Black artists have a new vision for Tulsa. Can it heal old divides?
Tulsa has big plans for the centennial of the 1921 race massacre that left the city’s Black community in ruins. Many residents say these efforts are important. But members of the city’s Black community say they’re just starting the process of mourning what they’ve lost – even as they’re trying to build something new.
The Greenwood Art Project aims to make sure Tulsa and the country know the history of both the massacre and Black Wall Street. Program director Jerica Wortham sees art as an opportunity to invite others into the story, and to capture the spirit of the city’s thriving Black community. “I’m so excited for the world to be able to come here and experience this story, to experience it in real time, and to feel the energy of the space being reignited,” she says.
In Part 3 of our podcast, “Tulsa Rising,” we hear about how Black Tulsans are processing this moment, and how art and innovation can be a catalyst for healing.
This episode was originally published in October 2020. We have republished the series under “Tulsa Rising” to commemorate the massacre’s centennial. To learn more about the podcast and find new episodes, please visit our page.
This story was designed to be heard. We strongly encourage you to experience it with your ears, but we understand that is not an option for everybody. You can find the audio player above. For those who are unable to listen, we have provided a transcript of the story below.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPTSamantha Laine Perfas: Hi everyone. I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, multimedia reporter at The Christian Science Monitor. And this is the third part of “Tulsa Rising,” the story of a city wrestling with its past and – maybe – forging a better future. If you’ve heard the rest of the series, you’ll know that my colleague Jessica Mendoza and I first published this in the fall of 2020, leading up to the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. After this episode, you’ll hear an update from Jerica Wortham, the program director of the Greenwood Art Project. She’ll talk about the role of art in the process of reconciliation.
When we first reported this story, we wanted to know what Tulsans were thinking as they looked to the future. The massacre’s centennial is spurring a new generation to own the story of Black Wall Street. So in this episode – again hosted by Jess – we find out what we, as a country, can learn from these efforts.
This is Part 3 of “Tulsa Rising”: Everything Is Us.
[Music]
This story contains descriptions of violence, including gun violence and trauma inflicted on Black Americans. Please be advised.
Jerica Wortham: Oh, you know what, I actually have a poem that I did for the Black Wall Street Awards. Let me find it. Where is that poem? OK, I found it. [Jerica begins poem, ‘Love Letter to Greenwood’]We were everything we needed SeededIn Ujamaa, and imani Faith got long legs and no eyes But they had vision For that Greenwood aveThat Redman landThat Brilliance build by black man handLegacies of a dreamland That became the blueprintFor hope meeting manifestationHeritage on every storefront Resilience in every brick Brick by brick the mortar became mortal This became a living thingMy bro Phetote said Greenwood was the body Black Wall Street was the soul I imagine for the generation post slavery Utopia Breathing came easy Cause God blessed the child that had its ownAnd We owned all this![Music]
Jessica Mendoza: 2020 is coming to a close. This long, difficult year, including the election, will be behind us. But no matter what else happens, no matter who wins, America will still be wrestling with race and racism. Black Lives Matter, police violence and calls for reform, white supremacy – these aren’t going anywhere.
So when the year turns, the nation may well look to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to see what it looks like when a city confronts a racist past. At the end of May, Tulsa will be commemorating the centennial of the 1921 race massacre – a violent incident of racism that left the Black community of Greenwood in ruins.
The city has big plans for the year. They’re building a new museum dedicated to Greenwood and the community once known as Black Wall Street. They’ve launched an investigation into where the bodies of those killed in the
Wortham: I was born and raised in Tulsa, went to Booker Taliaferro Washington, Sr., High School, world-class high school. Absolutely phenomenal magnet program. I learned nothing about the massacre there. Steph Simon: I just seen it in a related search. Tulsa race riot. Documentary.Simon: I’m like, man, is this from here? Like from my streets, you know what I’m saying, from where my school is at?Simon: I don’t walk, eat, think, nothing the same as pre-learning this. Like, I’ve been covered in this, I’m a whole different person. Learning this really like, changed me.Simon: He was the scapegoat, the catalyst.Simon: Dick Rowland was one of the first. The story is, he is blamed for sexual assault. I know we are believing women, but I also believe that they use Black kids to start stuff like that. Like Mike Brown –Simon: ‘He shouldn’t have been stealing in the first place. He wouldn’t have never got shot.’ Or the guy that got killed jogging. Simon: ‘He shouldn’t have been looking in the house.’ Simon: So that justified him getting shot by two non-cops. There’s always some justifiable, stupid story. And this one was, he assaulted her. And that’s the reason we blow the whole city up. These stories just keep happening over and over. And over. And over. And over again. You know what I’m saying? I was still mad about Ahmaud, and then it was like, dang, we gotta get more mad about George Floyd. I’m still mad about Terence Crutcher. That happened up the road from my house. And then by the time we got done painting him on a shirt, there was somebody else we gotta put. Like we’re running out of street signs, and we’re running out of shirts, and we’re running out of paint, and we’re running out of walls. Simon: I always tell everybody, ‘Everything is us. Everything is. Everything is us.’ The mindset is the key. It won’t work without the mindset. Pro-Black business, pro local, pro collaboration with your peers, is key. Black Wall Street – ‘everything is us’ was their mentality that they used. That’s how you rise as a community. Simon: It’s like, what kind of great way for the tables to turn? Where it’s a Black man in here. I want to get to the point where his name ain’t even brought up anymore. I’m changing the narrative, like let me be the ignition for the new Black Wall Street and the rebuild.[Jerica continues her poem, ‘Love Letter to Greenwood’]Imagine that negroes running thingsGreenwood was like the board room meeting the cookout. Nuclear Family Meets CommunityUnited.... on some June nights under the groove. Getting down just… for the funk of it Black Wall Street. Where I heard Steph say everything is us I believe it Wortham: Tulsa is a space that is rich with entrepreneurs, with opportunity to really just kind of spread your wings. Tulsa’s very, very receptive to, ‘I have an idea. I want to try this out. Can I get a little support and just kind of see how that works?’Wortham: A lot of the people in our community do their business online because the increasing difficulty for people of color to have storefronts. So it’s ingrained in us, we still are running businesses. But storefront space, having brick and mortar, having a space where you can go in and say, ‘Someone that looks like me created this space. And when I go into this space, I know I’m welcomed.’ That is what we are looking for more of. So the – the spirit of Black Wall Street, the spirit of Greenwood, the spirit of of bringing together community – that is there. What I’m hoping is some of those spiritual spaces also being able to manifest themselves into physical spaces within our community. [Music]As the centennial of the 1921 race massacre approaches, there’s a kind of bustle about the city of Tulsa. A sense of revival and revitalization, an awareness that the country might soon look its way. And in Tulsa’s Black community, especially in the north part of the city, there’s a new consciousness – of Greenwood and Black Wall Street, and all they represented before and after the massacre – that for decades, simply didn’t exist.Audio montage: members of The Juice Radio ShowTakara Williams: “To me, Black Wall Street means remembering what happened, remembering the businesses that were there, remembering the success that Black people had and still have.”Tiller Watson: “Black Wall Street shows me that we can be successful no matter the cost. Anything is possible for us.”Eden Burrell: “Black Wall Street to me is like a symbol, Black power, like Black excellence. It’s just a collage of everything that we can do and that we have done. That’s just what it is to me, like a symbol of hope and power.”William Green: “You know, when a lot of people think of Tulsa, they don’t really think of Black Wall Street. But we want that to be what you think about now. We want to make it less of an idea and more of a reality.”Bobby Eaton: I believe and I tell young people all the time, ‘Don’t limit yourself.’ Eaton: When I first moved back here four and a half years ago, I just would go around in the community and I would talk to people. And they would always say, ‘Did you know so-and-so had something going on at the event center, the cultural center?’ ‘No, I didn’t know nothing about it. Never heard of it.’ And it was always like a word of mouth kind of thing. So I decided to open up a radio station.Eaton: We try to make sure they get placed in college. We write letters and reference letters, let everybody know they’ve had some broadcasting experience. And we’ve helped get about three of them down in Jackson State.My grandfather always told me something: Be the best at what you do, whatever you decide. If you’re gonna be a garbage man, be the best garbage man. Or, you know, the best doctor. The best musician or entertainer. And if you strive to do the best, then you’re going to see some success. I think that in the African American community, we’ve lost a lot of that type of insight, like Black Wall Street. And to describe North Tulsa is, we’ve lost a lot. Economic development. Things have been torn down. Homes have been torn down. We don’t have a lot of Black businesses in our community like we once had. We’ve got to get back into that sense of building up our community. Eaton: And it needs to be talked about. It’s a conversation that’s overdue.Wortham: I am so excited – COVID pending, right? I’m so excited for the world to be able to come here and experience this story, to experience it in real time, and to feel the energy of the space being reignited.Wortham: The Greenwood Art Project is a public art project designed to help the artists in Tulsa tell the story of Greenwood in their own way, from their own perspective, and a first-person lens.This was a battleground. This was where horrific things happened. But at the same time, this is where a family lived, where they ate dinner, where they loved each other. And where real people lived real lives. So what you will experience is spaces being engaged with music, poetry, live theater, dance.Wortham: We understand that it could be heavy. So it’s partnering with mental health organizations to make sure that they have support on stand-by when people are experiencing these moments – to not just drop them in a space and leave them there to deal with it. That’s part of the problem, right? That’s how we got here. It was a lot of blowing things up and then leaving you to deal with it, but not actually having the necessary discussions. So the hope is then, after all of these experiences, that people are able to come together, that they’re able to have meaningful dialogue to really impact real change.Wortham: Man, ‘Fire In Little Africa’ is – it was so much fun. It was so much fun. I wish you all could have seen all of these artists in one space just creating. Wortham: It was beautiful to record it in historical spaces, to see the story being told in a nontraditional way, utilizing hip-hop. It was beautiful to see people that are significantly younger than me engaged in this story and telling it in a way that their peers can digest it. Simon: It’s showing people that Tulsa, Oklahoma, middle of the map, no man’s land. It’s like, naw. We got something to talk about and we have something to say. Wortham: The works that they’ve created, the work that I got to be a part of as well? Dope! Like it was amazing – amazing, amazing, amazing. And then for them to be able to do that without filter, without sugar coating, without watering it down. Just being able to just be like, ‘Yo, this is what I want to say. This is what happened. This is what’s still happening. And I want to talk about it.’ Eaton: I think it’s going to bring a lot of attention to Tulsa. But what are you gonna do when everybody’s gone and the smoke is cleared?Eaton: What are you gonna do? ‘Cause I got to be here after everybody’s gone. I got to live here and I got to make a difference. And that’s what’s going to be more important. What are you gonna do?G.T. Bynum: – it has focused citywide attention on a part of our city that got overlooked for decades. And I think we’ve made more progress on understanding what happened in that race massacre in the last five years than we had in the previous 94 years.But it would be a terrible error to think that everybody in Tulsa needs to focus on and care about North Tulsa for the next year and a half, and then we’ll move on and focus on something else. No. You do not fix the issues that need to be fixed by having a short term focus there.Bynum: I can’t speak about the lawsuit at all. But to tax Tulsans of today for something that Tulsans 99 years ago did, I don’t think is fair to the people who live here today. The issue of reparations is much more divisive than work that we’re trying to build community consensus around. And so what I don’t want to do is introduce the issue of reparations and erode support for the other work that we’re trying to do.Vanessa Adams-Harris: It is a process. People think that it is where you land. It is not that at all. Adams-Harris: We’re looking at it like a bank statement. It’s reconciled: debit, credit, balance. It doesn’t work like that inside of us as human beings, because we have emotions. We have feelings. We have thoughts. Can we then negotiate that? Can we challenge ourselves to intentionally be with each other in uncomfortable times and moments? Can we do that honestly? And then are we able to then do it again? So it’s a continuum.Simon: I’m not a big fan of the word reconciliation, because it always comes from just us. Simon: ‘What are we gonna do to heal ourselves?,’ is what always turns out to be. A million white people can show up and say, ‘I’m sorry,’ but they still can go home. And like, their lives are not affected. It’s a tough thing. It’s a fragile situation right now, it’s like, very exhausting. Tiffany Crutcher: The fact is, the 1921 race massacre robbed Black people of their generational wealth. I’m looking right out here across the street at this land where the Stradford Hotel used to sit. Owned by J.B. Stradford. Burnt to the ground. So when people talk about reparations, they ask, What would money do? It’s just not about money. We were robbed of our dreams, of our aspirations. J.B. Stradford could have been Hyatt. He could have been Hilton. He could have been the Marriott. But they stripped us of our generational wealth, our aspirations. But yet you tell us we need to get to a place of reconciliation? It’s like a wound that scabs over. And you think it’s healed. But on the inside it’s infected. You’ve got to pull that scab off, and you’ve got to clean that wound out from the inside out and let it heal. And it’s painful and it takes time. But that’s the only way we’re gonna get to that place of reconciliation is if we tear that scab off. And we have these difficult conversations and we start to work on healing.[Jerica continues to read her poem, ‘Love Letter to Greenwood’] Greenwood, has always been the trendsetter The world is watching and i promise we gone make it worth their whileGreenwood sweet sweet Greenwood Rich with heritage and a knowing got my heart swooning over the possibilities Got me open to the probability And I’m not the only One...I know Wanna know how i know? My city told me.Wortham: [sings] Reconciliation… I think it’s possible. I think we could get there. Wortham: I think we could. The capability to do so is there. I think it looks like having hard discussions and not letting go until you get it together. I think it looks like recognizing the differences that we carry and the similarities and just being a human.Wortham: What it is to be a Tulsan is to have the hope, like we all can feel it. We can feel the shift and the opportunity to actualize the dreams that have been placed in us. We have that hope. However, also to be a Tulsan is to have a bit of skepticism, understanding that even with all the greatness that is in Tulsa, even with all of the revitalizations – understanding that that’s not really being built for us. Us being the citizens in northern Tulsa, the minorities within this community. Wortham: How much further we could be if we had taken time to really acknowledge that history, teach that history, learn from that history a hundred years ago, 20 years ago, 40 years ago. Where would this generation be? We would be further along in the way that we interact with one another and the acceptance that we show towards one another.If we understood, like, ‘Listen, this is the way we’ve handled things in the past, we see how ugly that can get. We see how long it takes to heal from that.’ Well, I just feel like we would have been further if we had had these hard discussions before 2020.[Jerica Wortham, reciting ‘Love Letter to Greenwood’ in full]We were everything we needed SeededIn Ujamaa, and imani Faith got long legs and no eyes But they had vision For that Greenwood aveThat Redman landThat Brilliance build by black man handLegacies of a dreamland That became the blueprintFor hope meeting manifestationHeritage on every storefront Resilience in every brick Brick by brick the mortar became mortal This became a living thingMy bro Phetote said Greenwood was the body Black Wall Street was the soul I imagine for the generation post slavery Utopia Breathing came easy Cause God blessed the child that had its ownAnd We owned all this! Imagine that negroes running thingsGreenwood was like the board room meeting the cookout. Nuclear Family Meets CommunityUnited.... on some June nights under the groove. Getting down just.. just for the funk of it Black Wall Street. Where I heard steph say everything is us I believe it Yo view There was a fire in little Africa Started from a spark Gurley Stradford Franklin The pioneersBuilt fires Smoke signaled that opportunity awaited in ol Tulsy town Tulsa Where that fire spread to 35 city blocks A city on fire with excellence and expectation!A city on fire where lucid dreams turned reality A city on fire because jealousy burned in the hearts of those across the railroad lines Flames of destruction swept through in a matter of hours things were leveled In a matter of hours thousands homeless Lives lostIn a matter of hours things changed The fact of the matter is Greenwood was what humanity looked like for those that had to stretch to find it The matter is the Greenwood district understood black lives mattered before it was the “it” thing Yet ironically black lives matter can’t even be placed boldly in the heart of the space So i guess the more things change the more they stay the same Yea there was a fire in Little AfricaBombs dropped Smoke thick Breathing no longer easy Breathing sometimes ceased Hands up! Don’t shoot!I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe And while the methods may change (sometimes)Hate and jealousy from across the line swept through I thought i heard somebody say you used to be able to run south to escape thatHuh, yet...some stay Bothered by the audacity to find humanity in our blackness But just like in 1922 we rose Because Greenwood has always been more than a zip code We rose because we know That the torch that was passed down through the generations burns in the hearts of the city We rose because we know that fire only purifies the liquid gold that runs through our veins We rose because it takes more than hate and blue paint splattered to change our course Oooooh yeaThangs is changing I feel that Kuumba coming through Now! Now we understand what’s been true all along... that we don’t ask permission anymore We give notice So consider yourself notified that Greenwood is rising again And while broken over and over and over againWe will Put it back togetherConsider yourself notified that Hate don’t live here no more Come in love or don’t come at allCome in peace, decency, Humanity, economic opportunity, black foot traffic, black owned store fronts, respect for the history and legacy, commitment to revitalization, and sanctuaryOr don’t come at all! Black Wall Street was more than the money But let’s face it money talks And it’s time for some people to speak up Greenwood, has always been the trendsetter The world is watching and i promise we gone make it worth their whileGreenwood sweet sweet Greenwood Rich with heritage and a knowing got my heart swooning over the possibilities Got me open to the probability And I’m not the only One...I know Wanna know how i know My city told meCopyright © 2020 Jerica Wortham All Rights Reserved.Note: The poem, “Love Letter to Greenwood,” is printed here as it was sent by the author.