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Pearl District detention pond public meeting, Monday, October 14, 2019
Tulsa District 4 City Councilor Kara Joy McKee is hosting a public meeting on Monday, October 14, 2019, at the Central Center at Centennial Park, 1028 E 6th St, Tulsa, Oklahoma 74120, from 6 pm to 8 pm, to discuss the planned Elm Creek West stormwater detention pond. The City...
Tulsa City Council District 4: No endorsement
"I shall show my contempt by going down to the polling booth, taking my form, crossing both their names out and writing 'GET KNOTTED' in." -- Tony Hancock, Hancock's Half Hour, "The Election Candidate" I share The Lad's sentiments about many of the races on the August 28, 2018, runoff...
Teacher training a century ago
Amongst the discussion about education funding in Oklahoma is the claim that the large proportion of teachers with emergency or alternative certification is a danger sign -- we can't staff our schools with teachers that have the proper credentials. Getting the proper credentials involves taking certain courses in educational philosophy...
Vision Tulsa: North Tulsa perspective -- a 93.4% rotten apple
One of the joys of this campaign has been getting to know some valiant community leaders that I had not previously met. Tracie Chandler, a leader in the North Star neighborhood, was instrumental in getting the city to do a small area plan covering the 36th Street North corridor between...
Vision Tulsa: Northside payola projects
North Tulsa residents are among the most skeptical of visionary sales taxes. They know that they will bear a heavy share of the costs, but they are doubtful of seeing any benefits. They'll pay extra sales taxes on the basics of life -- food, clothing, electricity, natural gas --...
Alton Nolen DOC record matches Jah'Keem Yisrael Facebook tattoo photos
Tattoo photos in the Facebook profile of someone calling himself Jah'Keem Yisrael matches tattoos named in the Department of Corrections record of Alton Alexander Nolen, the man eyewitnesses say beheaded a worker at a food processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma, on Thursday. A number of websites uncovered the profile and...
African-American-led charter school attacked as racist for hair policy
Deborah Brown Community School, a elementary school in downtown Tulsa chartered under the aegis of Langston University (a historically black state university), has come under attack as a result of a misleading Fox 23 report about a parent's decision to remove his daughter from the school because the school prohibited...
Films of Greenwood post-riot and Oklahoma's African-American communities in the 1920s
100 block of N. Greenwood Ave., Tulsa, west side looking south toward Archer, 1924 or 1925, just three years or so after this block was destroyed in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. It is an exciting thing to see Greenwood alive as it was in its heyday. The...
Vision2: The problems with Prop 2
One possible outcome of Tuesday's vote is the defeat of Proposition 1 and the passage of Proposition 2. Many voters hear about proposed projects and think, "what the heck." There are plenty of reasons to turn down Prop 2. Here are just a few: We're voting in 2012 on a...
Vision2: TulsaNow's better vision
TulsaNow, which has announced its opposition Tulsa County's Vision2 tax scheme, has developed Vision 2029, a detailed example of an alternative, showing one possible scenario of what the City of Tulsa could accomplish if Vision2 is voted down and the City of Tulsa enacts a tax of its own to...
Vision2 imponderables
By the way, I'm speaking at the Tulsa Republican Club luncheon today about Vision2. It's at the Summit Club, 30th floor of the Bank of America Building, 15 W. 16th St. Buffet lunch ($20) served starting at 11:30, program begins at 12 noon. You can join the club for $25...
Tulsa Metro Chamber's 2011 election manifesto
Here is the Tulsa Metro Chamber's "candidate priorities" -- effectively the Chamber's "manifesto" for the 2011 City of Tulsa election. Candidates seeking the endorsement of and funding from the Chamber's PAC (TulsaBizPac) were interviewed and questioned about these issues. I have added bold font for emphasis on the most controversial...
Redd Foxx, Taft police chief
Here's an odd little digression to take us into the weekend: The mention of the town of Boley in the 1977 documentary on historic preservation in Oklahoma got me chasing a rabbit in the middle of writing the previous entry. It brought to mind a time in the '70s when...
Tulsa Boy Singers spring concert, Friday & Saturday
This coming Friday and Saturday evening, May 29 and 30, at 7:30 pm, the Tulsa Boy Singers will perform a spring concert of classical selections by Mozart, Holst, Mendelssohn, and others, and songs from the musical Camelot. Admission is $5 (or pay as you can). Donations above and beyond would...
Film of Oklahoma's 1920s black communities available through Global ImageWorks
UPDATE: The films discovered by Currie Ballard, filmed by Rev. Dr. Solomon Sir Jones, are now available for viewing and download on the website of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. More about the Rev. Dr. Solomon Sir Jones and his films here. A couple of years ago,...
More TCC tax hike commentary
Stan Geiger has a few blog entries up about next Tuesday's vote on Tulsa Community College's proposed property tax increases. (See my previous entry for links to my column on the topic and sources for additional information.) Here are some excerpts from Stan's latest -- click the links to read...
The Greenwood Gap Theory: The remaking and unmaking of the Black Wall Street of America
This is the originally submitted version of my column in the June 13, 2007, edition of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is available at the Internet Archive. The image below accompanied the article. It is from a 1951 aerial photo, labeled to indicate streets and landmarks and to show...
Greenwood 1957
This entry was inspired by a recent comment by the president of Langston University. I'll say no more now, as I will address the comment in this week's Urban Tulsa Weekly column, but here are some interesting facts I gleaned from analyzing the 1957 edition of Polk's City Directory. For...
Black Oklahoma of the 1920s on film
Joel Blain emails to tell me about an amazing archival find. Oklahoma historian Currie Ballard has found 33 cans of motion picture film documenting life in the African-American community in Oklahoma in the 1920s. The American Heritage Places website has a page with information about the discovery and a few...
Bruce Niemi, candidate for Tulsa Tech board
Bruce Niemi is one of three candidates for the board of Tulsa Technology Center. He wrote to respond to my comments about Tulsa's forgotten election -- this Tuesday's school board elections and Tulsa Tech board election. I promised that if school board candidates had some information they wanted to get...
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