The Newspaperman Who Championed Black Tulsa

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2021

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the years leading up to the horrific Tulsa massacre of 1921, the Greenwood district was a thriving Black metropolis, a city within a city. Buoyed by money from Oklahoma’s oil boom, it was home to the original Cotton Club and to one of the first Black-owned daily newspapers in the United States, the Tulsa Star. The Star’s founder and editor was A. J. Smitherman, a lawyer and the Alabama-born son of a coal miner. He addressed his eloquence and his ire at local nuisances like prostitution and gambling halls, as well as the gravest injustices of American life. The Radio Hour’s KalaLea is the host of “Blindspot: Tulsa Burning.” She looks in this story at how Smitherman documented Greenwood at its height, and how he tried to prevent its destruction. “Blind Spot: Tulsa Burning” is a six-part podcast co-produced by the History Channel and WNYC Studios, in collaboration with KOSU and Focus Black Oklahoma. The team includes Caroline Lester, Alana Casanova-Burgess, Joe Plourde, Emily Mann, Jenny Lawton, Emily Botein, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Bracken Klar, Rachel Hubbard, Anakwa Dwamena, Jami Floyd, and Cheryl Devall. The music is by Hannis Brown, Am’re Ford, Isaac Jones, and Chad Taylor. The executive producers at the History Channel are Eli Lehrer and Jessie Katz. Raven Majia Williams is a consulting producer. Special thanks to Herb Boyd, Kelly Gillespie, Shelley Miller, Jodi-Ann Malarbe, Jennifer Lazo, Andrew Golis, Celia Muller, and Andy Lanset. Maurice Jones was the voice of A. J. Smitherman. Additional voices: Terrance McKnight, Dar es Salaam Riser, Javana Mundy, John Biewen, Jack Fowler, Tangina Stone, Emani Johnston, Danny Wolohan, and Jay Allison.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:17.2	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:20.5	We've been hearing a great deal lately about what happened in Tulsa in 1921.
0:25.6	It's sometimes referred to as a riot, but it was far, far worse. It was a direct, horrific attack on the black community of Tulsa.
0:33.6	Scores of people were killed, an entire neighborhood was burned to the ground.
0:38.3	This was one of the deadliest episodes of racist violence in the long and terrible history of Jim Crow.
0:44.3	And yet for most of this century, the Tulsa Massacre was little known except to historians,
0:50.3	and the memory of it was deliberately suppressed in Oklahoma and well beyond.
0:55.9	Our story today is part of a new podcast called Blind Spot, Tulsa Burning.
1:01.8	It was produced by our colleagues at WNYC Studios, along with the History Channel,
1:07.0	KOSU in Oklahoma City, and Focus, Black Oklahoma.
1:11.9	We're going to start now years before the massacre,
1:15.2	when the Greenwood District was very much on the rise.
1:18.9	This was during the oil boom in Oklahoma,
1:20.9	and Greenwood became so prosperous that it became known as Black Wall Street.
1:26.3	Tulsa Burning is presented by one of the producers of our
1:28.8	program, Callalia. When I started learning about the history of Greenwood, one of the things I had to
1:36.2	get up to speed on was Oklahoma's guardianship laws. Oil drilling had made the land there really
1:42.6	valuable.
1:48.7	Guardianship was one of the ways that white settlers had of stealing that land away from the five native tribes and the black freedmen who owned it.
1:53.2	The scheme was so brazen that it came to be known in Oklahoma as the guardianship racket.
1:59.9	Land ownership laws in Oklahoma were pretty soft, pretty porous.
	...

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