The Dylantantes Podcast

Back in September 2022, I posted a piece on The Dylantantes called My Fraught Visit to the Bob Dylan Center. It tells the tale of my friend and I traveling to the Center for the first time and our experience with activists in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood was the neighborhood famously known as Black Wall Street at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was also the site of the horrors of the Tulsa Race Massacre in May and June of 1921, almost exactly 103 years ago as of this writing.

My piece was an attempt to summarize the Race Massacre, which many still have never heard of, and to grapple with the placement of the Bob Dylan Center Archive in the neighboring Tulsa Arts District, itself a site of considerable racial tension.

I am revisiting the piece because of recent news that a decades-old attempt by survivors of the Massacre to obtain reparations has finally failed in the Oklahoma Supreme Court.