‘Through Art, I Hope That We Can Make One Tulsa’

With many Americans just now learning about the Tulsa Race Massacre, there have been many questions about how to best memorialize victims of the attack while celebrating the accomplishments of Black Wall Street. How can art reckon with this knowledge gap?

QURAYSH ALI LANSANA It’s important to know that there have been three major reawakenings of Black Wall Street, moments when the public becomes conscious of what happened here. The first was immediately after the massacre in 1921. The second was right after the highway was built through Greenwood in the 1960s. And we are now living through a third wave of recognition that comes with the Black Lives Matter movement.

JERICA WORTHAM One of the most significant challenges we have now is that we can’t build our own community. Oklahoma University owns a large portion of the Greenwood district; everything has to be approved through them. And new construction — condos and facilities — isn’t necessarily bringing in more black people. But these new arts projects are meant to discuss what Black Wall Street was and what it could be in the future with the right resources and economic opportunities. It’s also important for us to shine a light on the fact that there are several black businesses thriving in Tulsa despite those barriers to access.

LANSANA Clara Luper, one of Oklahoma’s most noted civil rights leaders, once said, “My biggest job now is making white people understand that black history is white history.” Black Wall Street wouldn’t exist without the forced relocation of black people who traveled West as slaves of Native American tribes on the Trail of Tears, those who intermarried or as freedmen given land allotments; it wouldn’t exist without the Civil War and some of the harshest segregation laws in the country. Yet at one point, Oklahoma had as many as 50 all-black towns, more than anywhere else in the country. But what distinguished Greenwood from other notable black neighborhoods like Harlem in New York, Brownsville in Chicago, and the Hill in Pittsburgh was land ownership.

WORTHAM There are some Tulsans who are willfully ignorant of this history. But the point is that if a race massacre could happen in Tulsa, then it could happen anywhere. And while we are showing most of the Greenwood art projects in the district, we’re also taking the initiative to neighborhoods with people who might otherwise avoid North Tulsa.