Bottomline: Riot exhibits open

The Tulsa Historical Society, a custodian for artifacts of Tulsa history, including some sourced from Greenwood and the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, debuts a new in-house exhibit and a virtual resource this month.

The exhibit, titled “The Spirit of Greenwood: Prosperity and Perseverance,” covers the early days of the district, home of historic Black Wall Street, to its rebuilding after the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. “It’s about how Greenwood came into being,” said Michelle Place, THS, director, “about the people who settled there, the educated business people who set up the most prosperous black community in the country at its time.”

The exhibit, the largest on Greenwood the museum has offered, opens May 22, just one week before the 93rd anniversary of the attack.
“1921 Tulsa Race Riot,” the new virtual resource that will offer the museum’s collection of artifacts related to the event at the center of Tulsa’s darkest chapter, will be made available through technology by Moomat, a local firm specializing in data semantics.

All the items in the collection at THS have been digitized; now the staff sets about adding data to go along with the artifacts, including names of buildings and street addresses. In order to group artifacts, to place them into context with one another. “It all needs to be connected. That is a huge process. We will be continuing to work on that,” Place said.

“The Spirit of Greenwood” and “1921 Tulsa Race Riot” were approved last fall by the THS board and staff as efforts toward education, technology, and the organization’s status as a respected research repository.

“Whoever is viewing the app will have absolute access to everything that we know about that event,” Place said, including records from the Red Cross about their work in the subsequent relief, audio pieces, first-person accounts, and newspapers. Included, too, are images of artifacts like the passes required of victims after the Riot in order to go to work or to leave the encampments in the destroyed Greenwood area. App users will have access to all updates to the THS archives.

The No. 1 request at THS is for information on the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, Place said. “It’s nothing for us to get five in a week, and they come from all over the globe—London, Tokyo, Paris,” Place said. “A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a middle-school teacher in Madinson, Wisc. We have helped the board understand, this is our most often-asked question.”
The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Resource will be available later this month in the App Store at a cost of $9.99.

“It’s not our intent to make money, especially not to make money off the Riot,” said Place, citing a $25,000 investment by Tulsa Historical Society donors in the project.

THS will also partner with the Smithsonian on the National Museum of African American History and Culture, now under construction on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. A panoramic, 180-degree, post-riot photo part of the archives at THS will be available as a mural at the museum. It’s scheduled to open in 2015.

Bottomline: To cover its costs, the organization says, THS must change for its “1921 Tulsa Race Riot” technology. Maybe one day that technology will be web-based or otherwise not dependent on specialty devices, making the artifacts and how they come together to tell the story of Tulsa’s history free and open to all.

Between the lines

by DAVID HARPER

The shock waves continue to be felt after the announcement by the Oklahoma Department of Education that about 16 percent of the state’s third graders—and approximately one-third of those in Tulsa Public Schools—recorded unsatisfactory results on a standardized reading test.

The low scores are a major problem because of the Reading Sufficiency Act, which states that a third-grade student cannot be promoted to the fourth grade if he or she scores “unsatisfactory” on the reading portion of the Oklahoma Core Curriculum Test, minus a “good cause” exemption.

The statistics were sufficiently alarming that on May 19 a group of Oklahoma parents showed up at the State Capitol to urge Gov. Mary Fallin to sign HB 2625, which holds that a panel of parents and local educators would make such promotion decisions. 

When the amended bill passed on May 12, State Superintendent Janet Barresi responded in a statement that the vote “reinforces a status quo that has failed far too many children.”

However, Linda Hampton, Oklahoma Education Association president, said on the OEA’s website, “I implore the Governor to do what is best for the children, right the wrong, and sign this much-needed legislation into law.”

Bottomline: No one is arguing that reading proficiency is crucial to education, and the Reading Sufficiency Act may have been conceived with the best intentions. But adding a human element to check and balance the initiative is hardly “reinforcing a status quo.” HB 2625 is a complement to the program, not a cop-out.

Hitting the high notes 

by JOHN LANGDON

The recent budget cuts proposed by the Mayor’s Office would cut funding for several community arts programs, including positions at the Performing Arts Center, the WaterWorks Arts Center, and the Henthorne Performing Arts Center, home to the Heller and Clark theater programs. City Council has estimated the city would need $420,000 to restore the programs. One Tulsan has an idea for where a significant chunk of that cash might be found.

Adam Connors, a filmmaker and co-founder of Peaks and Pines Media, created a petition on change.org that urges the city to use the $332,700 seized by the Tulsa Police Department in a recent marijuana bust toward the restoration of the programs.

“Let’s real talk the situation with this money for a moment,” said Connors, “the $332,700 seized from Austin Hingey didn’t come from cartels or terrorists—it was given to him by the citizens of Tulsa in exchange for a service that hasn’t done one soul any harm. To say that money should be used for more of the same is a distortion of justice by itself, but to say so while vital arts programs are put on the chopping block borders on farce. I consider this petition to be a Band-Aid, not a cure, but at least it would be a good step towards getting our priorities straight.”

Bottomline: A thriving arts community is crucial in this city, and judging by the several hundred signatures on Connors’s petition at press time, many Tulsans will accept arts funding from wherever it can be found. Even if this ends up being an example of the too-good-to-be-true kind of idea at which the city government scoffs and shakes its collective head, hopefully at the very least it will see how much these programs matter to its citizens.