In the city where Black Wall Street was burned down, a Juneteenth-weekend speech is particularly fraught. Tulsa is a city of contradictions. Its official flag pays homage to the city’s Native American roots.
Yet, the Creek Council oak tree — Tulsa’s founding historic landmark, planted by Loachapoka Creeks — sits lonely in a nondescript neighborhood south of downtown, known to almost no one but nearby residents. Tulsa is the home of both Oral Roberts and Carlton Pearson. City leaders invoke Tulsa’s once-prominent status of “The Oil Capital of the World,” yet Tulsa’s oil industry all but vanished in the 1970s. Today, Tulsa wants to reinvent itself as a music city, but it is currently embroiled in a battle over public funds that have yet to be distributed to local musicians and artists.
Perhaps the most infamous contradiction of all is Tulsa’s history as a center of Black wealth and anti-Black violence. The Greenwood neighborhood was home to “Black Wall Street,” where business owners thrived in the early 20th century, until in 1921 a white mob looted and destroyed the 35-block district. They killed as many as 300 people and burned more than 1,400 businesses and homes. Weeks after the Tulsa Massacre, 54 Black men were charged with “inciting a riot.” That their names were not cleared until 1996 is one reason the city still wrestles with naming the event today.
Tulsa was already gearing up for plans to mark the centennial of that devastating event next year when President Trump announced that he would host a rally in the city this month. The news felt like a particularly painful snub from a president who has demonstrated little care for Black lives. The rally was originally scheduled for Juneteenth, when Black communities throughout the nation commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. To Black Tulsans, this timing and choice of location was no mistake. No one I spoke with felt that moving the rally to Saturday made any difference to them.
“1921 was a deliberate act,” local poet and mental health professional Deborah Hunter told me, “and this 2020 rally is a deliberate act.”
“[Trump] brings out the worst in everybody. If there’s confrontation, that’s what he wants.”
Whether it was Trump or one of his lackeys who chose Tulsa on Juneteenth — Stephen Miller is reportedly writing the speech for the rally — the president is stumbling into a city with a fraught history.
Trump stated on May 10 that his rally would be held at a beautiful, “brand new” arena, unaware that the BOK Center where he will speak was completed 12 years ago. The BOK Center, along with the minor league ONEOK Field, sparked a revitalization effort in downtown Tulsa that now boasts new art galleries, museums, bars and eateries, and a new jazz club. One of the other crown jewels of Tulsa’s downtown revitalization is the Woody Guthrie Center, adorned with a mural of Guthrie’s guitar painted with the words “This Machine Kills Fascists.” The center’s collection includes lyrics for unpublished Guthrie songs, one of which is about the president’s father, Fred Trump. Entitled “Old Man Trump,” it opens with the lyrics:
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
He stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
All of this revitalization isn’t far from Tulsa’s Greenwood District, which is unfortunately now a shadow of its former self. Although residents and business owners rebuilt Greenwood after 1921 (despite the city’s efforts to stop them) and the neighborhood thrived well into the late 1960s, it was razed when the city implemented its version of the federal highway program, Tulsa Model Cities. What was not bulldozed to build Highway 244 was acquired by the University Center at Tulsa Authority (UCAT), now the home of OSU-Tulsa and Langston University’s Tulsa campus. As a city, Tulsa has yet to reckon with the Massacre of 1921 and hasn’t even begun talking about the role of “urban renewal” in decimating what the Black community had rebuilt with its own resources.
Presiding over all of this is a mayor with his own fair share of contradictions, Republican G.T. Bynum. A member of Tulsa’s ruling class — his uncle, grandfather, and great-great-grandfather were all mayors before him — he has a mixed record on progressive issues. While he has credited Tulsa’s Latinx community for the city’s population and economic growth, the city’s downtown jail serves in part as a holding area for ICE detainees, a Tulsa County contract that Bynum refused to discuss in 2017.
And though the mayor has made some significant strides for the LGBTQ community, the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center has been critical of the city’s lack of mental health resources, especially for LGBTQ youth. Praised nationally as a data-driven decision-maker, complete with his own TED Talk, Bynum commissioned the city’s Equality Indicators Report in 2018. However, it seems that the mayor has yet to read his own report: Though it clearly indicates race as a factor in excessive use of force by police, he said in a CBS Sunday Morning segment that the murder of Terence Crutcher had nothing to do with race. Meanwhile, Travis Yeats, a major in the Tulsa Police Department, recently said that officers were shooting Black people “less than we probably ought to.”
Bynum has tried to have it both ways with the Trump rally, tweeting on June 11, “In Tulsa, we protect the free and peaceful exchange of ideas. We did it during the last two weeks of protests, and we will do it during the President’s visit to Tulsa next week. We will also continue to follow the State of Oklahoma’s guidelines for a safe reopening.” The statement was troubling for a few reasons. During at least two of Tulsa’s protests after May 30, the Tulsa Police Department used tear gas and pepper bullets on protestors — hardly an act of peace. It was also troubling to hear the mayor equate the protests against police killing Black people with remarks from a president who has revealed himself to be a racist in both his words and policy actions.
A protest after George Floyd’s murder in Tulsa on May 31, 2020. Photo: Nehemiah Frank
So it’s no wonder that here in Tulsa, the mood around Trump’s visit is complicated. Some Black Tulsans I’ve spoken to are afraid, others are furious, others indifferent. Some plan to stay home to protect themselves this weekend, while others plan to counterdemonstrate.
Local criminal justice activist Marq Lewis, ever-present at political demonstrations, is frustrated: “We’ve heard lip service over and over again and not implementing policy changes.” Lewis says he will be attending a Juneteenth celebration and plans to play a supportive role in the Juneteenth event to be held on Friday. Floretta Reed, chair of the board of directors for All Souls Unitarian Church, is wary of the anger that might arise from unofficial protests. “[Trump] does such evil things,” she says. “He brings out the worst in everybody. If there’s confrontation, that’s what he wants.” She urges people to stay home or, if going out in public, to remain peaceful.
And there’s more than one reason some people will choose to stay home: Covid-19 is still raging in the city. On June 17, 120 new cases were reported in Tulsa County. Bruce Dart, director of the Tulsa City-County Health Department, made a statement contradicting Vice President Mike Pence’s claim that Oklahoma is “flattening the curve,” cautioning that a large arena gathering would be a health risk for all attendees, including the president. The editorial board of the Tulsa World issued a similar statement, urging that Trump’s rally be postponed. Local attorneys have sued the management company of the BOK Center to try to stop the rally.
Concern about Covid-19 is top of mind for City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper. Normally during this time of year, she would be helping to plan the city’s Juneteenth celebration, but her organization, Tulsa Juneteenth, has decided to cancel this year’s event due to concerns about the spread of the virus, which has disproportionately killed Black Americans around the country. Instead, an alternate Juneteenth event will be held on Friday in Greenwood. Organized by the Black Wall Street Times and a collective of Greenwood community organizations, the socially distanced 2020 Juneteenth Celebration will be held outdoors. Unfortunately, Hall-Harper says there’s little she and her fellow city councilors can do from a legislative perspective, as the mayor wields more power than the council. “We would welcome changes that would hold police officers accountable,” she says, “but we simply do not have the authority like other cities do.”
Despite all this, organizer Tykebrean Cheshier is maintaining hope. Cheshier hopes that her Saturday event, Rally Against Hate, will offer a platform for marginalized communities — Native American, Asian, Latinx, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities — to peacefully and safely gather away from Trump’s event. When asked if she feared negativity or violence this weekend, Cheshier responded, “I keep getting asked what if something bad happens, but I ask them: What if something good happens?”