Hello friends, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today. I am speaking with a brand new author who has written a very important book. His name is Victor Lukerson, and he has a new book out called Built From the Fire, which is about the Tulsa Race Massacre.

An incredibly important event that a conspiracy covered up for over 80 years. And I think you need to hear from Victor and he's going to learn more about this event. So let's dive in.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.

I'm very excited to be chatting with Victor Lukerson today. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you Sharon. I'm so glad to be here. Your book is called Built From the Fire. And it is about a very, very significant event that historians have even argued about what what is even the right term to call it. And you even talk about this in your book. Is it a riot? Is it a massacre? What is the correct term? What term do you use for what happened in Tulsa in the early 1920s?

It's a really interesting question, Sharon, because this story really started for me with talking to folks in Greenwood who were descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre about what they experienced.

I remember one day I met with a man named Jim Goodwin. He is a massacre descendant now in his 80s and the publisher of the Black newspaper in Greenwood, Elkoma Eagle.

And so we were discussing the event that occurred in 1921, this destruction of the Greenwood community. And he was telling me the history of the terminology and how when he was growing up, it had been called a Tulsa Race riot that was what it was known as on both sides of the town, both black and white.

More recently, it had been called the Tulsa Race Massacre, which is I think the terminology that's pretty common these days. But Jim was telling me that he thought that a program actually might be the best term.

A program is a planned extermination of a specific ethnic group. And when you look at what happened in Greenwood with this group of a white mob and even white city leaders, police officers and others being involved in the wholesale destruction of this community with racism really fueling that destruction, I think program is an extremely fair term to use for what happened in Greenwood in 1921.

You know, this is a topic. I'm sure you are well aware. There was a big conspiracy to cover up a big conspiracy to make sure that the news of this event didn't get out. And when there was recently in 2021, you know, a hundredth anniversary, there's been an effort to try to have a commission to try to talk about some of the issues that have happened. But nevertheless, this is a topic that the overwhelming majority of Americans never learned.

That's the only way that I can describe that in school. The overwhelming majority of Americans are like, I didn't know I have no idea what you're talking about or maybe they've heard a passing mentioned, but they don't really have a grasp of the gravity, the size, the magnitude of this event. So I'm wondering if you can illuminate for people who are just now encountering the Tulsa Race Massacre for the very first time.

of what actually took place.

And I know it's a long complicated story,

but just set the stage for exactly what was going on

in this part of the world in 1921.

So Oklahoma's a unique case in that it's not quite the South,

it's not quite the West, but it's really a place

that decided to import Jim Crow from the deep South.

You know, they sort of imported the worst tendencies

of our country into this place.

And that was sort of brewing in Tulsa in 1921,

...