< Artist's Black Wall Street Project Is About Tulsa 100 Years Ago — And Today

NOEL KING, HOST:

Americans are really good at forgetting some of the terrible parts of our history. The artist Paul Rucker is deeply interested in them.

PAUL RUCKER: The work that I do evolves mostly around the things that I was never taught about.

KING: Things like the destruction of a thriving Black community known as Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Okla. - that happened 100 years ago today.

NPR's Neda Ulaby has more on Rucker's latest work.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: On May 31, 1921, a mob of armed white people descended upon a prosperous and peaceful Black community, one of the most successful in the country. They destroyed and flattened 35 city blocks.

RUCKER: Six-thousand Black people were arrested. Ten-thousand Black people were left homeless. Churches were burned - schools, libraries, everything in the Black community.

ULABY: Now Paul Rucker's teaching a college class about how you represent what's known today as the Tulsa race massacre through art.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: There were 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores, two movie theaters...

ULABY: Students at George Washington University researched and documented what was lost.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: ...A hospital, a bank, a post office, law offices and a bus system.

ULABY: The atrocities in Tulsa were unmentioned or underplayed in official state history until fairly recently. The story was not included in Oklahoma school curriculum until last year. Police records, newspaper stories and other evidence from the era have gone missing from archives.

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ULABY: A lot of people learned about the Tulsa race massacre from the HBO show "Watchmen" that first aired in 2019. It begins with a shocking and accurate dramatization of the violence, including dynamite dropped on Black businesses from planes.

RUCKER: A lot of people were giving "Watchmen" a lot of credit for bringing attention to Black Wall Street. Well, people in the Black community have been talking about it for years.

ULABY: Rucker wants to tell the story differently - in a way, he says, that does not focus on Black pain. Rucker, who's usually wearing a beanie and colorful glasses, is an art world powerhouse and a musician who likes to pick up a guitar during interviews.

RUCKER: You know, you can strum it. (Playing guitar).

ULABY: Here are some words on Paul Rucker's resume - Guggenheim fellowship, TED Talk, first artist in residence at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. But before his many grants and awards, Rucker was a janitor at the Seattle Art Museum. He made art from leftover supplies because he could not afford to buy anything new. Born 53 years ago in Anderson, S.C., his father was a yard worker.

RUCKER: My father was born in 1905. He was 63 when I was born. He grew up during the height of lynching, so he was around during Black Wall Street. He didn't tell me about the bad incidents that might have happened to him. But he had to be careful. He had to be careful about what direction he looked towards. You had people during the time that he was born that were lynched because they knocked on the wrong door.

ULABY: Paul Rucker remembers seeing Klan rallies when he was small. About seven years ago, he started sewing Klan robes himself. That was the subject of his TED Talk.

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RUCKER: These are not your traditional Klan robes you would see any KKK rally. I used kente cloth. I used camouflage.

ULABY: Because racism, he says, gets camouflaged, too.

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RUCKER: We have segregated schools, neighborhoods, workplaces. And it's not the people wearing hoods that are keeping these policies in place. My work is about the long-term impact of slavery. The stealth aspect of racism is part of its power. Racism has the power to hide. And when it hides, it's kept safe 'cause it blends in. I created this robe to illustrate that.

ULABY: With the Tulsa project, originally called "Banking While Black," Rucker was going to build an installation using the guts of an old bank. COVID changed everything. Now the project is virtual with three universities involved - George Washington University, Virginia Commonwealth and Arizona State University, which plans some sort of physical exhibit with the project this fall.

MIKI GARCIA: Paul does ask us to bear witness, for sure.

ULABY: Miki Garcia directs Arizona State's Art Museum. The school's partnering with Paul Rucker, she says, in all kinds of ways this year. It's also commissioned him as part of a huge group project looking at art history and prisons.

GARCIA: He is surfacing histories that have been intentionally, I believe, obscured. So whether it is looking at the history of mass incarceration or the Klan robes or the Tulsa race massacre, he makes history viscerally present.

KEVIN PATTON: This is Tulsa, completely 3D rendered and modeled that you could pull in as an FBX model.

ULABY: Design professor Kevin Patton worked with Paul Rucker and George Washington University students to build "Banking While Black" over Zoom. It evolved into a website immersing visitors into "Three Black Wall Streets" in Tulsa, Durham, N.C. and Richmond, Va.

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ULABY: Rucker composed the music in this digital portal to those long-gone Black communities at their zenith and the visionaries and entrepreneurs who created possibility and sanctuary. It was another kind of economic violence that destroyed Black Wall Streets all over the country, Rucker says. Urban renewal programs in the 1950s, '60s and '70s prioritized highways over Black communities. But his website does not focus on Black neighborhoods being torn up and split apart or Tulsa's Greenwood district being burnt.

RUCKER: We're not including any of those pictures of destruction on this website - zero. A lot of my work is about violence. I mean, I have more work about dead people than anybody I know. It wears me down, but I had to tell the stories because they need to be told. But this may be my last project around race and dealing with atrocities. You know, I kind of flipped the script of it (ph) to focus on the good parts.

ULABY: Ultimately, Rucker wants to enlist audiences in understanding a complicated and cruel history in order to move forward with compassion. "Three Black Wall Streets," he says, is not just about something that happened a hundred years ago. It's about the ashes of destruction that are smoldering still.

RUCKER: "Banking While Black" is also about student loans. "Banking While Black" is also about being able to buy that house. And people ask me about my Klan robes all the time and my artwork as being so radical. But the most radical thing that I've done as a Black man, as an artist, in my entire life is buy property.

ULABY: Rucker owns a house near the VCU campus and what used to be Richmond, Va.'s Black Wall Street. It's where the first African American woman was president of a bank in 1903. But today, Rucker is one of only a few Black homeowners in the area. When our country's Black Wall Streets were ravaged and ruined, he says, we were left with moral and spiritual bankruptcy.

Neda Ulaby, NPR News.

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