Coming up next on American Black Journal a multi-city celebration of Juneteenth.

We'll have the details on how Detroit is commemorating the holiday that marked the end of slavery in the U.S. Plus, I'll talk with the reporter and producer whose stories are the focus of a PBS documentary on the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

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♪♪ Welcome to American Black Journal.

I'm Stephen Henderson, and as always, I'm glad you've joined us.

This year marks the 156th anniversary of Juneteenth, and that's the holiday that celebrates the end of slavery here in the U.S.

It's often referred to as Freedom Day.

Several activities are planned to commemorate June 19th.

The Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History is heading up a three day series of virtual and in-person events here in Detroit, and that's part of a multi-city celebration that's led by black museums and historical institutions all over the country.

I got all of the details on the Juneteenth Jubilee Freedom Weekend from the Wright Museum's CEO, Neil Barclay.

So let's talk about Juneteenth and what kind of celebration we're gonna have at the Charles H. Wright.

Yeah, it's gonna actually be really incredible.

We joined with a couple of our corporate sponsors, Chase and T-Mobile and ten other museums around the country to kind of create this nationwide celebration of Juneteenth, which will air on the 19th, actually, around the noon hour.

But the idea was to get these organizations together and to script a really small, maybe five, seven minute excerpt that focuses their city's particular African-American history, as it relates to issues of freedom and this sort of emancipation theme that is in he Juneteenth celebration and this sort of notion of what freedom means today.

We use the "Lift Every Voice and Sing" song as an inspiration for that, and each individual museum selected a word or a theme from that song to create their five minutes excerpt, so it's really kind of getting to be a really exciting look at 10 different cities, their celebrations of Juneteenth, et cetera.

But here in Detroit there's even more fun to be had.

We're gonna be doing a screening of "Concrete Cowboy".

That's gonna happen on Friday, actually, the day before Juneteenth, the official celebration of Juneteenth.

It's gonna be downtown, a collaboration with the downtown partnership.

And then at noon, on Juneteenth day, we'll have a weekend dedicated to promoting quality education, economics, community engagement, black-owned businesses, and it will be along the Livernois, Avenue of Fashion, where a stroll will include a day of shopping discounts, health and wellness activities, pop-up artists, DJs and more, all of that can be found on thewright.org.

So it's kind of a national celebration, which will be mostly online, but then here both at the museum and down on Livernois as kind of a celebration throughout the city.

Juneteenth is something that grew up as African-American in this community you've heard maybe a little about, but it seems as though it's not as widely recognized as some other celebrations, some other historical celebrations, but it's getting there.

I think as we think about emancipation, freedom, even our 4th of July celebrations that happen a few weeks after this, we have to remember when it was that the African-Americans, in particular people of color, found out that they were actually free, and that was really the moment of celebration for our culture, right?

So as most people know the story was that soldiers came to Galveston, Texas two years after the emancipation proclamation to let people know that they were actually free, but they had been free for two years technically, right?

But we're just finding out about it, so this is a moment that we all need to remember about freedom, how we find out about our freedoms, what it means to us, right?

It's a great moment of reflection at that moment in history at that time in history.

So it is becoming a bigger deal, I think it's why we wanted to get other museums involved in this celebration, right?

And we hope to grow it every year, so there are more and more and more participants.

Talk about some of the things that will be common among the other museums, and what kind of other museums are participating?

Yeah, there'll be everything from musical celebrations, panels, symposiums, kind of symposium talks, conversations, things like that.

We'll be doing some of that at the museum itself on the 19th as well, and those will be common themes, I think, throughout what everyone is doing.

The Juneteenth, of course, letting people know what the actual day is about in terms of really talking about that moment in history in Galveston and how that then kind of permeated throughout the African-American culture at the time.

And what are the kinds of other museums?

The Wright is such an unusual thing for us to have here in Detroit, most people don't have a museum of African-American history, so who's gonna be participating?

Yeah, I was just looking at the list earlier.

It's like, the American Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, The August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh, which I'm the founding director of actually, the California African-American Museum in Los Angeles, the Wright, the Harvey Gantt in Charlotte, the Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park in Hilton Head, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, and the Northwest African American Museum in Seattle, so really a good cross section of museum that are participating.

Yeah, so we haven't talked much since the very beginning, I think, of the pandemic was maybe the last time I caught up with you.

I wonder if you can catch us up on the things that have changed, maybe, because of the pandemic, and I guess what you're looking forward to as the world starts to open back up.

What can we look forward to at the Wright?

Yeah, I mean, we're really kind of excited about the future for the Wright, what's coming up.

We used the time to do some planning, some introspection to think about how we were structured, the kinds of things we wanted to do moving forward, get our house in order.

We were named, post pandemic, as one of America's Cultural Treasures by the Ford Foundation.

That put us in August's company, actually, of 20 institutions around the country.

It did come with a seven figure gift, (chuckles) so that was exciting.

It allows us to really think broadly about the role of the Wright and organizations like it in the future.

So it's a really good time for us, you know?

We're going to be unveiling all of our Fall programs at once later this summer, probably around the African World Festival, which does return in hybrid format to the Wright Museum and around the museum in addition to around the country, I mean, around the country, around the city, in virtual format as well.

So those are exciting developments, and yeah, we're just really excited about what's happening.

We're looking forward to sharing it with folks in the weeks and months to come.

This year we're also marking the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

Hundreds of African-Americans were killed and home schools, churches, and businesses were destroyed by a white mob in Tulsa, Oklahoma's black community of Greenwood.

The violence decimated the area's thriving business district, which is often referred to as black wall street.

This painful chapter in black history is the subject of a PBS documentary titled, "Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten".

One of the film's producers is Washington Post reporter and Oklahoma native, DeNeen Brown, whose stories on Tulsa are the focus of the film.

Here's a brief look at the documentary followed by my conversation with DeNeen.

FEMALE NARRATOR: This was one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.

MALE NARRATOR 1: An unruly white mob destroyed part of this city, which was the black community.

MALE NARRATOR 2: They had just gained their freedom, they're just getting a foothold and building something for themselves and for their futures, and within two days, in the most horrific way, everything that they hoped for was gone.

(dramatic music) You have people, a generation out of slavery, who built something that no one else could have done.

(dramatic music) African-Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma should have those same banners above their hotels, above their barbershops that say "Since the 19-teens", and yet they don't.

We know that no white person was ever held accountable for any offense relative to that.

There was government sanctioned torture and terrorism.

That's the history of Tulsa going back to the 1921 massacre.

And Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma have never made amends for that.

If you don't know your history it will repeat itself.

Well, it's repeating itself.

It is terrifying because you realize that it could happen today.

The militia represented Saturday before last is the exact same mob that was represented in 1921 when the massacre took place.

I guess the great hope is that this will never happen again if you tell the story, but until they obtain justice for this massacre there can't be healing.

(dramatic music) DeNeen Brown, welcome to American Black Journal.

Thank you so much.

It's great to be here.

So I want to start with just the idea of the attention that the Tulsa massacre is now getting.

It's been a long time that this has been buried in American history.

I just want to get your reaction to the fact that people are starting to wake up to what happened.

There's conversations going on about maybe trying to repair some of the damage that was done to African-Americans there in Tulsa.

Just give me a sense of how that feels to finally be getting some idea of attention for this really important historical event.

Yes, so for nearly 100 years, the Tulsa race massacre, which began on May 31st, 1921 and ended on June 1st, 1921, for nearly 100 years it was covered up.

There was a concerted conspiracy of silence by civic leaders and city leaders in Tulsa.

Just years after the massacre many white people just would not talk about it, and black people would whisper about it for fear that it might happen again.

The Tulsa race massacre, as you know, is one of the worst single incidents of racial violence committed against black people in US history.

It is amazing, black activists in Tulsa tell me that it is amazing, that this massacre has now received national and international attention.

As you know, President Biden visited Tulsa on June 1st of this year, 2021, and recommended a number of policy changes, major policy changes, to deal with systemic racism and oppression.

But many of the community activists and the survivors, there are three survivors of this massacre who are 107, 106, and a hundred years old years old, were sitting on the edge of their seats wondering whether the President might mention the word reparations.

He did not, but that word reparations is very important to descendants and survivors of this massacre.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When we talk about this kind of thing and how important it was in history, I mean, there are two things that really happened here.

One is the massacre itself, which is bad enough, but you've also got this incredible destruction of a vibrant African-American economic community.

Talk about what that has meant and what that looks like a hundred years later in places like Tulsa.

Okay, so as you know, many of your listeners may know, Greenwood, this all black community in north Tulsa, on May 30th, 1921 was this prosperous, one of the most prosperous black communities, in fact, one of the most prosperous communities in the entire country.

It had a population of about 10,000 people.

It had luxury shops, it had 21 restaurants, it had 30 grocery stores, it had a black-owned hospital, a black owned library, it had a savings and loan, there were several millionaires, luxury hotels, there was a black man who owned six private airplanes, and there were black people with oil wells.

So when Booker T. Washington, the great philosopher and intellectual, visited Greenwood, he called it Negro Wall Street to describe the prosperity there.

And of course now we call it Black Wall Street, but it was a wealthy self-contained community of black people where the dollars circulated nine, 10 times before it left the community.

During that massacre, white mobs descended on this community and destroyed it.

They destroyed nearly 35 square blocks.

More than 1,200 homes and businesses owned by black people were destroyed.

Airplanes took to the air and they dropped turpentine bombs on it.

So on June 1st, 1921 it looked like a bomb had gone off there.

It was a complete and utter devastation.

Walter White of the NAACP called it in sheer brutality and willful destruction of life and property, it was without parallel in American history.

So there have been, it did rebuild, Greenwood did rebuild, and it was later destroyed by urban renewal, a highway cut through it, and then with integration people began shopping outside of the community.

But it looks like now it's reduced to about a block and a half.

Wow.

Wow.

So I also want to talk about how personal your connection is to this story.

This is your story in many ways.

Well, I say my people are from Oklahoma, and my people are from Oklahoma.

My great, great, I'm sorry, my great grandmother lived in Tulsa.

My grandmother, my paternal grandmother, was born in Boley, which is an all-black town about 60 miles away from Tulsa.

Many listeners may know that Oklahoma had a great number of all-black towns.

So my grandmother was born in Boley, my dad lives in Tulsa now, which is where he built his church.

And it was on a visit to my dad in 2018, I said to my dad, "Let's go have lunch on Black Wall Street," and we were having lunch at a soul food cafe and I noticed that black wall street was being gentrified.

There was a minor league baseball stadium, a yoga studio, a gleaming luxury apartment complex, and there were all the signs of gentrification in this site of this horrible massacre, which black activists say is sacred ground.

So my connection to Tulsa again goes back to my family, and then as a journalist I began reporting this story back in 2018.

I wrote my first story about the Tulsa race massacre.

It landed on the front page of the Washington Post in September of 2018.

And two days later, the mayor of Tulsa was at a community meeting where he was talking about development in north Tulsa, and that's when Reverend Turner, who was a pastor at Vernon AME Church, stood up, he held a copy of my story, and he said to the mayor "You would not have the land to develop had there not been a massacre, what will you do about it?"

And it was during that meeting that the mayor announced that he would reopen a search for mass graves, which the city found in October 2020. and just yesterday they found, in the pit, more than 25 coffins.

And just yesterday, this is breaking news, they began exhuming the remains where they will take the remains to a lab for testing, and a forensic anthropologist will examine the remains for any signs of trauma, any gunshot wounds or any charring or burning that might indicate that these remains are connected to the massacre of 1921.

Wow.

Wow.

I mean, that's just incredible the kind of pain that gets recalled when you think about the things that we're doing now.

They're necessary, we've gotta be able to front these things much more actively in American life, but I can't imagine being a resident there in Tulsa and watching this literally come back up out of the ground.

It is a very emotional time for many of the descendants and survivors as the city searches for these mass graves in the city and as the country, I guess, comes to terms with its history that includes complete utter destruction of black communities, barbaric violence that was committed against black people, and only now are many people learning about these massacres and lynchings that occurred in cities across this country.

Your listeners may know that much of this oppressive history was whitewashed out of textbooks, so many people didn't know about it.

And very smart people didn't know about the Tulsa race massacre until "Watchmen" aired.

Right.

Just last year, starring Regina King, and it opened with a scene recreating the Tulsa race massacre when airplanes are dropping bombs and white mobs are shooting at black people indiscriminately.

Regina King tweeted that a number of people wrote the show and asked whether this was real, and she actually tweeted out one of my stories saying, "Yes, it was real.

It happened, it wasn't fiction."

It wasn't a chapter in the book, it really happened to black people, not only in Tulsa, but it happened in Washington, DC, Chicago, east St. Louis, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska.

One of the worst massacres occurred in Elaine, Arkansas during the summer of 1919, which James Weldon Johnson called Red Summer.

So national geographic is releasing a film on June 18th called "Rise Again: Tulsa and Red Summer", and it'll feature my reporting.

But we examined the massacres that occurred during Red Summer that led to the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

You can check out that entire documentary, "Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten" at pbs.org.

That's gonna do it for us this week.

Thanks for watching.

You can get more information about our guests at americanblackjournal.org.

And as always, you can connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.

We'll see you next time.