On Ellison Visits Greenwood, 1921
By Quraysh Ali Lansana
Hi, I’m Quraysh Ali Lansana, a poet, author and professor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, here for Poets on the Plains. Today, I’m delighted to explore a poem of my own that speaks to an intersection of two significant aspects in Oklahoma history.
I am the author of over twenty books in poetry, nonfiction and children’s literature. I am an Applied Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing and Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where I am also Director of the African American Studies program and the Media Lab.
My most recent books include Killing the Negative: A Conversation in Art & Verse with visual artist Joel Daniel Phillips and a children’s biography of celebrated author and Oklahoma City native Ralph Ellison, who is the subject of today’s poem.
Ellison grew up in Deep Deuce, which was the nickname for the racially segregated northeast side of Oklahoma City. His father, Lewis, died tragically when Ralph was just two-years-old and his mother, Ida, was pregnant with a baby boy, who would be named Herbert. Now a widow, Ida struggled financially, working as a nursemaid and a housekeeper, while taking care of her young sons. The legislated racism and rampant hatred toward Blacks statewide didn’t help much either.
The Greenwood District, which was Tulsa’s racially segregated community, was thriving at the beginning of the 20th Century. Nicknamed “The Black Wall Street,” Greenwood featured hundreds of Black-owned businesses and thousands of homes. But, racism was common currency and three reported lynchings from 1920-1921, including the murder of a white man, deeply alarmed citizens of both Deep Deuce and Greenwood.
They also profoundly unsettled Ida Ellison, who, following the 1920 lynching of a teenager, decided that she and the boys would move to Gary, Indiana, to live with her brother. The Ellisons stopped in Greenwood on the way to visit family and friends. Their lives would be changed both during and after their stay in Indiana. Here’s the poem:
ellison visits greenwood, 1921
oklahoma sun an oppressive neighbor
in august 1920. churchgoers settle
after dinner stomachs. deep deuce
a murmuring disquiet: raid at the chandler’s.
moonshine & melanin the news on the street.
daddy chandler & one officer dead & young
claude jailed with alleged murder on his shirt
the christian sabbath a buzzing lynching bee.
three white men freed claude from his cage
one thousand armed black men on 2nd street.
mayor & police allow one of three cars
of now unarmed black men to find claude
to return the next sweltering midday without
him, his body rotting meat ten miles from okc
beaten & shot. miss ida had had enough.
her lewis gone years now, she frets when ralph
delivers the dispatch & herbert still too young
to spell KKK. maybe indiana. maybe gary, where
brother works steel. a stop in greenwood to visit
family on way north. hundreds of shops
businesses, elegant houses, hospitals. vibrant
black life in the face of jim crow, so unlike
the deuce. closer to the harlem ralph would know.
gary was not negro paradise. ida jobless, the boys
eating garbage from trash cans. okc was hateful
but at least familiar. dry heat stings black skin
irritable but somehow bearable with family.
highway leads them back to tulsa before 2nd street.
greenwood was gone. black wall street invisible.
In summer 1921, friends of Ida’s from Oklahoma City drove to Chicago to visit family and decided to check in on the Ellisons in nearby Gary. They found Ida and the boys homeless because her brother lost his job at a steel mill. The Ellisons got in the car to return to Deep Deuce. Again, they stopped in Greenwood on the way home, but the neighborhood had been destroyed by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the most violent acts of racial violence in the nation’s history.
Other than in correspondence, Ellison didn’t overtly write about the Massacre or its effect on him as a child. However, I believe this experience shaped him, and his work, in a multitude of ways. 2027 will mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Thank you for being with us for Poets on the Plains. I’m Quraysh Ali Lansana, poet, author and professor coming to you from the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of over twenty books in poetry, nonfiction and children’s literature. Lansana is Applied Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing and Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he is also Director of the African American Studies program and the Media Lab. Lansana is an alumnus of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and was formerly a Lecturer in Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa where he also served as Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation.
Lansana is Executive Producer of KOSU/NPR’s Focus: Black Oklahoma monthly radio program, which is a recipient of a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award, a 2022 NAACP Image Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists Award and was a Peabody Award nominee. Lansana is also the recipient of a 2022 Emmy Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Award and a 2022 National Educational Telecommunications Association Public Media Award for his roles as host and consultant for the OETA (PBS) documentary film “Tulsa Race Massacre: 100 Years Later.”
Lansana is a three-time International Regional Magazine Award-winning Contributing Editor for Oklahoma Today magazine. A former faculty member of both the Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
and the Drama Division of
The Juilliard School, Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and
Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2012 and was Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing there until 2014.
His most recent books include Killing the Negative: A Conversation in Art & Verse (with Joel Daniel Phillips), Opal’s Greenwood Oasis, the skin of dreams: new and collected poems, 1995-2018, The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience & Change Agent) and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop. Forthcoming titles include a hybrid biography of Ralph Ellison, a memoir on the last decade of his mentor, Miss Gwendolyn Brooks, and a series of books on the Black Rodeo. Lansana’s work appears in Best American Poetry 2019.
He is a founding member of Tri-City Collective and serves on the Board of Directors of Oklahoma Humanities and the Tulsa Press Club. Lansana is a Curatorial Scholar for The Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art. He is a Cave Canem alumnus and a member of the first cohort of the Culture of Health Leadership Institute for Racial Healing Fellowship. https://www.tricitycollective.com/quraysh-ali-lansana
