Greenwood After the Tulsa Race Massacre with Carlos Moreno | Crooked Media
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June 18, 2021
With Friends Like These
Greenwood After the Tulsa Race Massacre with Carlos Moreno

In This Episode

We’ve begun to recognize the tragedy that happened in Greenwood a hundred years ago, but Greenwood is more than a memorial. It had a bustling past, an amazing recovery, and, sadly, a second ransacking — and it’s recovering again. Carlos Moreno, author of The Victory of Greenwood, joins us to talk about the full story of this amazing community.

 

Transcript

 

Ana Marie Cox: Hi, I’m Ana Marie Cox. Welcome to With Friends Like These.

 

[song]

 

Ana Marie Cox: Picture the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, along the main drag. There’s a clothing store and a barbershop, restaurants, two movie theaters, and the storefronts of doctors, lawyers and a newspaper. Though everyone is welcome in the jazz clubs and at the soda fountain—they’re welcome everywhere—it’s a predominantly Black community. Black people own the businesses. They own the land. They’re the employers and the entrepreneurs. It’s bustling and lively, until the events of May 31st and June 1st. Over 24 hours, a white mob raged. Three hundred people lost their lives. Businesses and homes were burned to the ground. This month marks the 100th anniversary of what’s become known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. You may know that history. And that’s great, because for a long time no one was telling that story. But it’s still not the whole story. The full story of Greenwood continues after the massacre, and it’s the story of resurrection, success and unfortunately, a second sacking of Greenwood by white peopl. But then, perhaps, a second resurrection. We’re going to get into all of that with our guest, Carlos Moreno. His new book, “The Victory of Greenwood” is about the full story of this incredible community: the good and the bad, how they rebuilt themselves, and how Greenwood benefited from the oppression of Indigenous people. We’ll hop in a time machine with Moreno and go all the way back to 1920s Oklahoma, and through some other decades. And then we’ll end looking at the future, and what the possibilities for Greenwood are not just today, but tomorrow, coming right up.

 

Ana Marie Cox: Carlos. Welcome to the show.

 

Carlos Moreno: Thanks for having me.

 

Ana Marie Cox: So I can’t wait to hear about this, the history of Greenwood. I feel like we hear so much about the tragedy that happened, but not much around that. And the first thing I’d love to hear from you is if you could take us if we had a time machine and landed in the middle of Greenwood in its heyday. Just set down in whatever the main street, whatever the major corner is, that intersection, what would we see?

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah. So, so what we would do is we would take our time machine to the intersection of our Archer Street and Greenwood Avenue, and right on that intersection in 192, 1921, the first important thing to know is that you’re right on the railroad tracks. And back during this time, if you were, if your business was along the railroad tracks, you did very, very well because you had people traveling from all over the country into your neighborhood to do business. Right on the corner on the west end of Archer and Greenwood, you would see Lulu Williams Confectionery, her candy store, fully stocked soda fountain with ice cream and candies and treats and all these different kinds of goodies right on the corner there. And the family lived on the second floor. They rented out office space on the third floor. Across the street, you would see the offices of the Tulsa Star, one of Oklahoma’s oldest Black newspapers, and the first daily Black newspaper in the country, published by AJ Smitherman. Going, further walking, just strolling along further up the street, you would see hat makers and shoemakers and dressmakers and tailors, and you would see restaurants and just anything and everything you could possibly want.

 

Ana Marie Cox: It’s a hopping area. Like it’s like a live area.

 

Carlos Moreno: It’s a hopping area. There were jazz clubs. There was music outside. There were children playing in the streets. The school was just a few blocks up, the Booker T. Washington High School. So you’d have all walks of life from wealthy to working class to everything in between. It was just a really bustling neighborhood.

 

Ana Marie Cox: I was going to ask, like who would we see walking down the streets.

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah.

 

Ana Marie Cox: Who would be walking down the streets?

 

Carlos Moreno: That’s one of the more incredible things too, is you would see the most wealthy of Greenwood’s elite, like J.B. Stradford and Dr. AC Jackson, to the maids and butlers and delivery boys. And just again, all of the sort of working class of Greenwood and everyone kind of mixing and mingling with each other, which is which is really great to see.

 

Ana Marie Cox: It sounds like there was a lot of entertainment options, a lot of like leisure, really.

 

Carlos Moreno: Absolutely. So Thursday, if we landed our time machine on Thursday night, everyone would be dressed in their finest. All the jazz clubs would be packed. There would be singing and dancing. One of the things that I loved learning about Greenwood is that it welcomed everyone. So it didn’t matter if you were Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, didn’t matter who you were, you were welcome into these jazz clubs. You can sing and dance with everyone else. And so it was just a fun, happy time Thursday nights.

 

Ana Marie Cox: So I don’t want to take the time machine again. But I do want to get some background here because I imagine there were conditions that created the possibility of Greenwood. And I know that Greenwood actually wasn’t as rare as maybe some people might think in terms of a prosperous Black community. But I’m curious about what were the conditions around it? Like, like what helped create this prosperous community?

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah, there were there were a couple of conditions that created Greenwood. And you’re right, Greenwood was certainly not unique. There were about 50 all-Black towns in the eastern half of what would eventually become the state of Oklahoma, in Indian territory, which was set aside as land that would be owned in common by the five tribes: the Seminole, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee nations. And when those, when those tribes were relocated, Indian into Indian territory, they brought their enslaved peoples with them. After reconstruction, Black freedmen owned a full 1/3 of the, we’re talking about more than a million acres of that land. And so what would happen after that was the Indian Allotment Act, which broke up that land from being owned in common by the tribes, to families having individual land allotments. And it’s these land allotments and the mineral rights, the oil rights, that came with these land allotments—oil was discovered in Oklahoma in 1901 and an oil continues to be discovered throughout the state of Oklahoma during the 1900s during the 1910s. So you have this great increase in land wealth and oil wealth, and this is what creates the wealth of Greenwood. A way of thinking about it would be that Greenwood was built by oil and land wealth and that’s, that’s how Greenwood was able to be built. So you would, you would spend your money in Greenwood but the wealth that created Greenwood came from outside of that community. It came from all of the families who owned land and oil wealth during that time.

 

Ana Marie Cox: So the Allotment Act benefited the freedmen, but it came at a cost too. Just tell me a little bit about that.

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah, you know, I think a great author, and she wrote several books, is Angie Debo, who one of her books is And Still the Waters Run. She really does talk about this, what the tribes lost in the creation of not only the Allotment Act, but the creation of the state of Oklahoma itself and just how harmful it was to the tribes.

 

Ana Marie Cox: One thing that I found when I was looking up a little about this, though, is that there was kind of a migration to Oklahoma because of this ownership of land by formerly-enslaved people. Which word must have traveled right? Like we know about the great migration from the south to Chicago but there were also people who heard about this opportunity in Oklahoma.

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah. And one of the really big advocates for Oklahoma was a gentleman by the name of Edward McCabe, who really traveled across the country encouraging people to move to Oklahoma. There would be fliers all over the country telling people in big cities all over the US that Oklahoma needs entrepreneurs, Black entrepreneurs, that Oklahoma needs Black teachers, that Oklahoma needs Black settlers, to come in and build their businesses. So there are a lot of these ads and fliers that sort of advertise Oklahoma as the, quote unquote “promised land” for Black people to come in and really build something that they would own, build something that they could could create wealth off of. And so it for a while, it is this sort of promised land of being able to—you know J.B. Stradford builds, you know, the largest and most expensive Black hotel in the country. Again, you know, the Tulsa Star becomes the first daily Black newspaper in the country. So there’s all of these sort of firsts that come out of, that come out of Greenwood, that come out of this area. And in towns like Boley and in cities like Muscogee, where you have a lot of Black wealth and prominence and Black excellence.

 

Ana Marie Cox: And again, I don’t want to dwell too much on the massacre itself, but I, I have to say, in this country, when Black people gain a lot of wealth and some power, that gets noticed, I understand, by the existing power structure. And I think that does lead us into the conditions for the massacre, right?

 

Carlos Moreno: There’s quite a bit of evidence that is very recent—the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce released all of their meeting minutes from 1921, and this was just last year. Court case files that had thought to have been lost forever have recently been discovered. And so a new picture is emerging for the reasons behind the massacre. And it really is this sort of greed for land, greed for this wealth. You know, people throw around the word jealousy quite a bit that quote unquote “white business owners or the white community” in Tulsa was, quote unquote “jealous” of Greenwood. And I don’t know that that’s exactly the right word I would use. I think ‘greed’ is a much more appropriate word to use, knowing this new evidence and knowing that the intent for the attack on Greenwood was to take the land. Again, you remember what I said at the beginning, the land near the railroad tracks was the most prosperous land that you could have. Being along the railroad tracks was like being on the Internet. You know, if you were there, you did very, very good business. If you weren’t there, you probably didn’t do as well. And so having this community right on the railroad tracks is something that on the, on the western end of downtown, all of those business owners wanted all of downtown, they wanted to basically double the amount of wealth and commerce that they could have by having that land and moving the Black community further to the north, away from the railroad tracks and away from the, from this kind of bustling downtown area.

 

Ana Marie Cox: So the massacre was somewhat opportunistic, let’s say, right?

 

Carlos Moreno: Absolutely.

 

Ana Marie Cox: There’s evidence for some truth to the story, the cover story—I won’t call it a cover story, maybe it’s just a narrative, the master narrative. But then once it happens, there is this existing, I would say, covetousness, you know, that propels the tragedy. But let’s zoom past that.

 

Carlos Moreno: Right.

 

Ana Marie Cox: Let’s land, our time machine, I don’t know, maybe at the same intersection, like a year later? Two years later? What would be a good time to land?

 

Carlos Moreno: I think a great time to land would be September 14th, 1922. So just a little more than a year later, and what you see on that day is a newspaper article coming from the Black Dispatch in Oklahoma City announcing the reopening of the Williams Dreamland Theater, Lulu Williams Theater.

 

Ana Marie Cox: She of the confectionery store.

 

Carlos Moreno: Exactly. And the article mentions that she reopened that building as well. And we can still see that building today on the corner of Greenwood and Archer. And it still has her name on it. And it says 1922 very proudly at the top of it. So that is something that visitors to Greenwood can still see today, which I think is wonderful. And it really speaks to, I mean, the word resiliency is thrown around a lot. I like to use the word ‘resistance’ because Tulsa really did all it could to stop the community of Greenwood from rebuilding. And yet Greenwood did rebuild. The business district rebuilt, the Red Cross reported in December 31st, 1921, that of the1,256 homes that were burned, 764 were in some stage of rebuilding and repair. So you see it, a Greenwood community that has sort of everything taken away from it, every law and ordinance that the city could possibly pass to prevent them from rebuilding. B. C. Franklin sued the city, sued the mayor, sued essentially the entire power structure of Tulsa, and won. And so you see a Greenwood community that is very, that won’t back down, a Greenwood community that won’t back away, that won’t let this event and this tragedy define who they could become and define their dreams and ambitions. They didn’t, they refused to sell their land. They refused to give up their land. They refused to give up their community. Instead, they work very, very hard to rebuild it very quickly. And one of the more amazing things is we can actually see film footage from 1924 to 1928 that was shot by Reverend Solomon Sir Jones, and many people—and they can be forgiven for thinking that this footage was from before the massacre, but it isn’t. It’s shot on 16 millimeter and 16 millimeter film stock wasn’t invented until 1924.

 

Ana Marie Cox: And does it, it looks pretty much the same. Is that the same bustling community? Is it the same inclusive community?

 

Carlos Moreno: We find that there are white employees of Black businesses, we find we find the Zarrow family, a very prominent oil family, has a grocery store in Greenwood, so a Russian-Jewish immigrant family established as a grocery store in Greenwood. There’s an Asian store that we found in the directories. We found a Latino grocery store, the Villareal family had had a store in Greenwood. So quite a bit more diverse, I think, than than most people realize.

 

Ana Marie Cox: We are, of course, talking about capitalism here. So let’s take a break to remind you that it still exists and hear from those who support this podcast.

 

[ad break]

 

[clip of Alexis Teal] If anyone know the term shade, normally is like throwing shade and things like that. And when you’re speaking to one another, sometimes in a bad way, sometimes in a good way, but since my, the name of my business is called LeShade, I like to throw shade which sell my products to everyone. I want everyone to get shade, and we have to protect our eyes from the sun. So why not?

 

[clip of Allison Herrera] And so in particular, what made you want to come out and be part of the Legacy Festival?

 

[clip of Alexis Teal] Oh, absolutely. I believe it’s definitely a legacy for one. I also have to T-shirts too that it’s almost like a reminder too that’s called Buy Black, and this is specifically for a 1921 they had absolutely no means to build everything that they had, brick by brick. And in here in 2021, a hundred years later, we have all the resources and everything else that we have here. Why can’t we do that again and rebuild these legacies, and continue on for one hundred more years?

 

Ana Marie Cox: That’s our producer Allison Herrera, talking to Alexis Teal, owner of LeShade Sunglasses Company, a Tulsa Black-owned business. Alexis set up shop outdoors during the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival, one of the events marking the anniversary of the massacre. Teal is one of the Black business owners that Carlos is counting on to help create a future for Greenwood that looks more like his prosperous past. Now back to our conversation with Carlos Moreno about his book, The Victory of Greenwood.

 

Ana Marie Cox: So unfortunately, nothing this good can last forever and other stuff happens in Greenwood that is not the one or two day, um yeah, violence that happened in the massacre, but things do change in Greenwood, a slower-rolling manipulation by the existing power structure, probably.

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah.

 

Ana Marie Cox: So if we then take our time machine to the ’60s and set it down.

 

Carlos Moreno: Right.

 

Ana Marie Cox: What do we see?

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah. Yeah. So we’re looking at this film footage shot by Reverend Harold Mose Anderson, a parade, a Booker T. Washington High School parade down Greenwood. President—not president, but politician—young politician, Richard Nixon campaigning in Greenwood. Businesses, families, life on the street activity again, this sort of very diverse, bustling, thriving community in the early ’50s. Tulsa draws up a comprehensive plan in 1957 to build a series of highways around the downtown area, two of which are designed to be, to be built through the Greenwood District: highway 244 through the southern end of the business district, and then highway 75 going along Lancing Avenue. So you have these two highways that are designed to be built through the Greenwood district. And Tulsa doesn’t have the money in 1957 to do this. They have to they have to wait until the passage of the Federal Highway Act, like you said, and then in the 1960’s there’s two Federal Highway Acts: one that gets passed and ’65, the other in ’68. And Tulsa uses this federal money to subsidize the building of these highways and, which again is not unique. You know, the federal highway program builds many, many highways through Black and immigrant communities throughout the US.

 

Ana Marie Cox: And do you want to just explain, like the structural racism of that a little bit? Like why that is such a destructive move?

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah, yeah, well, a couple of things, the first is you’re creating a physical barrier between Black and white communities, and it is absolutely apparent in Tulsa. When we in Tulsa say north Tulsa, it is synonymous with saying Black Tulsa. When we say south Tulsa in this city, it is synonymous with saying white Tulsa. I can tell you that I’ve traveled to dozens upon dozens of cities and Tulsa is probably the most segregated city I’ve ever seen in my life. But again, this isn’t a unique story. It happens in every city. The other, the other thing that that happens, that is part of this sort of structural racism, is that now you’ve taken this land and it is owned by the Department of Transportation and is no longer owned by the community. So while Greenwood was able to rebuild after the massacre in 1921, it wasn’t able to rebuild after urban renewal that was completed in 1972 because the land was taken away from them. So in a, in a sense, what couldn’t be completed in ’21 was, was completed in ’71. The business community that had been Greenwood was bulldozed to build a highway and the Black community moves further to the north, no longer able to own the land that they once did.

 

Ana Marie Cox: And so what does Greenwoods start to look like then?

 

Carlos Moreno: A very, very bleak place. Photographer Don Thompson during this time takes a lot of photographs of Greenwood of the late ’60s, early ’70s, and you see a lot of businesses shuttered, closed down, a lot of business blocks, entire areas of Greenwood just completely bulldozed. Mable Little in 1970, whose house and businesses were destroyed during the massacre, had them, she rebuilt her house and her business and they were bulldozed to build a highway. So she was quoted in this House Tribune in 1970 saying, you know, what you’re doing to us now—referring to urban renewal—is worse than you did to us in the massacre. You know. And so, that you have quite literally hundreds of families living in Tulsa today who have had their generational wealth taken away from them twice. And it’s something that that families still grapple with today.

 

Ana Marie Cox: Because we could take our time machine to another period where this, the tools of urban renewal are used against Greenwood. You were talking to me earlier about the ’90s, which is such recent history, it seems like to me. But that was another important way in which more property and, you know, generational wealth was stolen.

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, uh, in the late ’80s, there was this, Tulsa conceived of a public four-year university campus. And it would be a collaboration between, OU, OSU, NSA and Langston Universities to build this collaborative, innovative campus for 20,000 students.

 

Ana Marie Cox: Sounds great!

 

Carlos Moreno: It sounds great. And the plans were amazing. And Greenwood was promised student housing and Greenwood which was promised new business and a sort of rebuilding of the district. Which Greenwood, you know, bought into for a large, for the most part. Um, but OU pulls out of the deal. NSU moves to Broken Arrow. And so what was supposed to be the university center at Tulsa, UCAT, falls apart and the only the only campuses that were left were Langston and OSU. The current enrollment for OSU is fewer than 2,000 students. So what had been intended to be this great four-year public university collaboration ends up being a tiny fraction of what it was supposed to be. And yet the land was taken again from Greenwood. And to this day, nothing has been done with land that had intended to be more houses and more businesses and prosperity for the Greenwood area. Um, in recent months, OSU Tulsa has agreed to give some of that land back. So that’s that’s promising. I think the next positive step would be to turn that land into a public land trust and give it back to the community of Greenwood. I think that would be another step in the right direction.

 

Ana Marie Cox: Well, let’s leave our time machine behind entirely, and let’s step into the Greenwood of today. And what do we see now? What is Greenwood like right now?

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah, so, um, what had been about 40 blocks of a thriving area, is about a block and a half, which is all that is left of historic Greenwood. Vernon AME, where the basement and part of the first floor survived, rebuilt and still exists today on the other side of Highway 244. Mount Zion Church that was burned in 1921, was rebuilt in the ’40s and and exists once again. So there are, there are remnants of what had been a thriving Greenwood. I think one of the more positive things that I see is this sort of new generation of Black entrepreneurship that is really starting to gain critical mass. Nehemiah Frank just opened his new office, Black Wall Street Times, a new newspaper that he had been running for a couple of years. So now he has a physical office on Archer Street near Greenwood in what was the Greenwood district. Venita Cooper has a sneaker shop “Silhouette” that is on the site of a former shoe shop, Grier Shoes, which I think is amazing. And so you have places like the Liquid Lounge, you have Fire in Little Africa, which is a wonderful music project and art collective that, where artists are building and creating and painting and creating awesome music inside of Tate Brady’s mansion—Tate Brady being the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, back in, back in the day, so to speak. So Felix Jones, who played for the Dallas Cowboys, bought Tate Brady’s mansion, is now no longer known as the Brady Mansion, is now Skyline Mansion. So, yeah, this there’s a sort of taking back of some of Greenwood, even, even though the land itself is still not being given back to Greenwood, which is again, is something I hope that happens in the future. You still have this sort of really kind of up and coming generation of Black entrepreneurship, people like Cheryl Lawson, Tyrance Billingsley and just several others that are really trying to bring back Black-owned businesses and really promoting them and making them something quite special.

 

Ana Marie Cox: Unfortunately, it occurs to me there’s always some tension when areas start to rehabilitate.

 

Carlos Moreno: Mm hmm. Yeah.

 

Ana Marie Cox: You get into gentrification issues.

 

Carlos Moreno: Absolutely.

 

Ana Marie Cox: Is that something that just having to be teased out or balanced?

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah, I mean, that is something that Greenwood is having to fight from, from quite literally all sides. Vast Bank just built its new headquarters in what had been formerly Greenwood owned land. There is a new building being built by WPX Energy that is again on formerly Greenwood land. The baseball stadium, 1 Oak Field where the Tulsa Drillers stay, play, where the Tulsa Drillers play was once Greenwood. And to, uh, to the south you have a building that was Black owned that is no longer that block, that entire block is no longer Black-owned. And then to the north along 36th street, you have a lot of developers who are buying up land and none of this is Black owned.

 

Carlos Moreno: So it seems to me that this gentrification issue—which, yes, pressing in from all sides—kind of forces us to look at reparations a little differently, maybe. What does that look like for you?

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah, I think, you know, there was a report that was released in 2001 by the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission itself, and their first two recommendations were direct cash payments to victims of the massacre, and then secondly to their descendants. So I think that that absolutely needs to continue to be a part of the conversation. We sort of really wrestle with that here in Tulsa. And I’m hoping that now that this is a national conversation that that becomes, that we really start talking about that again, that we that we don’t dismiss that. Forbes just released a new article about the continual holding back of the Greenwood community, the continued attacks on the Greenwood community, everything that we’ve mentioned, from the massacre to urban renewal to gentrification. The total that they came up with for reparations amounted to $45 billion dollars, which I think is quite appropriate.

 

Carlos Moreno: if they were somehow to do reparations as an equal payment out of what all was lost.

 

Carlos Moreno: Absolutely.

 

Ana Marie Cox: And, but what I was thinking is that direct payment doesn’t even really start to it, that’s the start.

 

Carlos Moreno: Right. It’s a start. Yeah.

 

Carlos Moreno: There could be more there could be a lot more. I think that, again, this land that was recently pledged to be given back to the city, needs to belong to the Greenwood community. We cannot allow just anyone and everyone to come in and develop Greenwood. It can’t be this sort of laissez faire, the richest developer who gets to come in and develop this land. It needs to be owned by Greenwood. There’s a growing movement and this, again, is part of a national conversation to remove the highway that that runs through Greenwood and that’s highway 244. So I think there’s a lot of local conversation around that, and now that the Biden administration has a sort of plan, an idea, to use federal dollars to remove highways that historically have been built through Black and immigrant communities, that if any other, that if any city needs this, it’s Tulsa.

 

Carlos Moreno: And this is the last ad break, I promise.

 

[ad break]

 

[Church service sounds]

 

Ana Marie Cox: That’s music from the First Baptist Church in North Tulsa during a Sunday service on the eve of the centennial of the massacre. Out in front of this church there’s a plaque commemorating its survival. The white mob that burned Greenwood passed over this church because they said it looked too nice, it couldn’t be a Black church, so they didn’t burn it down.

 

Ana Marie Cox: So I lied. I’m going to bring back the time machine.

 

Carlos Moreno: OK.

 

Ana Marie Cox: Because I want us to go forward.

 

Carlos Moreno: All right. All right.

 

Ana Marie Cox: Wipe it off. Reset. You’re not going to go backwards anymore. Because you’re talking about giving the land back, you’re talking about what could happen. Let’s talk about that. Let’s envision it. You can pick the how many years ahead we go, but I want to hear what your vision is.

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah, let’s pretend in our time machine that this land is given back to Greenwood, that Black businesses are allowed to build upon it, what you really see is a benefit for the entire city. You know, let’s flip this question about reparations and stop talking about “if you win, I lose” and start talking about what is the value of bringing back what was the most diverse pedestrian, mixed use, mixed income—all of the things that the New Urbanists, like Chuck Marohn Jeff Speck and all those—you know, the utopia of New Urbanism existed here in Tulsa in the ’50s and we completely destroyed it to build a highway. So what is the value of that? And what could we benefit as a city by bringing that back? That’s what I would like to imagine, and imagine the prosperity that the entire city could have if Greenwood was allowed to sort of come back to its former glory in the ’50s. They sort of, they knew how to build this dream community that cities all over the country now want, so let’s so let’s ask them, you know, how do we build this again? Because there is a generation that grew up in this pre-highway, pre-car culture of Greenwood, and we just need to ask them, what was this like and how do we build it back again? We could get some very some very intriguing answers and we could all benefit.

 

Carlos Moreno: In your, you know, vision, like, what would you like to see when the time machine lands the same corner?

 

Carlos Moreno: Yeah.

 

Ana Marie Cox: 20 years from now

 

Carlos Moreno: The highway is gone and instead is this very pedestrian, diverse boulevard that’s in its place. And there are businesses, there are houses, it’s a, it’s a mixed-use neighborhood, it’s a pedestrian neighborhood once again. And once again, anything and everything you could possibly want is within walking distance, from clothing stores to restaurants to entertainment there. I think that possibility exists. We really just, we need the will to build it back, and I think we can do it.

 

Ana Marie Cox: And that’s it for this week’s show. Our guest was Carlos Moreno, author of The Victory of Greenwood, about the joy, hope and promise of that community in the past, in the present and in the future. The music you heard at the top of today’s show was by Fire in Little Africa, a Tulsa-based hip-hop collective that created a multimedia project dedicated to telling the story of massacre.

 

Ana Marie Cox: This show is a production of Crooked Media. Our senior producer is Allison Herrera. Jordan Waller assists. Izzy Margulies is our booker. Whitney Pastorek wishes you a thoughtful Juneteenth. Take care of yourself.