S2:E17 Remembering Tulsa
Thursday, January 21, 2021
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Trigger Warning: While there are no graphic details, this episode contains mention of lynching and rape.
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Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis
Elaine: Then I was working on the talk and I asked my son “what would you like the audience to know, and he said, ‘I want them to know how scared I am to live my life every single day.’”
Laura: Yesterday Joe Biden was officially inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. No matter what side you’re on, January 20, 2021 has been a highly anticipated day. In past years I’ve always thought of inauguration as more pageantry than punch; this year for the first time I felt nervous.
From the beginning in Shelter in Place, we’ve tried to grapple with our country’s division without letting it defeat us. We’ve intentionally invited guests on our show who represent a range of politics--not because we think we’ll change each other’s mind, but because we believe that we need to learn to listen to each other better if we’re going to find a way forward. In that process, we’ve made some new friends.
Elaine: Hi, I'm Elaine Appleton Grant, and I am the co-founder of a podcast consultancy and production company called Podcast Allies.
Laura: Elaine is a lifelong journalist who’s lived all over the country. She spent decades writing and editing for magazines, working as a health reporter, and leading interview programs for public radio.
Elaine: And then I went out on my own, writing for magazines and dipping into this new thing that was podcasting. This was five years ago. I had been watching it and I thought this is really going to be big.
Laura: Back in June Elaine sent me an email. We’d never met, but she’d seen my name on a radio Google group we both belonged to. She reached out with a simple question: how’s it going?
So I wrote Elaine back and told her in a few sentences the story behind Shelter in Place: how on March 17, I started a daily podcast to give myself a creative lifeline for a few weeks while my kids were home; how two weeks in, my husband got laid off and every plan we had for 2020 disintegrated; how without meaning to, I’d made the podcast my full time job.
Elaine: I have to tell you, I'm dying to know what the next chapter is in your story. I think we last left off where Laura and her family had settled in Hamilton and the Odyssey of the Airbnb was behind you.
Laura: If you’ve been listening, then you know that Elaine is referring to our Pandemic Odyssey, the very unexpected migration my family made in September from California to Massachusetts, set in motion by the California wildfires and a distance learning-induced breakdown of pandemic parenting.
Halfway through the original Odyssey, just when you think Odysseus and his men have escaped the danger of the sirens, they have to navigate some even dicier waters between Scylla, a six-headed monster who gobbles up six of Odysseus’s men, and Charybdis, a giant whirlpool that could swallow the entire ship whole.
Throughout our country’s history, we’ve lost too many to the monster of systemic racism.
We still have to navigate some dangerous waters ahead. Like Odysseus and his men, we don’t have the option of taking another course.
Elaine: We have a lot of problems right now, but I feel like this is the single biggest problem in our country. And we have to find a way to fix it because it ruins people's lives from very young ages. I don't think I understood the extent of systemic racism. I think it's very easy to ignore unless it affects you personally. We aren't telling the truth in our history. And so how can you understand it?
Laura: Elaine isn’t just theorizing. As a white woman with a Black son, she’s experienced this firsthand.
Elaine: A good friend of mine is a history teacher at a high school in Denver, and he was going to see a Black version of Oklahoma. And so he started telling me some of the history and why Oklahoma was a very important place if you were Black, because there were so few places where you could stop and actually stay the night or go to a restaurant or get gasoline.
And then he told me about the Tulsa Race Massacre. The couple sentence summary is going to sound like a made-for-TV movie. It's gonna sound not real because it's so shocking. But what happened almost a hundred years ago--May 31st to June 1st of 1921--there was a community in Tulsa, Oklahoma called Greenwood. It was a Black neighborhood. There were about 11,000 people who live there, and Tulsa at the time was like the oil capital of the world. It was all new money. Apart from Greenwood it was very, very white, but Greenwood was so entrepreneurial and so affluent that Booker T. Washington nicknamed it Negro Wall Street, Black Wall Street. It had attracted Black professionals from all over the country--doctors and lawyers and bankers--and it was a really incredible place.
And May 31st to June 1st of 1921, white Tulsans burnt Black Wall Street, and much of Greenwood to the ground. 1200 buildings are burned to the ground. It was the first city in America to be bombed from the air--by, think of it, by American citizens. There's an estimated 300 people who were murdered--you know, basically slaughtered in cold blood and thrown into mass graves, which right now, like, as we speak, they've been investigating and actually finally, after almost a hundred years, finding the evidence.
And I remember standing there on the playground with my jaw dropped and I kept saying, “You're kidding me. Really? How do I not know this?” He had taught it a little bit to his students, but it's outside the normal curriculum.
Well, I just kept thinking about it. And one of the things that I do is I write and produce a daily business podcast called Business Wars Daily, for Wondery, which is a big podcast network in Hollywood, and they have a podcast called American History Tellers. And my editor for Business Wars Daily was also the editor of American History Tellers, and so I pitched it to her. And 24 hours after I sent the pitch, I got a rejection. And I was kind of relieved. It's like one of those things that's like writing about the Holocaust--and yet what a story and how important.
About six months later out of the blue, she sent me an email and she said, “we've rethought this, and we actually would like it. Would you like to do it?” I was blown away, and I really wanted to, but I was also really busy.
But I just couldn't say no. And I went to Tulsa for a couple of days and met incredible people, and I basically didn't sleep for about six or eight weeks writing this series. Tulsa is very close to my heart now.
Laura: The four-part series Elaine wrote about the Tulsa Race Massacre is written in a style that Wondery calls “immersive storytelling.” The narrator--in this case Lindsay Graham--uses a blend of historical narrative and reenacted scenes to bring the story to life for the listener.
Elaine: It's a really interesting mix and I could imagine myself in those scenes. In the case of American History Tellers, I was very concerned that there was a Black voice playing the Black characters, and so there was one other actor, but it's still that very weird immersive sort of radio drama kind of form.
Laura: As Elaine was immersing herself in creating those episodes, she was also seeing echoes of what happened in Tulsa today.
Elaine: It's a story that is a hundred years old and yet it has ramifications right now today. Not just for the people in Tulsa, but for all of us. It might've been the worst, but it was one of many, many what they called “riots” back then. There was something in 1919 called the Red Summer. And the Red Summer was basically massacres in many cities across the country--to a smaller degree, but equally horrifying. It's not just Tulsa, it wasn't just an aberration. It actually was white supremacy at its worst.
And a lot of the rhetoric that caused this to really come to a boil and explode is rhetoric that we hear today--sometimes almost verbatim. One example is the calls for law and order, and “we won't tolerate this sort of bad behavior, looting and rioting,” the sense of the other being very dangerous--the other meaning someone who's Black and especially a Black man, or someone who steps out of their place. That was a very big thing, taking power that rightly belongs to them. Back then certainly white supremacy was the order of the day and it was normal. And to sort of step out of your place was something that many people wouldn't tolerate. And I think we see that narrative happening today, about how those people in cities are going to ruin your suburbs, that's the same rhetoric.
Laura: Elaine said one example of this is the Central Park Five case of 1989.
Elaine: There were five young Black men. I believe most of them were teenagers. There was a woman who was in central park and she was raped. And these five boys were falsely accused, and they wound up in prison for a really long time. And they protested their innocence, and they were in fact innocent. They've been exonerated after many, many years.
And at the time Donald Trump was, I believe, in real estate in New York City. And he took out a full page ad calling for them to be, you know, thrown in jail. And the language that he used at the time was the same language that was used by a newspaper editor in 1921 who was calling for this young Black teenager--his name was Dick Rowland and he was 19 years old. He had been trying to build up his subscriptions to his newspaper by doing all this very sensational talk about law and order and how the people in Greenwood were reprobates and we needed police to go in there and clean it all up. He was basically saying, “Dick Rowland is going to be lynched. There's going to be a, there's going to be a Black person lynched in Tulsa tonight” on a headline of the newspaper.
Laura: The Tulsa Race Massacre began when Dick Rowland stepped into an office building elevator where a woman named Sarah Page was operating the elevator. No one knows exactly what happened that day. Maybe Dick Rowland tripped. What we do know is that he touched Sarah Page’s arm and she screamed. Dick Rowland fled the scene.
Without seeing anything, the building clerk called the police and reported that Dick Rowland had assaulted Sarah Page. In 1921 in Tulsa, the word “assault” meant rape. Within a few hours, the Tulsa Tribune printed a front-page story saying that Dick Rowland was guilty of rape. The headline read “Negro to be lynched in Tulsa tonight.”
Dick Rowland was arrested even though there was no evidence for his supposed crime. By nightfall, an angry white mob had gathered at the courthouse where he was being held.
Elaine: And so it had been building and building and building and then, mob rules sort of took over.
And the language is so similar today. I hate to say it, but I wasn't that surprised by what happened to George Floyd or Brianna Taylor or any of those folks.
And I’m not that surprised, sadly by the backlash that says, “Oh, racism doesn't exist” or “that's not us,” or, “well, if they didn't loot.”
I don't think I understood the extent of systemic racism. I think it's very easy to ignore unless it affects you personally. And I was privileged to not have it affect me.
And I have a Black son who I adopted when he was six weeks old. And he would say when he was eleven, “this teacher, this person was being racist to me.” And I’d say, “no, no, you know, people are too nice for that. No, you know, you must've been behaving badly.”
And it really took me taking this deep dive into this history for me to understand what's going on in the world today. We need to be learning the reality of all of American history, not just white American history.
I mean, I don't discount the successes, but we're also missing the dramatic, wonderful successes of Black people in this country, because they've been discounted just like we have discounted the history of women.
Laura: Researching and writing about the Tulsa Race Massacre didn’t just change Elaine’s understanding of racism in America; it changed her relationship with her son.
Elaine: I believed as many, many, many adoptive parents believe that all will be well because all you need is love.
And my son for the first 10 years of his life was raised in a town that was virtually completely white in New Hampshire, but because he started out his life there and because little kids are cute, I wasn't aware of racism. I suspected it existed in, you know, maybe having fewer play dates, that kind of stuff--the stuff that you don't know--but he had a lot of friends and things were fine. But I do remember him being in kindergarten and coming home and saying, mom, I don't look like anybody else. It was sort of a gradual thing. And I didn't really become aware of it until he was about eleven in Denver, and he's a big kid, and he was starting to get big. And we lived in a sort of suburban neighborhood--it's a nice place, but you know, not a whole lot of black people. And he started to feel the eyes on him, you know, next door moms watching him. And there was one night when he was out playing with a couple of his white friends, you know, maybe a block or two away and a police officer stopped them and asked my son where he lived. And he told him and didn't understand why he was being asked. And this police officer did not ask the white boys where they lived. And I remember Teddy came home and told me that, and I just didn't grasp the seriousness of that. But I do remember telling him you can't ride your bike home through the alleys. You have to go on the streets because he would be looked at as someone who might be like casing houses to steal things.
I started listening to and reading some of the really great African-American thinkers about racism. I wish I could remember who said this, but she was talking about how when she and her brother were growing up, they understood that they had to be 30 times as well behaved as any white kids because of the assumptions that are made.
My son, like a lot of teenagers, has not always been on the straight and narrow path and he's a risk taker. And even as his mother, I made assumptions. Now I probably would have made them anyway, because I was his mother, right? We want our kids to be well-behaved and we're not happy when they're not. But I was missing the boat in a very, very big way.
And when I told him about working on the Tulsa project, I apologized to him. I said, “I never took this as seriously as I should have. I did not understand your experience.” And that really meant a lot to him.
Laura: The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history; over the span of eighteen hours, a white mob set fire to the predominantly Black Greenwood neighborhood, killing hundreds of people and leaving thousands more homeless. Despite the destruction, it’s a history most people still don’t know. At the time news reports of the events were squelched, and most of us didn’t learn about it in our history books.
Last January, Elaine gave a TEDx Talk titled: Why We Don’t Understand Racism. I’ll include a link to it in the show notes. It’s an excellent talk--but it wasn’t an easy one for Elaine to write.
Elaine: I had a huge anxiety attack a few days before the TEDx talk and called the organizer and said, “this is not my story to tell. You know, who am I to tell this story?” And she talked me down off the roof. She said, “it's an important story to tell and you did the research, and you know the story, and you have a personal connection to it. And in that way, it is your story to tell.
Then I was working on the talk and I asked my son “what would you like the audience to know?” And he said, “I want them to know how scared I am to live my life every single day.”
No matter what color you are It's very difficult to be the mother of a black son, their reality is exactly what we see and it's terrifying.
(pause)
When Obama was first elected and I had this little guy who was, I think going on seven years old, I cried because it meant he had a role model. There was some hope that life could be different. And seeing Kamala Harris walk onto that stage--that means so much for women. It means so much for me. I mean, I'm in my late fifties, and I wish I had grown up with that same kind of belief, like you can do anything. But we didn't see it. We saw Seventeen Magazine and people who weighed nothing, and that was our goal, was to be pretty and thin and have boys like us--you know, it was terrible. But to see a black woman (of) South Indian descent be not just in her position, but so joyful and so confident is just . . . I mean, it's a step in the right direction. Is that going to solve the fact of systemic racism? Absolutely not. But it doesn't hurt.
I saw something the other day. It was some stats on the election and it was a Black woman who said, “Look, we stepped up for democracy. It's you white people who didn't,” and basically she was saying, “it's your job to fix systemic racism, not ours.”
And I think that's true. And I struggle with being a white person, having the audacity to have a voice about it. Because I don't understand. And I do have privilege.
Laura: I resonate with what Elaine is saying. I want to do my part in fixing systemic racism. I want to step up for democracy. But for a long time I felt scared to talk about it. Who was I to talk about racism in America? It wasn’t my story.
But here’s the thing: systemic racism isn’t a Black issue--it’s an American one. If you call this country your home, this is your story. It’s my story, too. It doesn’t matter whether or not my ancestors came from Georgia or Germany, whether or not they owned slaves. What happened in Tulsa is part of my country’s history; until we’re honest about that history we’ll never be whole. As Mark Charles said in season one, episode 72, we need to share a common memory. We need to take the horror we feel when we hear about Tulsa, and let that outrage motivate our actions today.
One of the reasons we created Shelter in Place is to provide a safe place to work through the hard parts of life. We’ve invited all kinds of people into this metaphorical house so we can learn to listen better--and also find the courage to speak up.
I asked Elaine what she hopes people will take away from her work for American History Tellers, and what she’s learned herself.
Elaine: Obviously I want all of my listeners to understand the historical roots of racism so that we can do something about it now and that they really grasp reality, what's really happening in this country now. But in a more general sense, I want people to understand that things are actually complex. There's usually not one reason why something bad or good happens in society.
I guess the best current example I have is, COVID. People don't understand the science of epidemiology. They don't understand the importance of epidemiologists. They don't understand how viruses spread. You know, there's this lack of belief in science now that to me is sort of epidemic with our lack of understanding or wanting to have patience with complexity. You can have, fear and worry and mental health crises and hope all at the same time.
Laura: I asked Elaine what’s giving her hope right now as we wade through the complexity of this particular moment in history.
Elaine: My greatest hope for this country is that we can somehow come back to our senses and remember what democracy means and remember what the golden rule means. And honestly start living for the good of all of us together.
We are in community whether we want to be or not.
And there's nothing like the pandemic to show us that. You know, all you have to do is have someone near you test positive and you go, “Oh, well I saw the grocery clerk and I saw my aunt.” We're not alone. We are not independent. But politics have many of us believing that it's just us. It's just me and my family and you know, my friends and those are the only people who I need to worry about. And I just feel that that is really the opposite of the truth. You know, I'm a big believer in original ideals of American democracy--not the way it played out, in terms of white supremacy and slavery, but the ideals of it. But also really of community. You know, that's like our biggest hope.
Laura: For the past two years, Elaine has been working for the greater good at Podcast Allies--not just in the podcasts she helps to create, but in her work training and mentoring others.
Elaine: There are a ton of people who are launching podcasts these days, and it helps to have someone guide you. My business partner Lindsey O'Connor--she's been five books and has had a career in radio and some in TV as well as remarkable--and we got together and we started Podcast Allies.
We started out doing two things: doing creative consulting with organizations for how to develop a podcast and doing production of those podcasts. One of the projects that I'm most excited about right now, we've been working with environmental defense fund for quite some time to develop a flagship podcast for them and produce it. It's called degrees. Real talk about planet saving careers. So it's sort of a how I built this for the purpose-driven crowd. It's for people who either already have or who want to have mission-driven careers working on climate change, renewable energy, pollution, economic injustice, environmental justice. And it's an amazing team of people at EDF.
What I came to realize over a few years working on podcasts is that there are a lot of people very excited about the idea of doing podcasts, but being overwhelmed by the process. So we started out helping big organizations or medium-sized organizations get up and running we put a lot of. Time and energy upfront in the editorial process, and, we are launching a community for people who want to start their own podcasts.
So that will include online courses, a Facebook community with live zoom calls so people can help each other, and also discounts on all the stuff you need. We've partnered with equipment vendors and music libraries and hosting platforms and web developers. We're really excited about the possibilities of this. I don't think I'll ever stop loving hearing people's stories . . . and Odysseys (laughs).
Laura: If you’d like to be added to the waitlist for the community at Podcast Allies, you can sign up at podcastallies.com.
I’ve been ending each episode of season 2 with an invitation, and so today I want to invite you to listen to the American History Tellers and think about how you can fix systemic racism in your own life. Maybe it’s filling your bookshelves with Black authors, or listening to Black musicians. Maybe it’s having that awkward conversation with the grandma you love, but who makes racial slurs, something you’ve let slide in the past because you knew she grew up in a different time. Even in a pandemic, there’s a lot we can do.
As our Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman said yesterday, let’s let love become our legacy and change our birthright. Let’s fix this together. Let’s be not broken, but simply unfinished.
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As always, you can hear outtakes if you listen all the way to the end of the episode. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Alana Herlands was assistant producer for this episode. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 apprentices are Sarai Waters, Winnie Shi, Eve Bishop, Melissa Lent, Gabi Mrozowski, Isobel Obrecht, and Alana Herlands. Shelter in Place is a Hurrdat Media production.