Watch Now: City removes Black Lives Matter mural from site of Tulsa Race Massacre

Tulsa’s Black Lives Matter street mural was painted in the historic Greenwood District under the cover of night, and Monday the city removed it under a similar veil of darkness.

City contractor Becco Contractors arrived on Greenwood Avenue about 3 a.m., and by 6:15 a.m. the nearly 275-foot-long yellow sign was gone.

Other than a few media members and city staff, no one showed up to watch.

Terry Baccus, who arrived too late to find any remains of the sign, thinks he knows why.

“I think it’s going to be put back down,” he said. “Where are the protesters at, right? So they are just like, ‘OK, they are going to do what they do; we’ll put it back down.’”

Mayor G.T. Bynum made no effort to conceal why the work was done so early.

“The project was started at this time so it could proceed without interference,” Bynum said. “This is a lawful street project, conducted in a way to minimize disruption for the workers and adjacent businesses.

“With the earlier start time, we hope to finish work by the end of tomorrow instead of later this week.”

So ends, for now, the controversy that has surrounded the sign since it was painted by activists without the city’s permission just days before President Donald Trump’s June 20 rally at the BOK Center and just weeks after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis.

One of those activists, Briana Shea, said she was disappointed in Bynum.

“I think it is ridiculous that with Tulsa’s unique history and the significance of the area in which the mural was, that he decided to tear it up,” Shea said.

The sign was painted along what was once Black Wall Street, a thriving business and entertainment area that was destroyed along with the rest of the Greenwood District in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Considered one of the worst episodes of racial violence in the country’s history, the event left at least 37 dead, hundreds injured and thousands homeless.

Shea said she reached out to Bynum to seek permission to paint a Black Lives Matter sign but never heard back from him.

“It fell on deaf ears; we never heard anything back,” Shea said. “And then the people we did talk to, sources at the Tulsa government, off the record, they told us the best effort was to do it subversively.”

A spokeswoman for Bynum said the Mayor’s Office had no record of receiving an email from Shea.

City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper, Tulsa’s only Black councilor, said last week the city had caved to pressure from bigots and racists.

“The city — because people were bitching, racists were calling elected officials and raising hell about it — said, ‘No, it needs to come up, it needs to come up now, it needs to come up now, it was done illegally, it was done illegally, blah, blah blah,’” Hall-Harper said. “And so Tulsa is the only major city in this country that said we have to remove it, as opposed to standing on the right side of history and saying, ‘This issue was more important than that.’”

Cyndii Cosper, an employee with Black Wall Street Tee’s & Souvenirs, said the Black Lives Matter message is a good one but that removing the street sign was the right thing to do.

Although the sign has brought in more visitors to the store, it’s also attracted unwanted controversy and disruptions, Cosper said.

“We have had people come down and pour blue paint over it representing Blue Lives Matter,” Cosper said. “We’ve had numerous amounts of trucks that have come through here burning rubber on it try to peel it up.

“Before they put that down, we didn’t have people coming down here doing that. ... We needed to be building up and not tearing down.”

The routine mill and overlay project had been scheduled for the spring of 2021, but the City Council, in consultation with the Mayor Office and City Attorney’s Office, determined that keeping the sign in place would likely prompt legal challenges and serve as an invitation to others to use city streets as canvases for their messages.

The city issued a news release announcing the details of the road work but did not provide a start time. Removing the street sign did not cost the city any additional money as it was part of a scheduled road project. It is expected to be completed by Wednesday.

City officials had explored several options for retaining the sign. Bynum approached the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce to see if it would be interested in taking ownership of the street and assuming responsibility for the sign, but the offer was declined.

Bynum has said he supports the sign’s message but cannot support keeping it on a city street.

“I fully support the display of this message on private property, as has already been done without controversy in a number of locations around the city,” Bynum said Friday.

Hall-Harper has said previously that she hopes to find a way to permit a Black Lives Matter street sign in the Greenwood District through the city’s Main Street program. The Historic Greenwood District was recently added as a program of the Oklahoma Main Street Center.

The Race Massacre occurred May 31-June 1, 1921. The official death count, based on death certificates and National Guard reports, is 37, but authorities said at the time that they couldn’t confirm that all deaths were accounted for.

Gallery: Black Lives Matter mural on Greenwood Ave. removed for a resurfacing project

Tulsa Race Massacre: This is what happened in 1921

Tulsa was home to one of the most prosperous African American communities in the country. Businesses flourished along Greenwood Avenue — dubbed Black Wall Street, according to tradition, by the great educator Booker T. Washington. Residential neighborhoods spread out in a bustling community of several thousand souls.

In a little more than 12 hours, it was gone. White mobs invaded Greenwood intent on burning, looting and killing. This is what happened in the 1921.

Tulsa Race Massacre/The Tulsa World Library: See all of the coverage of the race massacre.

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