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PrintTulsa stories worth retelling
For Tulsa, this is an important summer, as important a summer perhaps as any since the events of the Greenwood race riots effectively wiped out not just a neighborhood but also an entire, important piece of the local economy.
Doctors, lawyers, architects, entrepreneurs and auto mechanics lost their homes, businesses and, of course, in many cases, friends and family members.
Fittingly, nearly 90 years after the riot, two very important events are taking place almost simultaneously: the return of baseball to a downtown park for the first time since 1929 and the dedication of the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation.
The connections are unmistakable. In 1921, professional baseball in Tulsa was played at McNulty Park. This is the same park that was used, depending on your view of events, to either protect or retain the citizens of Greenwood while determined, pathetic attacks were waged upon the people, homes and businesses of the neighborhood.
Now, baseball is again being played in the Greenwood neighborhood and expectations are that the park will stimulate new economic growth. This is good, not as good as the return of a dedicated, entrepreneurial, hopeful citizenry, but in time maybe that, too, will come.
In the meantime, what do we make of these events? How do we contextualize the reactions of the police department, the justice department, the Oklahoma attorney general’s office, as well as that of the general citizenry in both the immediate aftermath of the riot and the long, quiet interval that
followed?
The quick answer is that there is no quick answer. We don’t know. We’re learning. Toward that end, the first Franklin Center Symposium takes place June 2-4 (the events of the riot took place from May 31-June 1). The theme of the symposium: “Reconciliation in America: Moving Beyond Racial Violence.”
What does it mean to move beyond racial violence? Certainly, there are many answers and, yet, no easy answers. Time? Understanding? Dialogue? Reparations? Grassroots community building? All of the above? Exploring these questions, of course, is the objective of the symposium and, further, the objective of the Franklin Center itself. In time, the questions will change. The answers will change.
In the meantime, we can do good work simply by showing a willingness to learn.
And I have very high hopes for the new ballpark as well. It appears to be an extraordinary spot to watch a game.
Pretending that the ballpark exists in a vacuum, however, feels silly. Just past the outfield fence lies the Williams Building, named for John Williams, whose own entrepreneurial spirit is worth celebrating. A self-educated, up-from-the-bootstraps family man, Williams was an expert auto mechanic.
According to Scott Ellsworth’s account of the race riots, after Williams’ business outgrew its first space, he erected a three-story building so that he could add apartments above the garage.
Still unsatisfied, he and his wife opened the Dreamland Theater next door to the apartments.
When told he couldn’t operate a garage beneath residential apartments, he moved the mechanics shop up the street and converted the bottom floor into space for a candy store and other retail outlets.
Then, in 1921, rioters destroyed it all. The next year, 1922, with the neighborhood in tatters, Williams rebuilt the entire building, all three stories, right where it still stands to this day.
That’s an extraordinary story. That’s a story worth retelling. And that’s even more reason, not less, to go see a game in a brand-new ballpark in downtown Tulsa, a city that is poised to learn and grow and, if possible, capture just a little of the entrepreneurial spirit of Mr. John Williams, auto mechanic, husband, father, businessman, Tulsan.
