After The Fire: Tulsa’s Untold Reckoning

January 11, 2026

In 1921, a prosperous Black neighborhood was destroyed almost overnight – and then quietly written out of the historical record. This week, we examine how violence, silence, and selective memory shaped what generations of Americans were never taught.

In the end, thirty-five square blocks and around twelve hundred homes were reduced to ashes. White mobs looted and burnt down businesses and systematically murdered African American residents in cold blood.

Guests:

Scott Ellsworth, lecturer, Department of Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, author, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and The Groundbreaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice.