Gilcrease Preserves North Tulsa History

“Get to the root of problems that seem to divide mankind today. Learn how thoughts and actions of the past impact the present, and how they will eventually influence the future.”

The Eddie Faye Gates Tulsa Race Massacre Collection honors the tireless labors of one of Oklahoma’s most important African American women leaders. As a researcher, writer, historian, educator, and community activist, Gates’ life work provides an invaluable window into the lived experiences of Black North Tulsans. Her passion for capturing a broad diversity of human stories that range from hope to despair, trauma to resilience, brings learners into contact with the memories of past generations. 

Gates preserved her work for future generations through photographs, correspondence, handwritten research notes, survivor inventories, newspaper and periodical clippings, and audio and video interviews. Within this collection one hears not only the painful and empowering remembrances of survivors and descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, but also the broader, vibrant histories of North Tulsa and Oklahoma placemaking. 

This collection is an extraordinary gift not merely to Gilcrease Museum but to the entire city of Tulsa and beyond. Gifted to the museum nearly 100 years after the Massacre, this collection presents a unique opportunity to honor and continue Gates’ legacy of putting generations of Tulsans into conversation with one another about collective memory, tragedy, justice, and resilience.

IMLS CARES Act Grant Overview

Through generous grant funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Gilcrease Museum’s Eddie Faye Gates Project Team has been engaged in the foundational work of making the video interviews and photographs from the collection available online. This grant award is making it possible to archive, digitize, research, and create educational resources from the collection.

Archives and Research  

This IMLS award has made it possible to do the necessary archival work to make the collection available for individual research. Our team of archivists are hard at work physically processing collection items, including physical arrangement, rehousing, inventorying, describing, cataloging, assigning accession numbers, and evaluating materials for conservation treatment. Our Gilcrease team has welcomed an IMLS Archival Processing Intern, Michelle Smith, whose work is helping to archive and organize the collection. 

In collaboration with our Advisory Committee of scholars, an IMLS Research Scholar, Autumn Brown, is working to help identify people, places, and events contained in the collection and determine interpretive interconnections with other Gilcrease collections. Her work will be presented in writing and through the Eddie Faye Gates Annual Lectures. 

Digitization

IMLS is helping Gilcrease Museum build our technological capacity to help make in this early stage the video interviews and photographs from the collection available online. This work is laying the foundation for one day digitizing even more from the collection. Working together, our Archives and Digitization teams are helping upload audiovisual files, image and digitally transfer hundreds of photographs, and create item records within our new archival software. In honor of Gates’ cross-generational work, our Digitization experts will also be connecting with local community members (teams of elders and youths) to help us in our digital tagging efforts for videos and photographs.

Education

In order to bring the lessons from this collection to the community, our Education Team is working to make available teaching resources for K-12 educators and students, including a collections anthology webpage, curricular materials, and the Eddie Faye Gates Teacher Institute the week of July 12. Angela Guillory, IMLS Administrative Assistant, joins Gilcrease and the Education Team in helping coordinate these efforts, communicating with local stakeholders, and partnering with organizations.

With this project underway, our Gilcrease team hopes that Tulsans, Oklahomans, and Americans will be learning from this collection for many years to come. As a keen observer of human experience, Eddie Faye Gates understood that collective memory can help us identify the historical gaps, erasures, and silences as a first step toward a fuller understanding of our past, our communities, and ourselves. We are excited that current and future generations will be able to honor Gates’ legacy by continuing her work of historical recovery and reclamation through this collection. We also hope that ongoing work in this collection will deepen our community’s appreciation for Eddie Faye Gates and ensure that future generations remember her as the hero she is.

Dr. William R. Smith is Associate Director of the Helmerich Center for American Research at Gilcrease Museum and Co-Director of the Museum Science and Management Program at the University of Tulsa. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He earned graduate degrees in American history from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Oklahoma. He is a public historian and scholar of eighteenth-century North America, the Atlantic world, and American religion, and is the author of Benjamin Colman’s Epistolary World, 1688-1754: Networking in the Dissenting Atlantic (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022). He has taught courses in American history, religion, and archival studies at Notre Dame, Grace College and Seminary (Indiana), Oklahoma State University, and the University of Tulsa.

Autumn Brown earned her Ph.D. in Social Foundations of Education from Oklahoma State University and served on this grant as IMLS Research Scholar at Gilcrease Museum from 2021-2022. Her dissertation was an educational biography of teacher activist Clara Luper (1923-2011). Her research aims at foregrounding Black women’s labor in the movement to showcase how integral their roles were serving in multiple capacities behind the scenes and on the front lines. Dr. Brown’s research also (re)presents Oklahoma City as a radically activist space by highlighting the city’s role in the sit-in movement, preceding Greensboro, North Carolina and the Woolworth sit-ins. She has presented at numerous national and international conferences, has published book chapters and peer-reviewed articles, and currently holds the Duane H. King Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Helmerich Center for American Research at Gilcrease Museum/University of Tulsa. She is faculty at Oklahoma State University working with the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program. Dr. Brown also runs her own research consulting business named Winona Jewel Research Consulting, LLC.

Jack D. Baker is a Citizen of the Cherokee Nation and has served in multiple roles as a leader, administrator, researcher, and expert on Cherokee history and culture. He is president of the National Trail of Tears Association and has served for twenty-one years on the board and as treasurer of the Cherokee National Historical Society, Inc., as the president of the board of the Oklahoma Historical Society, and as president of Goingsnake District Heritage Association. He served eleven years on the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council representing those citizens living outside the Cherokee Nation boundaries. Baker has done extensive Cherokee research for more than forty years and has authored various articles and edited books on Cherokee history, as well as advising on Cherokee history documentaries. In 2007, he received the Principal Chief’s Leadership Award for his work preserving Cherokee history and his many contributions to the Cherokee Nation.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is an American poet, book editor, civil rights historian, and professor. He has authored 20 books in poetry, nonfiction and children’s literature. In 2022, he was a Tulsa Artist Fellow and Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa, where he was also Lecturer in Africana Studies and English. Lansana is also credited as creator and executive producer of “Focus: Black Oklahoma,” a monthly radio program on the public radio station KOSU. He is a founding member of Tri-City Collective and serves on the Board of Directors of the Philbrook Museum of Art, is a Curatorial Scholar for the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art and a Curatorial Board Co-Chair for the Ragdale Foundation.

Nkem Ike is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa with a focus in African diaspora archaeology. Her research centers on the material remains of race massacres and other forms of anti-Black violence in the early 20th century United States. In her current research, Nkem highlights the ways that three Black communities in Springfield, IL, Tulsa, OK, and Rosewood, FL, contend with the historic impact of mass racial state sanctioned violence through processes of reclamation and remembrance facilitated by art, activism, and archaeology. By centering contemporary Black people, she brings forth the historical and temporal effects of tools such as erasure, dislocation, and migration across the United States. Her research presents a gateway for further conversations related to the interlocking components of race, class, gender, and the landscape through processes of Black placemaking and placekeeping.

In honor of Eddie Faye Gates’ work of facilitating cross-generational conversations around the lessons of the past, Gilcrease hired and worked with 4 elders and 4 youth from the Tulsa community to serve as community commentators. Elders came to project with deep roots in North Tulsa and personal experience knowing and having worked with Mrs. Gates. Youth were selected for their local community engagement and interest in the project. Working in pairs, these community members provided digital search tags and general comments for 250 photographs and 4 videos from the Collection. Their work can be seen in the Online Collections display for these photos and videos.

Elders
Marsha Francine Campbell (Retired educator, artist)
Montecella Driver (Retired educator and district administrator)
Bobby Eaton (Musician, owner of Eaton Media Services, and local radio show host)
J. Kavin Ross (CEO of Kavision, Chairman of the Tulsa Mass Graves Investigation,and educator)

Youth
LeQuincia Brown
Sofia Fermo
Erika Hanes
Iana Redman

Visit these websites to learn about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and Greenwood. 

Greenwood Cultural Center

John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation

1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission 

Greenwood Rising

Tri-City Collective

Tulsa Historical Society & Museum

Oklahoma Historical Society

National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institution

Greenwood Art Project on Google Arts & Culture

For Gates Collection inquiries, please contact the Library at hcarlibrary@utulsa.edu. For general museum inquiries please contact us here.

The Helmerich Center for American Research at Gilcrease Museum offers short-term research fellowships, travel grants, and postdoctoral fellowship opportunities. For more info, see here. To learn more about the Gilcrease archive and library collections, see here.