Women of Black Wall Street was produced at Oklahoma State University in HIST 4073: Digital Methods in History, Fall 2020. The course was taught by Dr. Brandy Thomas Wells, Assistant Professor of History. The thematic focus for the course was the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Dr. Wells, Project Director and Course Instructor
Dr. Wells is an historian of United States history with specializations in African American and women and gender histories. Her research interests especially center these population’s organizational activities and empowerment.
Dr. Wells is currently writing her first book on African American women’s internationalism through civic and social organizations, the United Nations, and the State Department.
She teaches several courses at Oklahoma State University including surveys of U.S. history, Black Women in the U.S., African American History to and since 1865, and Oklahoma History.
Her experiences in these courses and the historic centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre led her to adopt this historic event as thematic focus for the course on historical digital methods in Fall 2020.
Students in Dr. Wells’s future courses at Oklahoma State University will deepen this project and continue to contribute to Greenwood’s, Tulsa’s, Oklahoma’s, and American history.
For more on Dr. Wells.
Interns
In Spring 2021, two students from the course worked with Dr. Wells as interns to put the website together.
Makayla Swanson
Makayla Swanson is a graduating History Major with a minor in Philosophy. After four years at Oklahoma State University, she will go on and teach history at the secondary level in Oklahoma.
She has primarily studied American history with particular interest in the histories of women and people of color in Oklahoma. For her senior thesis, Makayla wrote on the experiences of black women in Indian Territory who were enslaved by Cherokee masters.
In the Summer of 2020, Makayla worked on her first digital history project transcribing World War II letters with Dr. Sarah Griswold. The experience proved to be very rewarding and inspired Makayla to take Digital Methods in History in the Fall of 2020.
Through the class, Makayla learned a lot about the work behind digitizing history including copyright policies, providing greater accessibility for viewers, and various methods of presenting history online.
In addition to this, the class focused heavily on the events of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In reading Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre by Randy Krehbiel, Makayla learned a wealth of information on who was involved in the tragedies of the event and how local and federal government agencies dealt with it.
Most fascinating to Makayla however, was the work of the Greenwood community and its leaders to come together resiliently under such horrible circumstances.
When offered the opportunity to continue the project by creating this website, Makayla said yes without hesitation, recognizing the need to highlight the lives of several women who were indispensable and so loved in the Greenwood community.
Through this project, she hopes to shed greater light on the untold stories of incredible Black women of Oklahoma.
Elizabeth Thomas
Elizabeth Thomas is a History major with a minor in English and a member of the class of 2022. After finishing her Bachelor’s degree, she hopes to go on to graduate school and eventually earn her PhD studying twentieth century cultural and political movements in American history.
She is particularly interested in the Civil Rights movement, women’s suffrage and the later women’s liberation movement, and the countercultural shift in the 1960s. Elizabeth has been working with Dr. Wells to research the histories of Black women in Greenwood since the Fall of 2020, having started by doing an independent study for an honors contract. She first became interested in historical research during her freshman year, when she worked on a digital humanities project with the Honors college at Oklahoma State.
She is very interested in public history and archival work, and took Dr. Wells’ Digital Methods in History class in order to gain a deeper understanding of the tools available to historians in the digital age.
Despite having grown up in Oklahoma, she did not learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre in a formal education setting until she arrived at Oklahoma State.
Taking Dr. Wells’ class was an eye-opening experience that taught her not only about the atrocity that occurred in her home state, but also the shame that kept it buried for the years that followed. Through an honors component, she got the special opportunity to work one-on-one with Dr. Wells to begin some of the research found on this site. This project gave her a deeper love and understanding of historical research, particularly as it relates to biographical writing.
Elizabeth was happy to take on this opportunity to work with Dr. Wells because she hoped she would be able to bring greater exposure to this historical event and create an educational tool for students now and students to come.
WBWS Project Contributors
& Valued Members of the HIST 4073 Class
Autumn Bean
is a senior at Oklahoma State University. She is majoring in History and minoring in Art History. Autumn is interested in museum studies and curatorial work and is currently working at the OSU Museum of Art. Since she is a history major, she decided to take the Digital Methods in History class to help her get more comfortable working online with the topic of history. This class helped her more with research and how to work a blog. Autumn worked with a group on how to properly write about a historical event.
Before taking this class she had only heard a little about the Tulsa Race Massacre. The class and the books in the class read opened her eyes to what actually happened in Greenwood, Tulsa. Autumn enjoyed looking into the women whose lives were affected by the Massacre. This is a topic that never gets brought up within the history of Greenwood. She enjoyed this class and the work her and her classmates put into gathering the research they needed to tell the stories of these brave women.
Kelsey Briggs
is from Burns Flat, Oklahoma. She graduated from Oklahoma State University in the Spring of 2021 with a degree in Multimedia Journalism. She enjoys creating videos that help promote the history and culture of Oklahoma. She recently helped work on a movie in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and aided with documentary created by Kelly Kerr called, “Greenwood: Here and Now.”
Kelsey took HIST 4073 because she desired to learn more about what happened to the Greenwood District. The first time she had ever heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre, she was a sophomore in college, and it was referred to as the Tulsa Race Riot. As an Oklahoma history buff and advocate for the state, she enrolled in Dr. Wells’s class to educate herself and bring awareness to the event that happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Trader Johnston
has two majors areas of study: History and Philosophy. Most of his historical and academic focus is in Middle Age, world, and European history, as well as the World Wars and modern world history. However, he has a number of other research interests including Antiquity history. In the field of Philosophy, he has a focus in Pre-Socratic philosophy and its metaphysics and epistemology. He enjoys learning about the field of Existentialism and about modern philosophers such as Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre, Camus .
His reasoning behind taking the Digital Methods in History course was to get an idea of what he would like to do with his career: to use the growing breadth of digital methods to preserve history in the transition to a more digital age. Through the course, he also learned much about the Tulsa Race Massacre, and just how damaging it was and the sheer impact it had on the Black community even today.
Piper Reese
is a senior multimedia journalism student at Oklahoma State University. She is from Fairfax, OK, and has always loved to tell stories visually. She was encouraged by her mother, an OSU alumnus, and her sister who was getting her degree from OSU, to attend. In her spare time, Piper loves creating videos, graphics and photography to showcase her creativity. She currently works as a video editor for the Center for Executive and Professional Development.
During her time at OSU, she’s been involved with the O’Colly Media Group as a photojournalist and a producer, and she’s involved with the Oklahoma Intercollegiate Legislature as a member of the press corps. Once she graduates, Piper wants to find a job dealing with video production in Oklahoma. Her long-term goal is to be able to travel first the United States, then across the world working on videos and being able to see it all. Piper learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre in high school briefly. When she saw an opportunity to learn more about it, she took it.