Tulsa, Oklahoma, Part One: Legacy is Everywhere
Part Six of Blue City Warrior Visits Red America: In Search of Us
This is the sixth part of my series Blue City Warrior Visits Red America: In Search of Us. Go HERE to read the Blue City Warrior opening essay. Please subscribe to follow my journey!
The day has finally arrived for me to make my first journey outside of my blue bubble. Destination: Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa made the list because it is a traditionally conservative Bible Belt city in a reliably red state, with a culture steeped in its history as a fossil fuel powerhouse and the location of one of the country’s most devastating and destructive incidents of racial violence, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Additionally, Tulsa is similar in size to my hometown of Minneapolis (just over 400K residents according to the 2020 Census), but with a very different history and political culture.
I scheduled my trip to coincide with the anniversary of the race massacre on May 31 - June 1. As I head to the airport in late May, the politics of the country are divided as ever. The polls continue to show Donald Trump ahead in the presidential race, including in the states that matter. He’s been spending his days in a New York City courtroom, while President Joe Biden runs the country and campaigns. It’s just distressing for a Blue City Warrior like myself to see so many of my fellow Americans support this huckster reality TV persona who has completely shredded social norms and our shared sense of humanity over a workhorse who is rebuilding the pandemic-ravaged economy to benefit the middle class over wealthy donors. To address my anxiety about the race and future of the country, I’m starting to line up my electoral volunteer activities for the rest of the year, even as I head to Tulsa.
With the homemade chocolate chip cookies that my husband made for me tucked safely in my luggage, a story comes on the radio about a Republican-on-Republican primary fight in the Texas congressional district where Uvalde is located. The challenger is a “gun influencer” who posts videos to his 3 million followers in which he tests guns used in the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and others, and by Nazi soldiers during World War II. Apparently the incumbent GOP member supported the bipartisan gun reform bill after a gunman killed 21 humans, mainly children, at the school in Uvalde. Oh my. I don’t know anyone who would be attracted to that YouTube account, let alone that choice on their ballot. This foray into deep Republican territory was starting to feel real. And intimidating. What are the gun laws in Oklahoma anyway?
My flight went through O’Hare, and when the final leg to Tulsa took off, the sense of adventure really hit. I was really going to a type of place that I had never been. Even though I was traveling in my own country, I felt like I was going on a cultural exchange.
First Impressions
I arrived in Tulsa a few hours ahead of my travel partner Karen, so I hit my first stop on my own: the Oil Capital of the World pop up exhibit located in the lobby of the historic Philcade building in downtown Tulsa. I thought it would be a good grounding in why Tulsa was located where it was, what drove its growth and cultural foundation. The TL/DR: The discovery of oil near Tulsa in 1901 transformed it from a small frontier town to a boomtown. As more oil was discovered, a whole industry grew up in Tulsa to support this liquid gold. When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, Tulsa’s population was just over 7,000. Three years later, the 1910 census counted over 18,000. By 1920, Tulsa was home to 72,000 people. This meteoric growth had foundational impacts on what Tulsa was to become. Tulsa’s moniker as the “Oil Capital of the World” was secured by 1923 with the inaugural International Petroleum Exhibition, a mostly annual event that drew up to 120,000 petroleum industry stakeholders in its peak years. Tulsa’s oil economy made some people very rich, and the city is still defined by some of the edifices and cultural institutions they left behind.
Driving Karen from the airport back into downtown, her first impression captured mine perfectly: “It looks like Minneapolis in the 1970s”. A mid-sized city with not a lot of people, and older buildings surrounded by surface parking lots.
Another immediate observation was that there were no outward signs of people’s political, cultural, or religious beliefs. No bumper stickers. No flags. No lawn signs. Not even ones from proud parents of their honor students. I mean, in Minneapolis, we have lawn signs for everything. Political candidates for sure, but also for your kid’s sports club, support for abortion rights, climate campaigns, your membership in a local sourdough bread subscription service for God’s sake. Over the next few days, we did come across a couple of “be nice to someone”-type signs in restaurants and coffee shops – even one “All are welcome here” rainbow sign. But nothing like you’d see in a blue city, and certainly no MAGA or even religious iconography. I wonder what it says about this place. And I wonder what it says about blue places.
Getting Grounded
Our first full day in Tulsa was focused on getting more historical grounding. We started at the Tulsa Historical Society, which is just one of many of Tulsa’s cultural institutions located in a historic mansion. (THS’s home was built by Oilman Sam Travis in 1919.) After reviewing the timeline of Tulsa’s history, we took most of our time at the powerful exhibit on the Greenwood neighborhood and the 1921 Race Massacre.
The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoe shiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 17-year-old elevator operator in a nearby downtown office building. Rowland was arrested and rumors that he was to be lynched were spread throughout the city, where a white man had been lynched the previous year. Upon hearing reports that a mob of hundreds of white men had gathered around the jail where Rowland was being held, a group of 75 black men, some armed, arrived at the jail to protect Rowland. The sheriff persuaded the group to leave the jail, assuring them that he had the situation under control. A gunshot went off, and then, according to the sheriff's reports, "all hell broke loose." The group of white rioters, fueled by a local paper’s incendiary coverage of the event, grew through the night, then invaded Greenwood that night and the next morning, killing men and burning and looting stores and homes. Around noon on June 1, the Oklahoma National Guard imposed martial law, ending the massacre.
Twenty-four hours after the violence erupted, it ceased. In the wake of the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins, more than 800 people were treated for injuries and contemporary reports of deaths began at 36. Historians now believe as many as 300 people may have died. The commercial section of Greenwood was destroyed. Losses included 191 businesses, a junior high school, several churches, and the only hospital in the district. The Red Cross reported that 1,256 houses were burned and another 215 were looted but not burned, with an estimated 10,000 people made homeless by the destruction. The Tulsa Real Estate Exchange estimated property losses amounted to $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to a total of $38 million in 2023).
—Sourced mainly from Wikipedia and the Tulsa Historical Society
We topped off our visit at the exhibit on Tulsa in the Roaring ‘20s. Tulsa was hopping in the 1920s, flooded with money and men getting rich on the natural resources found on native land, not to mention the skyrocketing population growth, the strength of the Ku Klux Klan in local social and political life, and the prevalent illegal activities fueled by Prohibition. (I’m just fascinated by the hypocrisy of the Prohibition supporters – perhaps my next project should be exploring speakeasies throughout the United States. The exhibit certainly made me interested in where they were located in Tulsa.)
After lunch we finally headed to the Greenwood neighborhood, specifically the corner of Archer and Greenwood Avenues, the epicenter of the Black commercial hub known as Black Wall Street. It was emotional for me to stand in the spot where the 1921 Race Massacre destroyed so much Black wealth and prosperity. It has been the subject of so many photographs - from the days immediately following the destruction in 1921, to its resilient rebuilding in the years immediately following, to its current iteration after the decades of redlining, “urban renewal”, and interstate highway construction diminished it anew. Of course I had to take my own photo.
We hit the t-shirt shop that was run by descendants of the 1921 events, where Daniel and Cindy gave us some insight about the local Black community’s understanding of what happened on those fateful days. Dick Rowland and Sarah Page were actually romantically involved, Daniel attested, and fled town after the massacre and lived out their lives together in California. There is also broad understanding that the white community had been resentful of the prosperity of the Black neighborhood, and had already been making plans to destroy it. The incident with Rowland and Page just provided the spark. (Daniel also pointed out with pride that the Gap Band, the funk band that was popular in my high school years, was from the neighborhood, getting its name from its main street borders: Greenwood, Archer, and Pine. That tickled me!)
Our last stop on this initial dive into the historical events of 1921 was Greenwood Rising, the new museum on the history of the Greenwood District that opened in the spring of 2021. We would recommend it.
Where is Everyone?
There were not a lot of other people at the places we were visiting, leaving us to wonder where everyone was. It left our conversations with locals limited to short interactions with servers and store clerks. We got a lot of advice about what we should do in Tulsa, with a few tidbits of insight. The people we spoke with were not politically involved, or even aware of current political news. Several mentioned being skeptical of the truthfulness of the news they were seeing. One waiter said that “it’s hard to know what’s real anymore”; another felt that the news was feeding her propaganda about voting and the system being rigged. That, and people were busy with their own lives: working and taking care of family and pets didn’t leave much time for keeping up with current events.
We even hit the local VFW in search of conversation. “You’re a very brave woman,” Karen said, assuming that it would be full of gun-toting, MAGA-hat-wearing partisans. Even if it had been, there was no bravery required. I wanted to just talk with people with a sense of curiosity about lives and perspectives that were different from mine. I was hoping we’d have a chance to learn something new.
Our arrival doubled the number of customers in the upstairs bar. It was just us and a couple of the bartender’s friends. They told us that the building had been the armory where the National Guard was housed in 1921 and had to be defended from the white mob looking for guns. A National Guard sniper was positioned on the roof of the building to keep the mob at bay. How do they think about what happened there in 1921? What does it continue to mean for Tulsa to have this in their history? One shared that it was “a bit nuts”, because even after growing up in Tulsa, and attending Tulsa Public Schools, she hadn’t even heard about the violent destruction of the Black community until she was 20 years old. (Later we learned more about how the history was shut out of school books and commemorative summaries of what Tulsa was like in 1921. It was not included in Oklahoma’s public school curricula until 2000.)
On a lighter note, they also told us about the building’s speakeasy, and showed us the hidden window for serving drinks. There was even a portal to the attic, where the partiers hid when the authorities arrived.
We went home pondering new questions and other ways to discover the political culture of the city.
What are the racial demographics of Tulsa? According to the 2020 Census, the white population is just under 50%, with Blacks at 14% and Hispanics (of any race) at 19%.
How engaged are Tulsans in elections? While Minnesota celebrates having the highest level of voter turnout, Oklahoma hovers near the bottom.
Where were the expensive neighborhoods, where we might see more explicit signs supporting conservative religious, political, and social outlooks? Identifying where the expensive stores were, and searching Zillow, gave us some neighborhoods to explore.
We also picked up the Tulsa World and learned that our trip coincided with the end of the state legislative session. That made for a lot of news coverage about the last minute wrangling of negotiations and bills. Specifically, that morning’s headline announced the legislature passing the “Women’s Bill of Rights” proposal. The legislation defined “in strict biological terms what it means to be female or male. It also sets legal restrictions on how people might access public accommodations, such as restrooms, based on their biological identification at birth.” It hurt our hearts to see such a denial of the lived experiences of such a small and vulnerable segment of the population. Let’s just say that my “women’s bill of rights” would include very different provisions.
We drove through the tonier parts of Tulsa, where we saw more of what we’d already seen: not many signs or flags. In town we did see one lawn sign for one of the candidates for mayor – a Democrat. Even in the expensive suburban neighborhoods on the edge of town, there were just a few candidate lawn signs. Google helped us learn that there was a Republican challenger to a Republican incumbent for State House, who, among other things, wanted to make sure the liberals and their ideas don’t get a foothold in Oklahoma. That’s the sort of language that suggests some current Republicans are more interested in fueling culture wars than solving a community’s problems.
Bill and Janie
We got lunch with an old friend of my Dad’s and his partner. Bill is a transplant to Tulsa (I knew him in LA), but Janie is a plugged-in Tulsan who really knows the city and its vibe. We did not get enough time together (maybe next time, Bill and Janie!). Their take was that while they enjoyed Tulsa’s arts and cultural assets, it was still a conservative town largely due to the prominence of religion. Oral Roberts University, founded in 1963, remains a cultural force, and there is still significant peer pressure to be connected to a church – any church. They shared a story of a colleague who moved to town for a job and was incessantly asked which church she belonged to. It made me wonder if that was why Tulsa’s Unitarian church – All Souls – is one of the largest Unitarian congregations in the country.
Politically, Bill and Janie both vote Democratic and support Democratic candidates. And sometimes those Democratic candidates even win! In Tulsa! Yet, they also like Tulsa’s current mayor, Mayor G.T. Bynum, a Republican. “He’s not crazy though,” they said, in that way that Democrats talk to each other about the modern Republicans under Donald Trump’s influence. Bynum is a fifth-generation Tulsan family, and is the 4th member of his family to be mayor of Tulsa. He was the mayor who finally, in 2021, apologized to Black Tulsans for the race massacre of 100 years earlier. In reality, he probably didn’t have much of a choice, with all eyes on Tulsa that year. But he – unlike many contemporary Republicans – talks about the need to find common ground and the importance of having civil conversations. He was first elected in 2016, then re-elected in 2020.
Because he is not running for a third term, Tulsa is in the middle of a multi-candidate race to replace him. Wait, what? We only saw that one lawn sign for a candidate, otherwise there was no evidence that voters of the city were engaged at all in a conversation about who would be their next mayor. Back in Minneapolis, there are still homes in my neighborhood with lawn signs from candidates from several cycles ago.
America’s Most Generous City ®
This lack of people wearing their politics on their sleeve, front lawn, or bumper of their car is certainly not evidence that people don’t care about their city. Bill and Janie told us about the dominance of philanthropic families on the landscape of Tulsa. George Kaiser and his family foundation stands out in contemporary times – especially for its transformational investments in the Arts District’s Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan museums and programs to support the healthy development of young people. But the philanthropic community extends beyond George Kaiser.
The Tulsa Community Foundation claims Tulsa is “America’s Most Generous City ®”, and a 2018 Chronicle of Philanthropy Readers’ Choice award declared Tulsa “the best city for philanthropy” in part due to large donations from some very rich people. That’s what massive amounts of wealth created from oil fields on indigenous land over the last century can do.
(Just to point out that in 2022 Lawnstarter – whatever that is – found Minneapolis to be the most generous city, based on 13 key indicators. So there.)
One thing that Tulsa and its philanthropic community can be very proud of is The Gathering Place. Everyone we talked to about what we should do in Tulsa mentioned it. And for good reason. It is an amazing public space. It is 66.5 acres on the Arkansas River with places to be, gather, rest, play, explore. It has playgrounds, splash pads, a boat house, nature trail, a great lawn, sports courts, a skate park, various gardens, a lodge, a beach, a land bridge that brings you into proximity to the river. Just walking through it revealed little surprises at each corner: unique plants, a free yoga class, the Cabinet of Wonders, fireflies flickering in the tall grasses. And it was all funded by private donations. Led by George Kaiser’s vision to transform nearly 100 acres along the riverfront into space where Tulsa’s diverse communities could come together, about 75 donors raised $465 million, making The Gathering Place the largest private gift to a community park in U.S. history.
But even when we visited The Gathering Place on an early summer’s eve, there were very few people there. It was such a theme for my time in Tulsa. We never really saw lots of people anywhere. Not at The Gathering Place, not at Oral Roberts University (side note: ORU is a wild place. Straight out of 1963. I’m sure there’s more to the story than we got! Definitely worth a visit if you ever find yourself in Tulsa, especially if you like architecture), not at restaurants, bars, breweries, stores, on the street, using the (impressive) bike lanes, driving on the highway, at the airport, or at the rental car counter. Where was everyone?
A Lesson in Resilience
By Saturday, the actual anniversary of the 1921 Race Massacre, Karen had left and my friend Laura had arrived. Our plan to mark the day was to attend the Legacy Festival along Greenwood Avenue in mid-day. We arrived for the Black Wall Street small business fair, visited a few nonprofit booths, tried to resist eating more fried food, and walked through the Greenwood Cultural Center. Established in 1995, the Greenwood Cultural Center has long held the story of Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the events of 1921 for the community to reflect and learn from. For the anniversary, the center was hosting a lecture on the legacy of Black Wall Street, the race massacre, other ways generational wealth has been stripped from the neighborhood’s Black residents, and the need for reparations.
We made our way to the unveiling of an art mural on the concrete walls of the underpass of the I-244 highway that divided Black Wall Street and downtown from the larger neighborhood – a relic of urban renewal of the 60s and 70s that decimated Greenwood again after whatever rebuilding happened after 1921. (Later I learned that some people are exploring the idea of removing parts of I-244 to create space to rebuild more of Black Wall Street and reconnect the divided parts of the neighborhood as a part of true healing of the community.)
The new mural was right around the corner from John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park, a beautifully landscaped and messaged space that moved visitors through reflections on “hostility”, “humility”, and finally, “hope”. The park is named after John Hope Franklin, the preeminent African American historian and Tulsa native.
It was very hot and sunny, so from there Laura and I toured the historic redlined neighborhoods and other Tulsa sites by the cool of the car before calling it a night.
Reflecting on Promises
I’m going to write a separate piece on my reflections on how Tulsa responded – and continues to respond – to the horrific events of May 31 - June 1, 1921. But my initial observation is that it was meaningfully marked by the Black community with a variety of activities to engage a broad spectrum of ages and interests. It was less commemorated by members of the white community.
Most of the non-Black commemorations were in the form of acknowledging what happened, such as supporting walking tours, plaques denoting where a demolished building stood, and land acknowledgements. However, while there was a lot of talk of ancestors and descendants of the Black victims of the race massacre, I didn’t see any white people talking about being a descendent of a member of the white mob. Related, while there are stories of individual leaders in the Black community that helped build Greenwood and what happened to them through the events that could highlight the resilience of the community, most of the white attackers are talked about as an amorphous, faceless group, rather than individuals. Who were these white individuals that made a choice to wage war, a war that turned a prosperous community to rubble? Presumably, after the destruction, white attackers were able to go back to their homes and families and simply blend back into the fabric of Tulsa’s community and civic life, all without being held accountable for their racial animus and destructive acts.
Enter Tulsa’s All Souls Unitarian Church.
I know going to a Unitarian Church runs counter to the whole “getting into conservative spaces” thing, but I have some relational connections to All Souls, and was super intrigued that it is one of the largest Unitarian congregations in the country. I saw that Sunday’s service topic was going to be about making amends for the church’s own ties to the events of 1921. White people acknowledging white people’s role in the destruction of a Black community. So off I went.
The TL/DR of All Souls’ connection to 1921 is that one of the founders of the church – Richard Lloyd Jones – was also the founder and publisher of the Tulsa Tribune. After Dick Rowland was accused of sexually assaulting Sarah Page on Memorial Day, May 30, 1921, Jones published a story titled, “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator”, and the inflammatory editorial, “To Lynch Negro Tonight.” It was those two pieces that fomented racial tensions and led both Black defenders and white attackers to gather around the jail house on the night of May 31st.
All Souls, led by senior minister Marlin Lavanhar, has been working to reconcile this history for over 20 years, including taking a leading role in an interfaith coalition calling for reparations for Greenwood residents. This Sunday’s sermon wasn’t about asking for donations to the reparations fund, but it did focus on the need for people to reflect on what it means to make a promise, then break it, and the opportunity to build something anew through a recommitment of that original promise.
While sitting in a blue church in a purple town in a red state, a sermon about promises made, broken, then remade as a way to continue the ongoing injustice felt in the wake of the 1921 race massacre made me wonder if it was also the process the country needs to go through to heal from the trauma of the past 8 years. Is the country’s trauma similar to Tulsa’s? Thinking about the arc of history and how we’re living through a generational paradigm shift in … well, everything really, economic, the role of government in our lives, political alliances, at home and around the world. We’re in the middle of a reevaluation of who we are – as a country, and to each other. Is healing from our chaos and division of the last 8 years as simple as reminding ourselves of the promises we made as a country, acknowledge that we’ve broken some of those promises along the way, and yet, it is possible to nonetheless build something beautiful out of that mess through a recommitment to those promises?
I left Tulsa the next day with a full heart and a full notebook. It appears that Tulsa is not ruby red after all, but rather has red and blue stripes, akin to how a zebra has black and white stripes. Equally assumption-shattering is that even though Tulsa is similar in population to Minneapolis, Minneapolis’s proximity to St. Paul puts it in the heart of a much larger metropolitan area from Tulsa. In fact, their visitors center bills the town as “the world’s largest small town”. In my next essay, I’ll compare Minneapolis and Tulsa, especially the experiences of their respective Black communities. Let me know what you think so far!
This is the sixth part of my series Blue City Warrior Visits Red America: In Search of Us. Go HERE to read the Blue City Warrior opening essay. Please subscribe to follow my journey!