TULSA, Okla. — Members of the Greenwood Avenue Chamber’s advisory board are calling on public officials to halt their work to designate the historic district its own national monument, even creating a petition to add public pressure.
This comes after Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum and members of Congress announced they’d work to guarantee a monument in the near future.
“It is super important to get this right because if we don’t, there’s opportunity and chance for us not to have this history the way we want it to be told,” advisory board member Heather Nash told 2 News Reporter Samson Tamijani Tuesday.
City and county leaders respectively endorsed a letter asking legislators for a national monument for Greenwood Avenue back in February.
In March, Greenwood Chamber advisory board members traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with lawmakers to construct a plan for one, with a less-than-desired impact, board members said.
The advisory board has no problem with a national monument, either at a certain spot or the original Greenwood buildings themselves.
What’s not okay, they argue, is not even being involved in the process.
“All of (the) logistics of it, we never received that because we never were brought at the table. If we came to the meetings, we were pushed to the side like we were not a stakeholder,” advisory board member Patricia Breeckner said.
Breeckner, who owns Natural Health Clinic, is a stakeholder in the original buildings that make up Greenwood which was bombarded during the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
Fellow advisory board member Heather Nash is a descendant of one of the victims.
“To (plan for a monument) without stakeholders, and not to have stakeholders at the lead, is kind of asinine to me,” Nash said.
The anguish at local and national leaders resulted in one member drafting this online petition calling to halt any bill establishing a monument.
That is, Nash said, is until officials can simply draft a plan with their full input.
“Being able to be successful is to tell the real truth about what happened," she said.
"And I think on the national level. It’s important for other communities because it happened in other places too. But this might be the start of why we need to be having these conversations because America had a history of doing wrong to people that look like me.”
2 News reached out to Mayor Bynum's office and the offices of Sen. Lankford and Rep. Hern for comment Tuesday afternoon but haven't heard back as of Tuesday night.
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