Watching the current onslaught of mass deportations and state-sanctioned killings of nonviolent protestors, bystanders, and ordinary citizens, I’ve found myself at the edge of hopelessness, dread sinking further into my chest with each echo of a gunshot. I’ve struggled to pull a coherent thought together that isn’t how much more of this can we take? And then I remembered: We’ve been here before.
In fact, we’ve been here quite a few times. Many in the social media echo chamber have argued that we are witnessing the formation of a new “gestapo” here in the U.S. Others have rightly disagreed. We needn't compare ICE to foreign historical powers when our country has its own history of violent militias with government ties. In Tulsa, it happened in our own back yard.
Many Tulsans are aware of the Race Massacre of 1921. Many still aren’t. My mind keeps coming back to it as I watch masked individuals take lives and brutalize communities across the country, empowered by our government—just as they did on the evening of the Massacre, when Tulsa Police deputized hundreds of white men in an effort to quell what they saw as an uprising in Greenwood (and what was, in reality, a community coming together to protect one of its own). According to a 2025 report by the Department of Justice, nearly 500 men were deputized in under 30 minutes, many of whom had been drinking and instigating violence. Within two days, 35 blocks were destroyed, 300 people were killed, more than 800 were injured, and the coverup began. Bodies of victims were buried in unmarked graves, local papers like the Tulsa Tribune contradicted the death toll daily, court cases were thrown out, and the state denied emergency care. Black Tulsans were left to rebuild alone, in a city that would take decades to officially recognize the severity of the crimes those citizens had endured.
But Greenwood did rebuild. Survivors found ways to tell their stories, thanks in part to community historians like Eddie Faye Gates, whose archival practice honored survivors and their descendants, whose activism forced Tulsa to reckon with its past, and whose legacy still reverberates throughout the city five years after her passing. In a time when a phone video or a voice note can mean the difference between an act of violence being plausibly deniable and being utterly indisputable, Gates’ work feels prescient and more vital than ever.
In honor of what would have been her 92nd birthday, I’d like to pay respects to this remarkable woman—historian, educator, and pillar of her community—whose work still calls us to witness, document, and persist in telling the truth.
The Past Is Present