In a few days Lee Roy Chapman’s major article on Tate Brady, a leading figure in the growth of Tulsa in the early twentieth century, will be published in the September issue of This Land Press, a progressive monthly magazine (named — of course for Oklahoma native Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land is Your Land.”) Chapman’s interested in Brady’s role in the violence that led up to the riot and in the riot and its aftermath, too.
Tate Brady played almost no role in my story of the Tulsa riot (and the aftermath); I was interested in the African American side of the story in the years leading into the riot and how the ideas of equality and opposition to lynching led Tulsa’s African American citizens to take action to protect themselves and stop a lynching. That, tragically, met with the ideas of white supremacy on the other side of the railroad tracks that separate the black and white sections of Tulsa. Most of Chapman’s article, “The Nightmare of the Dreamland,” which I had the pleasure of reading a month or so back, was new to me and I think it will be the starting point for a lot of rethinking of Tulsa’s history in the 1910s and 1920s.
You can see a brief trailer for the story here.
Also, here’s a link to an article I published a decade ago in the Oklahoma Law Review that uses William Redfearn’s brief in his case against the American Central Insurance Company to help reconstruct the riot (and here’s the brief itself). And here’s a link to testimony in the suit that JB Stradford filed in Chicago against his insurance company.