by air.

In the end, up to 300 were killed, 800-plus injured, $2.7 million in property damage incurred ($30–50 million in 2021 value) and thousands interned and homeless. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre had destroyed the 35 square blocks comprising “Black Wall Street,” one of the nation’s wealthiest Black communities.

On June 2, 2021, during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial weekend, the 11,000-sq-ft Greenwood Rising history center will be dedicated at 23 N. Greenwood Ave. on the southeast corner with Archer Street, the gateway to the resurging community. The $7.5-million one-story building is anchored by an exhibit hall celebrating the story of the Greenwood District. It opens to the public later in June.

“Greenwood is ground zero for historic racial trauma in this country. This history facility ... will become a place where healing from that trauma can begin a journey to racial reconciliation.”

— Phil Armstrong, TRMCC Project Director

The event will be hosted by the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission (TRMCC), formed in 2015 by Tulsa-born State Senator and Commission Chair Kevin Matthews. “We’re building a first-class history center that will tell all Americans and the world the story of that terrible massacre and, hopefully, will spur renovations and new buildings downtown and throughout North Tulsa,” says Matthews, a former firefighter and business owner who helped raise $30 million for the facility.

Roxanne Bell, one of Matthews’ relatives, recently died at age 102. She often told the story of how her parents hid her under a table during the siege. “The name Greenwood Rising affirms that after 400 years of African American history in this country, we have continued to rise after our community was burned down and destroyed,” Matthews adds.

The Tulsa office of Columbus, Kan.-based Crossland Construction Co., serves as construction manager for the center, which broke ground in August. It was designed by Selser Schaefer Architects in Tulsa. New York City-based Local Projects is completing the exhibit designs. The rest of the team is also Tulsa-based: Wallace Engineering, civil; 360 Engineering Group, structural; Philips + Gomez, MEP; Howell & Vancuren Inc., landscape architecture; HofferWaska Creative, environmental graphics; and Stonebridge Group, the owner’s representative.

The Pathway to Hope, a pedestrian walkway that begins near Greenwood Rising, is scheduled to open the weekend before the center. It is also a TRMCC project and is being built by Crossland Construction. It travels past ONEOK sports field and Interstate 244 to the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park, named for the noted Tulsa-born historian. The park opened in 2010 as a memorial to the massacre victims.

The $5-million pathway symbolically reunites Greenwood, which was further traumatized in the mid-1960s and early 1970s by the building of a highway that divided the community in the name of urban renewal.

“Greenwood is ground zero for historic racial trauma in this country,” says Phil Armstrong, project director. An Ohioan by birth, he moved to Oklahoma in 1997 after attending Central State University. “This history facility ... will become a place where healing from that trauma can begin a journey to racial reconciliation.” 

Light, Strong panels

Crossland began construction on Oct. 30 and at peak has had 40–45 workers on the 14,500-sq-ft parcel, says Greg Smith, vice president of the firm’s Tulsa division. “The biggest challenge of this project is the schedule, which is very aggressive but critical as we need to complete the project for the 100-year anniversary of the 1921 Race Massacre,” he says.

The number of specialty materials and finishes also posed construction challenges, Smith adds. The center’s glass fiber reinforced concrete panels, which wrap the exterior, act as a rain screen and are articulated by the patterned black brick below, explains Stephen Dinnen, project architect with Selser Schaefer Architects.

The panels are lit in the cavities and can be controlled via phone or other electronic means to change the color and pattern of the lighting. Other exterior elements include a glass entrance and structural silicone glazing as well as an aluminum curtain wall that stands at the northwest corner of the building, he says.

GFRCs provide many benefits, explains Eric Sutliff, general manager for DeVinci Precast, the Oklahoma City-based manufacturer. Sun Valley Masonry, Stillwater, Okla., is installing them on site.

On average, large-scale panels tend to be about five times lighter than wet-cast concrete, compared by square foot. “The savings in weight allow for easier and less costly constructibility and often translate into shorter installation times,” he says.

The veneer also requires fewer resources: less sand and cement, less water, fewer chemicals, less fuel to transport—and “let’s not forget, fewer strained backs,” adds Sutliff.

The north facade expresses the resilience, vibrancy and revitalization of the Greenwood spirit, welcoming visitors to the pedestrian-friendly building and district with a quote from writer James Baldwin, explains Nathan Koob, principal-in-charge for Selser Schaefer Architects.

“The shaped GFRC facade, never touching the ground, captures light from within and creates a rising effect. The randomized panels reflect individualism and together represent a larger fabric symbolic of the community, and the lower textured masonry recalls the brick structures of the lost buildings of Black Wall Street,” he adds.

At night, the facade changes, with dramatic light representing a transformation from a business area to an entertainment district. Koob says: “The building comes to life as an illuminated beacon seeking to inform and inspire both present and future generations.”

The Greenwood Rising Lesson

Greenwood Rising will feature interactive exhibit/experiences that highlight Tulsa’s Greenwood District and examine race relations in the U.S.

Post-Civil War segregation helped create Black Wall Street and spur prosperity among its residents, explains Tulsa resident Hannibal B. Johnson, author of 10 books on Black history.

“They seized the opportunity to devise a closed market system that defied the myth of African American mediocrity,” he has written of those early Greenwood residents. “Over time, fear and jealousy swelled within the white community. African American success, including home, business and land ownership, precipitated increasing consternation and friction.”

This animosity helped spark the 1921 massacre. But by 1942 more than 200 black-owned businesses had made Greenwood prosperous again. “In subsequent decades, integration, urban renewal and economic changes sparked a prodigious decline in the Greenwood District,” Johnson notes. Integration removed black dollars from the community, and urban renewal became “urban removal.”

With the interstate completed in the early 1970s, the “Deep Greenwood” area languished; many properties came to be owned by the Tulsa Development Authority, not African Americans, Johnson says.

But in the last 15 years, the now-integrated community has become the focus of development and investment. Johnson has written: “No longer a Black entrepreneurial mecca, its new incarnation is that of a business, educational, recreational, cultural and entertainment hub.”

As visitors prepare to exit the LED-lit galleries, they will enter an amphitheater that solicits dialogue. “Because Greenwood Rising is a place for healing racial trauma, a place for people to begin the journey to reconciliation, they will be encouraged to sit and start discussion on issues that divide us,” Armstrong says, suggesting an example, “How do we get past the aftermath of George Floyd?’”

The valedictory space is a commitment chamber where visitors can do that; their statements will be permanently displayed on a wall of unity. “What can I do to change the way I think or to help change other people and their biases?” he asks. “When they leave, they can feel that they haven’t just looked back on the road but have begun to make the journey forward.”

Two benches are honoring those impacted by a dark part of our history. 

The Tulsa Rotary Club Foundation is helping to commemorate the 1921 Race Massacre. Tulsans gathered Saturday in Greenwood to unveil a $12,000 project.

McKenzie Barr, 10, won't wonder about her roots or look through history books that mask the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Today, she's taking part in a history lesson.

She read Useni Eugene Perkins' poem "Hey Black Child", a piece performed by several historic figures like Maya Angelou, before watching as the Tulsa Rotary Club Foundation unveiled its project.

“‘Hey Black child. Do you know who you are? Who you really are? Do you know you can be who you want to be if you try to be what you can be,’" Barr read.

Organizers envision a place where generations can sit, talk, eat and think.

Look a little closer when you arrive because the plaque will give it all away. You see, this is no ordinary place. History happened here.

It's part of the Toni Morrison Society’s "Bench By The Road Project”, commemorating significant moments, people and locations in Black history.

One bench now sits outside the Mabel B. Little House at the corner of Greenwood and Archer. Another will soon call Tulsa's Greenwood Rising museum home.

Brenda Nails-Alford is a descendant of several Tulsa Race Massacre survivors, including her great-grandmother and grandparents. She said she felt many things today like horror and hurt, but also hope for the future.

"I, myself, did not learn about our family's history,” Nails-Alford said. “About the race massacre aspect of our history, our family history, until later in life. I hope that they sit here and think about who they are and who they want to be in life and to take the history that they will learn, to incorporate that to be the best people and persons that they can be.”

An attorney suing the City of Tulsa for reparations has told the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission to stop using the name of 106-year-old survivor Lessie Benningfield "Mother" Randle.

Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons sent the commission a cease-and-desist letter this week over a reference Project Director Phil Armstrong made to the 106-year-old Randle in a panel discussion late last month. Talking about the Greenwood Rising history center the commission is building in downtown Tulsa, Armstrong mentioned Randle by name and said the commission is "dedicating much of this work to their lives."

Solomon-Simmons said that creates the impression Randle supports their work.

"My family and I were shocked to hear that the commission is 'dedicating' much of their work to me since they have refused to meet with me, did not allow me an opportunity to participate in the Commission’s planning, and declined to enter discussions on how I, a living survivor of the massacre, feels about their activities around the centennial," Randle said in a statement.

"They want to leverage the rich history of the massacre while Mother Randle’s living in poverty. She’s never received any type of justice or compensation for the massacre, and she thinks that's wrong," Solomon-Simmons said.

Solomon-Simmons said there are steps the commission could take that would change that, including meeting with Randle, and using some of their $30 million in funding and Greenwood Rising museum revenue to support massacre survivors and their descendants.

"The centennial commission should strongly and forcefully endorse reparations and justice to Mother Randle and all descendants of those who suffered from the massacre," Solomon-Simmons said.

Armstrong and the commission did not respond to a request for comment.

The reparations lawsuit says through their actions during the Tulsa Race Massacre, the City of Tulsa and other defendants created a public nuisance of racial disparities, economic inequalities, insecurity and trauma that continues today.

FC Tulsa is doing its part to recognize the upcoming centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

The soccer club is adding “Greenwood Ave.” patches in honor of the estimated hundreds of victims one hundred years ago, and their descendants living and working in Tulsa’s historic Greenwood District.

“Greenwood Ave.” is a brand designed by local artist Trey Thaxton, celebrating Black entrepreneurship and excellence in Greenwood.

The patch will appear on the sleeve of each FC Tulsa jersey worn at home and on the road for the 2021 season.

“I’m extremely thankful that we are honoring the history of Greenwood this season with the Greenwood Ave. patch,” said FC Tulsa head coach Michael Nsien.

“It’s important that we pay homage to those whose lives were lost and the community that was torn apart. However, I believe it’s equally important to hold in memory what was there prior to the massacre. Greenwood’s history is about more than just three days of burning, it’s about a community that was for years prominent and thriving. Growing up on Greenwood and knowing that history gives me a sense of pride and purpose of who I am and what I’m capable of, what we are capable of – that we can all go so much further together. This patch will serve as a reminder of our incredible potential.”

All proceeds from the patch sales, and a portion of the sales from every FC Tulsa jersey sold with the patch, will be donated to the Terence Crutcher Foundation, which will put it toward the building of the Black Wall Street Memorial to be placed in the district.

“I’m beyond humbled and honored to partner with FC Tulsa on this Greenwood Ave. patch,” said Thaxton.

“This is a historic year for Tulsa and an important time in our country’s history. I am grateful to FC Tulsa for blazing a trail to support an up-and-coming Black-owned brand with this partnership, and I hope that it can open the door for meaningful alignment with people and entities on uplifting the communities they operate in. Greenwood is not just Black history, but it’s American history. While I’m fully aware that this is a “patch” on a sleeve, I hope it can help someone who sees or hears about Greenwood for the first time, face this difficult history in an unexpected way. Together, we are all Greenwood Ave.”

The patch will be sold both separately and as a piece of the team’s jerseys at the FC Tulsa Team Shop.

From FC Tulsa:

The patch producers, Mythic Press, will carry the patch on its website and at its Tulsa-area shops, as well as other local retailers GreenwoodAve.com, Ziegler Art+Frame in the Kendall-Whittier District and at the Terence Crutcher Foundation located inside the Greenwood Cultural Center.

This patch continues FC Tulsa’s mission to make a difference in the Greenwood and North Tulsa communities. In February, FC Tulsa made a $25,000 donation to Greenwood Rising, a historical museum being built to remember the events of 1921. Leading up to the start of the season, FC Tulsa’s front office staff, technical staff and players all took a guided tour of Greenwood, led by Tulsa Race Massacre descendent Chief Amusan and The Real Black Wall Street Tour, to become more educated on the neighborhood the team plays in and the events of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Fans can purchase the patch now at any of the locations or vendors described above or at FC Tulsa’s return to ONEOK Field on Saturday, April 17 for its preseason match against Austin Bold FC. Tickets to the match are available now at FCTulsa.com/tickets.

‘The right side of history’

“After 100 years of social injustice, here is our chance, on our watch, to right a wrong. While we attempt to repair a trust that was broken a century ago by Tulsa’s homegrown terrorists, the world is watching our every movement as we go through this unique process. 

There are Tulsans today who desire to do the right thing for those who were massacred, for those who were not given proper burial rights, and for the most part, for those who were disposed of like common urban trash in the summer of 1921. As chairman, I’m even willing to extend an olive branch to the owners of the Rolling Oak Memorial Gardens cemetery, who own the forgotten, desecrated and suspected gravesite.

Together we can talk this process out and have a proper investigation. There is no room for the blame game 100 years later. In my family, we practiced not focusing on who messed up. Instead, we focus on how to solve the problem so that we won’t repeat problem. So Tulsa, let us all evolve and move forward. By working together, we all can be on the right side of history ... this time.”

— Kavin Ross, chairman of the 1921 Mass Graves Public Oversight Committee, on the City of Tulsa’s continued requests to conduct geophysical scanning in the privately owned Rolling Oaks Memorial Gardens, 4300 E. 91st St., which has been identified by the Committee as another possible location for mass graves. 

Spring Cleaning

Tulsans can participate in the City of Tulsa’s “virtual creek cleanup” April 10-24 by registering at tulsastreams.com. Team leaders can choose the date, time and location of their cleanup from a list of 20 locations. If necessary, trash bags, safety vests, disposable gloves and trash grabbers can be provided while supplies last by calling 918-591-4325. Volunteers will receive a T-shirt when supplies are returned.

Changing of the Garb

The Tulsa Drillers, in conjunction with the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, have announced plans to wear a special patch in May 2021 to raise awareness and encourage Drillers fans to educate themselves about the Massacre while honoring victims and their families.

The Drillers will wear patched jerseys for all May games played on ONEOK Field, located in the historic Greenwood District. 

Additionally, in honor of Juneteenth 2021, the Drillers will wear throwback T-Town Clowns jerseys for three games, June 11-13. 

The T-Town Clowns, a popular team from the historic Negro Baseball Leagues era, played at Lacy Park, 2134 N. Madison Place, from 1952-1965. The Drillers first wore replicas of the T-Town Clowns’ original jerseys during the 2011 season. 

Both jerseys will be available for purchase using an auction process with proceeds benefiting the Greenwood Rising Black Wall Street History Center and the Lacy Park baseball field renovation project, respectively. 

DVIS to Create Monarch Garden

Rather than have its traditional fundraising gala, the Monarch Ball, in 2021, Domestic Violence Intervention Services is raising funds for an outdoor space for survivors of domestic or sexual violence to reflect and begin their journey to healing.

The organization is consulting with a Master Gardener, a conservationist and the chair of the Monarch Initiative of Tulsa on initial planning for the garden, which will be a certified monarch waystation located at the DVIS outpatient facility, 3124 E. Apache St. Only native Oklahoma plants will be utilized to ensure the space is sustainable.

The garden also will feature a children’s area with raised beds for digging and a rock garden designed to provide butterflies with hydration.

The fundraising campaign is called Monarch Evolved. To sponsor, call 918-508-2709 or email jday@dvis.org.

On March 26, 2021, TTCU Federal Credit Union pledged to donate $100,000 over the next four years to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission and Greenwood Rising, a state-of-the-art history center located in the heart of historic Greenwood which will honor the legacy of Black Wall Street before and after the massacre. It is under construction with a scheduled public opening in late June 2021.

"Greenwood Rising will become one of the most transformative initiatives for our city and nation, leading the way towards greater racial healing and justice," President and CEO Tim Lyons said. "We think it's important to learn from the past as well as look forward to the future, and we are very honored to help support this vital effort."

The efforts of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission will educate Oklahomans and Americans about the Race Massacre and its impact on the state and nation; remember its victims and survivors; and create an environment conducive to fostering sustainable entrepreneurship and heritage tourism within the Greenwood District specifically, and North Tulsa generally.

"We are grateful for the financial support of TTCU to help us build Greenwood Rising," said Phil Armstrong, project director of the Commission. "These funds get us closer to our fundraising goal to finalize the visitor offerings within the history center and provide programming to facilitate the reconciliation and healing process."

The Commission is hosting a variety of events to remember the massacre from May 31 through June 5 starting with "Remember + Rise" a commemorative program and candlelight vigil at ONEOK Stadium. Economic Empowerment Day, an interactive conference focused on closing the racial wealth gap, will be held in Tulsa and online June 1. Other events include the National Day of Learning, Tim Reid's Greenwood Film Festival, Dreamland Again and other community events. Learn more at Tulsa2021.org.