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‘He Does Such Evil Things’: Black Tulsans Are Bracing Themselves for Trump’s Rally
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…
