The next generation of black leaders in Tulsa — the people who will help dictate how the city functions for people who look like them for years to come — have a keen understanding of why their work means so much to so many.
That motivation comes from realizing that there is much to gain, and just as much to lose, particularly during present-day discussions about inequity within education, community policing and how the proverbial playing field isn’t level for all.
The Tulsa World spoke with four leaders who are forcing the city to examine itself.
Nehemiah Frank, Black Wall Street Times founder
For Nehemiah Frank, an innocent question from a grade-school student combined with a 20-minute drive from north Tulsa to the suburbs reinforced the mission to elevate his community.
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As the story goes, Frank was having a conversation with a young girl at the north Tulsa elementary school where he taught when she asked about the requirements to sign up for the gymnastics class he held for years in Jenks.
Frank, 36, said he realized — because of the girl’s socioeconomic circumstances — that her family wouldn’t be able to afford the fees needed to participate.
“That question just hit me so hard,” Frank said. “Here’s this kid at this Title I school, (where) 99% of the kids are on reduced or free lunch, and she’s asking me about a gymnastics team in Jenks where the tuition is out of reach. It was just not realistic for most of the kids going to that school.”
Then there was the commute from north Tulsa to that gymnastics facility where Frank could see the disparity unfolding in real-time with each passing minute of the trip. That experience eventually forced him to come to the realization that he must be committed to serving the people in his own community first.
“It was just a different world,” he said. “I never realized how 20 minutes from north Tulsa to Jenks would impact me and my social outlook on race relations, access and opportunity. It was breaking me. I made a decision to commit to the community full time. It was the hardest, craziest decision I’ve ever made in my life.”
Frank, who is the founder of the online publication Black Wall Street Times, wanted to create a space where previously untold stories about racial inequity in education and throughout other institutions in Tulsa would force the public to confront their own biases.
“One of the things I noticed is that it (Black Wall Street Times) helped push the needle in our city when it came to talking about race. Anytime I would see a disparity, I would call it out and people would be forced to discuss it.”
Frank credits his work, along with others, in influencing Tulsa Public Schools leaders to change names of several institutions that honored Confederate figures.
“It’s always about what my community wants,” he said in reference to writing about topics that affect black people. “That’s the drumbeat I live to.”
Kuma Roberts, executive director of diversity and inclusion for the Tulsa Regional Chamber
When Kuma Roberts was appointed to her current position at the Tulsa Regional Chamber two years ago, she was slightly aggrieved.
Roberts, 45, was under the impression she was typecast because she fit the archetype of being black and female.
“Oh, choose the black woman to do it, that makes a lot of sense,” she thought at the time. “I was a little resentful.”
But soon Roberts realized she was the appropriate candidate for the job due to her firsthand experience witnessing imbalance in education along class and racial lines while previously in the role of program manager for Tulsa-based Partners in Education.
There, she was tasked with connecting the area business community with local education stakeholders to help provide school supplies and even fund occasional pizza parties for classrooms.
“What it allowed me to see was the state of the public school system, which was a travesty,” said Roberts, who started her corporate career as a receptionist. “North Tulsa schools certainly had more black and brown students and were less resourced. And eventually, the pizza parties just stopped being enough. I felt like the business community should do way more than just a pizza party and a backpack.”
Working with nonprofits and eventually, the Tulsa Chamber, helped her gain an intimate look at how the city functioned at all levels. Roberts became equipped with the knowledge of all warts restricting tangible progress.
“We really do a great job of hiding our dirty underwear under the rug and not really facing it head-on in order to make a significant change in those areas,” she said. “What I feel like what I do in my current position is to try to get the Chamber to be honest.”
Roberts, though, is quick to reveal that she doesn’t want to be the lone voice dedicated to fighting these battles in boardrooms. She desires a collective effort on all fronts — from people of all backgrounds — to produce a social metamorphosis.
“Success for me is when I don’t have to be the only the person in the room giving the, ‘Hey, Bud...’ or ‘Should we consider ...’ conversation in every room that I sit in,” she said. “I think what success looks like is when all voices are speaking for equity and inclusivity, and it’s not just a few choice people around the city.”
Timantha Norman, Tulsa Star executive editor
If the city lacks transparency, Timantha Norman wants to expose it through justice-oriented investigative journalism.
Norman, 33, is the executive editor of the Tulsa Star, a website that takes its name from the original Tulsa Daily Star of the early 1900s, which then supported and published stories centered on black causes.
Working in education and for nonprofit organizations has pushed Norman to become involved in advocacy. Starting a website seemed to be the perfect outlet to express her passion for justice and community empowerment.
“There was just a need for another publication to take a deep dive and not be afraid to tackle tough issues that were happening in and around north Tulsa,” Norman said of her purpose for creating the website.
Norman briefly worked with the Bail Project assisting justice-involved individuals. She says Tulsans must first realize the common thread in areas where the city lags in everything from affordable housing to economic opportunity is institutional bias and racism.
“It’s become insidious,” she said.
To overcome that, Norman says it will take Tulsans as a collective to perform the hard, long-term solution-oriented work needed instead of relying on symbolic or less impactful antidotes to solve systemic issues.
“At some point, we’re going to have to have leaders be true anti-racists and really examine how they’re approaching these issues on a personal level,” said Norman, who believes the city hasn’t done enough to foster complete equity. “If you’re not trying to change the mindset of people long-term, I don’t know what we’re trying to do.”
Greg Robinson II, director of family and community ownership at Met Cares
Greg Robinson II, director of family and community ownership at Met Cares, grew up being associated with community organizing.
His father, Gregory Charles “Greg” Robinson, was a highly respected Tulsa activist who served on the Tulsa Civil Service Commission, Tulsa Community Action Agency and even ran for public office. He was the executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services until his death in 2003.
Robinson was there with his father, watching him tirelessly commit to the mission of serving the public as righteously as he could.
“He was a man who wasn’t everyone’s friend, but he was respected by all,” Robinson said.
These days Robinson, just 30 years old, has internalized all those lessons taught by his father to push local and state decision-makers to address quality-of-life issues that threaten marginalized people.
Robinson started out in politics working for the Barack Obama presidential campaign while in college. He has often been found at City Hall and elsewhere speaking to councilors and Mayor G.T. Bynum on behalf of the public.
“You can’t help but be convicted to make sure you put in the work so people can have what they truly deserve,” he said. “I try to wake up and say, ‘Hey, I’m working on their behalf every day.’”
Robinson says he was proud to be part of a group that provided recommendations for Tulsa’s newly implemented affordable housing strategy. The influence continued with efforts that led to the city facilitating Equality Indicator meetings on policing and holding forums during the recent police chief search.
“I think we’ve been able to affect the way things are happening and the results in the future of better policies because of the conversations we’re forcing at the decision-making level,” said Robinson.
Black History Month: Notable Oklahomans and state history
Black History Month: Notable Oklahomans and state history
Janice C. Jones
Believed to be the first black registered nurse in Tulsa, Janice Jones began working for the Public Health Service in the 1920s.
She operated a small clinic on Archer Street, but spent as much time out in the community, visiting homebound and elderly residents throughout north Tulsa.
Despite meager resources, Jones offered a variety of clinical services, including tuberculosis and prenatal care.
Her efforts led to the establishment of the Variety Health Center in 1945.
Jones was inducted into the Tulsa Hall of Fame in 1989.
Rev. Calvin McCutchen
During the civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s, Calvin McCutchen, minister at Mount Zion Baptist Church, was a leader among black pastors in Tulsa, coordinating efforts in the push for desegregation.
He was especially good at getting youths involved.
Preaching the principles of nonviolent resistance, McCutchen and the late Rev. B.S. Roberts organized students for sit-in demonstrations at whites-only restaurants, including Borden’s Cafeteria in north Tulsa and Picadilly’s downtown.
Teaching black history education in Tulsa area schools
Educators throughout Tulsa Public Schools have taken advantage of Black History Month to recognize the achievements and contributions of African Americans in their classrooms.
TPS Deputy Chief of Academics Danielle Neves said schools are encouraged to recognize Black History Month as well as other commemorative months, such as those for women and Native Americans. The district also is working to ensure conversations surrounding African American heritage continue beyond February.
Since joining the district about five years ago, Neves said she has seen a considerable shift in how black history is taught in schools. She remembers a not-so-distant time when Black History Month centered solely on Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman.
“Now we’re not only celebrating all of our heroes and celebrating the legacies of black Americans, but we’re also having conversations about the systemic oppression that is still rampant in our country,” she said. “We’re actually talking about the enslavement of Africans as they were brought to this country and the ways that slavery and all of its ramifications have continued to live on.
“But that is also part of our history. That is part of how we understand the lives of black Americans in this country, and we’re doing a better job of positioning these stories in that context.”
Melvin B. Tolson
Before arriving at Oklahoma’s Langston University, Melvin B. Tolson already had established himself as an educator of impact.
At historically black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, in the 1920s and ‘30s, Tolson had built an award-winning debate team that defeated largely all-white college teams around the country. Decades later, that effort would be memorialized in the movie “The Great Debaters,” with Denzel Washington playing Tolson.
Tolson moved on from Texas to historically black Langston in 1947.
'Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre,' book by Randy Krehbiel
In the late 1990s, longtime Tulsa World writer Randy Krehbiel was tasked with creating for the newspaper a Tulsa Race Massacre archive, which would then serve as a resource for future coverage.
Starting with a timeline, and expanding it with new information until it ran some 70 pages, he amassed thousands of documents, including items from the Oklahoma State Archives, and spent hours scrolling through Tulsa World and Tulsa Tribune newspapers on microfiche.
The two decades of research and writing Krehbiel invested in the project would also yield a book.
Saving Langston University
A decade of turmoil at Langston University, spurred by repeated changes in leadership and alleged financial mismanagement, culminated in 1978 with the state Legislature considering a bill that would close the historically black institution.
Students responded by staging a sit-in at the state Capitol.
After four days, the students finally left with some assurance that money was forthcoming to keep the school going. But the future was still very much in doubt.
1958 Oklahoma City drugstore sit-in
One of the nation’s first publicized sit-ins in protest of segregation was held in 1958 at a Katz drugstore in Oklahoma City.
The result? Within two days, Katz officials had desegregated the lunch counters at their stores in three states.
The main organizer behind the sit-in was a local school teacher and NAACP youth adviser named Clara Luper (pictured). And she was just getting started.
Rev. T. Oscar Chappelle Sr.
Remembered as a dynamic, pulpit-pounding preacher who challenged churchgoers to serve their community, Oscar Chappelle got at least some of his passion from his father.
P.A. Chappelle, a Virginia attorney, had moved his family to the Tulsa area in 1914, where he would practice with civil rights attorney B.C. Franklin, defending the rights of the city’s African American community.
Oscar Chappelle began preaching at 16 and would take over as pastor of Morning Star Baptist Church in 1942.
Booker T. Washington High School
Tulsa’s black high school during segregation, Booker T. Washington traces its storied history to 1913, when it opened with founding principal Ellis Walker Woods (pictured) at the helm.
Woods, principal until 1948, established BTW as a place of high expectations, and used segregation to his students’ advantage, shielding them from an often unfriendly white society, while instilling in them a sense of self-worth.
Officially, Tulsa schools desegregated in 1955. But in practice, they remained segregated until the early 1970s.
Book: Death in a Promised Land, Scott Ellsworth
An author and historian who grew up in Tulsa in the 1950s, Scott Ellsworth wrote the first book to delve into the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
At the time it came out in 1982, his “Death in a Promised Land” was news to many.
The massacre had been a taboo subject for decades, and after so many years, few had even heard of it.
Tulsa's four police chiefs
For the first time, four of Tulsa’s largest police departments have chiefs who are African American men.
That includes Tulsa Police Department chief Wendell Franklin, Tulsa Public Schools Police Chief Matthias Wicks, Tulsa Community College Police Chief Melvin Murdock and Walter Evans, police chief at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa.
After corralling the chiefs for a photo, Tulsa Police Lt. Marcus Harper put the image online.
“Twenty years from now, that is going to be one of those Black History Month moments,” Harper said. “It was an opportunity to capture history.”
A.J. Smitherman
Through his Tulsa newspaper, A.J. Smitherman pushed for black independence and unity while exhorting his fellow African Americans to stand up for their rights. But in 1921 the outspoken founder of the Tulsa Star was temporarily silenced.
Click here to read more.Greenwood Cultural Center
As the site of regular educational and cultural events since it was established in 1995, the Greenwood Cultural Center has kept alive the story of the historic Greenwood District while promoting Tulsa’s African American heritage.
The center, at 322 N. Greenwood Ave., faced uncertain times after a previous loss of state funding, but today it seems poised for a bright future.
Olivia Hooker
A longtime college professor and first black woman in the U.S. Coast Guard, Olivia Hooker’s achievements are all the more impressive when you consider her background.
Just 6 years old at the time of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the Tulsa native survived the traumatic event, but saw her family home ransacked and her father’s clothing business destroyed.
Afterward, Hooker and her family started over in Topeka, Kansas, and tried to put the experience behind them.
Dr. A.C. Jackson
Of the Tulsans who were killed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the most prominent was probably Dr. A.C. Jackson, a 40-year-old African American surgeon.
Jackson’s white neighbor, former police commissioner and retired judge John Oliphant, saw the whole thing, and called it “cold-blooded murder.”
Tulsa's next generation of black leaders
The next generation of black leaders in Tulsa — the people who will help dictate how the city functions for people who look like them for years to come — have a keen understanding of why their work means so much to so many.
That motivation comes from realizing that there is much to gain, and just as much to lose, particularly during present-day discussions about inequity within education, community policing and how the proverbial playing field isn’t level for all.
The Tulsa World spoke with four leaders who are forcing the city to examine itself: Nehemiah Frank, Black Wall Street Times; Kuma Roberts, executive director of diversity and inclusion for the Tulsa Regional Chamber; Timantha Norman, Tulsa Star executive editor; and Greg Robinson II, director of family and community ownership at Met Cares.
1921 Race Massacre
Over a nightmarish two days in 1921, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history unfolded in Tulsa.
The Tulsa Race Massacre left 37 residents dead officially, although far more may have been killed. Thousands were left homeless and much of Tulsa’s Greenwood District was charred ruins.
Decades would pass before the event was openly discussed in Tulsa or taught in its schools.
Greenwood District
Starting as a simple land acquisition by black entrepreneur O.W. Gurley, Greenwood, in just over a decade, had become one of the most vibrant hubs of African American business in the country.
After much of it was destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, many residents would stay and rebuild, and the area would eventually regain much of its former glory.
But a decline followed, brought on by desegregation and other factors.
"Black Wall Street Burning" movie
A little more than a year ago, Dekoven Riggins and Marcus Brown were not filmmakers — just a couple of friends from their Oklahoma City church who knew a good story when they heard one.
A story so powerful that they scraped together what money they could, worked tireless hours, and asked their families, friends and co-workers to do the same to make a movie about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
“I hadn’t known much about it, and I decided to look for a movie about it, and all I found were documentaries, and I said to our group (of friends), I really want to make a movie about Black Wall Street,” said Riggins, who wrote that movie and co-directed it with Brown.
Wade Watts
Although marching with his friend Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama once was one of his proudest moments, the Rev. Wade Watts’ focus was advancing the cause of civil rights in Oklahoma.
A leader in efforts to desegregate public facilities in the state, he would spend 16 years as president of the Oklahoma chapter of the NAACP, an organization he joined when he was just 17.
Donnie Nero
When Donnie Nero was named president of Connors State College in 2000, it made him the first African American president of a non-historically black institution in Oklahoma.
Previously provost of Tulsa Community College’s Southeast Campus, after beginning his career teaching in Sapulpa, Nero held the top post at Connors until 2011, when he retired as one of the state’s preeminent black educators.
Training at Tuskegee
The Tuskegee air program in Alabama had taught John Claybon some lessons while leaving him with a lifetime’s worth of memories.
Today, some 70 years later, Claybon continues to draw on those lessons and memories whenever he’s at the Tulsa Air and Space Museum.
More than just a dedicated volunteer there, Claybon is a living link to an important piece of aviation history.
At the time he was at Tuskegee, many of the original Tuskegee Airmen, as they were known, were still involved with the school.
“I knew them all,” Claybon, 92, said of the legendary black pilots. “Knew them by name. Trained with them, talked with them, had chow with them.”
Wayman Tisdale
Son of a Tulsa-area preacher, Wayman Tisdale dominated the basketball court first, going from Booker T. Washington High School to the NBA by way of the University of Oklahoma.
After 12 seasons of professional ball, he turned his full attention to his other love: music.
Tisdale became an accomplished jazz musician and bandleader and released multiple albums.
A.C. Hamlin
Just a year after becoming a state in 1907, Oklahoma elected its first black state legislator: A.C. Hamlin of Logan County.
However, some of Hamlin’s lawmaker colleagues tried to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.
They passed a constitutional amendment that effectively limited black voters by creating ridiculous voter registration requirements.
Pastor Corbin Nash
Corbin Nash couldn’t believe his eyes or ears.
“For the first time in my life, I was face to face with people I felt would kill me for no reason other than I was black,” recalled the Tulsa pastor and volunteer prison minister.
“Many were shouting racial slurs. Many mocked us, and many gave negative gestures.”
But the shock Nash felt initially — as a young college student joining civil rights marchers on the streets of 1965 Montgomery, Alabama — would wear off quickly.
John Hope Franklin
After growing up in Tulsa, where his father, celebrated civil rights lawyer B.C. Franklin, defended the rights of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre survivors, John Hope Franklin would strike his own blow for racial justice with his pen.
The Booker T. Washington High School graduate went on to become one of the country’s most respected scholars and historians and wrote several key texts, including “From Slavery to Freedom,” a definitive narrative on black history, and the book “Racial Equality in America,” taken from lectures.
B.C. Franklin
After his law office burned during the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, B.C. Franklin could have left town and started over.
Instead, he set up a tent and got to work.
Operating out of that tent for the next few weeks, the activist and attorney began intervening on behalf of other black survivors.
Black Wall Street by Hannibal Johnson
Since its release in 1998, the book “Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District” has played a big part in bringing new attention to a subject long ignored.
It also helped establish its author, Tulsa historian Hannibal Johnson, as one of the foremost authorities on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Bob Busby
As the first African American to serve as Tulsa police chief on a permanent basis, Wendell Franklin rightly was the subject of a lot of attention when the announcement came in January.
But almost three decades earlier, the position was briefly filled by another pioneering black member of the department.
The Tulsa Police Department’s first black deputy chief, and before that its first black major, Bob Busby was named acting police chief in 1991 after Chief Drew Diamond stepped down.
Leona Mitchell
New York City’s Metropolitan Opera is a long way from Enid and the church choir where she first sang publicly as a child.
But that’s exactly where Leona Mitchell’s talent, which was too big not to share with the world, would eventually take her.
Kenny Monday
Long before beating the Soviet Union’s top wrestler to claim Olympic gold, Kenny Monday got his start at his family’s north Tulsa home, tussling with his older brothers.
That led to the Hutcherson YMCA down the street, where he’d go every day after school for the wrestling program.
Boley
“The most enterprising and in many ways the most interesting of the Negro towns in the United States.”
So proclaimed Booker T. Washington after a 1905 visit to Boley, which left the famed African-American leader duly impressed.
Pastor Ben Hill
When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Tulsa in 1960, the honor of introducing him fell to the Rev. Ben Hill.
It would’ve been hard to find a more fitting choice.
With his tenure as pastor at Vernon A.M.E. Church coinciding with the rise of the civil rights movement nationally, Hill assumed a leading role in how it played out in Tulsa.
Maxine Horner
Just breaking a barrier, which she did as one of the first two black women elected to the Oklahoma Senate in 1986, was not enough for Maxine Horner.
As a fledgling state lawmaker, the Tulsan immediately got to work, establishing herself as a champion for education and the arts. Horner would also serve as Democratic Caucus chairwoman, and in the late 1990s, was a sponsor of the legislation creating the Tulsa Race Riot Commission.
Lelia Foley-Davis
When all votes in the 1973 municipal election were tallied, the unlikely candidate had earned her place in history.
In being elected mayor of Taft, Foley-Davis, 30 at the time, had become the nation’s first black female mayor.
Almost 50 years since that monumental event, Foley-Davis still calls Taft home.
Seymour Williams
However far he had to take them to find other black schools to play, Seymour Williams’ Hornets teams were always ready to compete.
As head football coach at Tulsa’s Booker T. Washington High School during the era of segregation, Williams led the program to 19 state titles in the Oklahoma Interscholastic Athletic Association and finished undefeated 14 times, traveling as far away as Chicago to play.
He would post a record of 290-23-11 over his career, which began in 1920 and spanned 33 years.
