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GREENWOOD Dist.–Victor Luckerson, author and journalist of the critically acclaimed Black Wall Street book “Built From The Fire,” will continue his Deep Greenwood series with a discussion on the ways urban renewal negatively impacted the community.
Luckerson will join nationally recognized local photographer Don Thompson to discuss the harm caused by urban renewal in the ’60s and ’70s, February 1, 2024 at 7 p.m. inside the OSU-Tulsa auditorium.
Together, they’ll juxtapose visuals from government sources with Thompson’s on-the-ground photography of how Greenwood residents experienced those tumultuous years, according to a press release.
“One of my main goals in ‘Built From The Fire’ was explaining Greenwood’s second destruction in detail,” Luckerson told The Black Wall St. Times Friday. “Urban renewal policies that were pitched as a way to help Black people ultimately ended up gutting their community.”
Deep Greenwood: The Lingering Legacies of Urban Renewal at OSU-Tulsa
First launched in September, Deep Greenwood puts a new twist on the old idea of book series. Each session involves exploring a different chapter of “Built From The Fire” with a contemporary discussion at a new location each time.
Luckerson is a journalist who has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times and Smithsonian Magazine. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Luckerson moved his entire life to Greenwood in 2018 to immerse himself in the community while conducting his research.
hompson, whose work has been on display at Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Philbrook Museum of Art, considers himself a “social justice documentary photographer.” His Black Settlers in Tulsa: The Search for the Promised Land collection, which includes photographs of 45 of Tulsa’s earliest settlers, is currently on display on the OSU-Tulsa campus.
Luckerson told The Black Wall St. Times the damage urban renewal perpetrated against Greenwood is “a tale almost as old as mob violence, and one that deserves the same level of scrutiny as what happened in 1921.”
Notably, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum’s grandfather, Mayor Robert LaFortune,oversaw the funds secured to construct a stretch of the I-244 freeway that literally cut Greenwood in half.
“I look forward to going into greater detail on this key era in Tulsa history,” he said.
Sponsors for Deep Greenwood include OSU-Tulsa Library, the Tulsa City-County Library and the University of Tulsa’s Oklahoma Center for the Humanities.
Additional sponsors include The Center for Africana Studies at OSU, All Souls Unitarian Church, the Historic Big 10 Ballroom, Fulton Street Books, Magic City Books, the Black Wall Street Times, the Oklahoma Eagle and the North Tulsa Unity Book Club.