In-person at the Barker Center and Streaming at youtube.com/hutchinscenter

Stevie Johnson, Producer, DJ, Scholar 

Little Africa On Fire, Still 

PLEASE NOTE SPECIAL COLLOQUIUM LOCATION: Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street

Part of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Colloquium Series

Fire in Little Africa Performance: a multimedia hip-hop project commemorating the 1921 massacre of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood known as ‘Black Wall Street’.

In the early 20th century, Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood was a thriving mecca of black business. The combination of the oil boom in Oklahoma saw wealth pouring into Greenwood and Jim Crow laws meant those dollars continued to circulate within the black community. The entrepreneurs of Greenwood believed black people had a better chance of economic progress if they pooled their resources, worked together, and supported each other’s businesses. Soon, people like Booker T. Washington spread word around the nation that Tulsa was the ‘promised land’ of opportunity for blacks in America and ‘Black Wall Street’ was born.

In 1921, white Tulsans with the backing of city leaders like Tate Brady attacked Greenwood and burned 40 square blocks to the ground. Hundreds of people were killed and thousands lost their homes or businesses in one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history. The scapegoat for the massacre was a 19-year-old shoe shiner named Dick Rowland, falsely accused of attacking a white girl in an elevator which set off the chain of events that led to the massacre of Greenwood. For years, this dark chapter was left out of textbooks as Tulsa attempted to erase this part of its past.

Over 100 years later, the massacre still hangs heavy over the city and the scars of 1921 may never fully heal. Miraculously this set of circumstances have birthed a hip-hop scene built on love, community and the legacy of the ancestors that paved the way. Now the Tulsa community is preparing to acknowledge what happened, bring justice to the victims and move forward into the future. Now, hip-hop artists have taken on an important role in leading the community in processing this generational trauma and ushering in a new era for Tulsa with a groundbreaking project entitled Fire in Little Africa.

Fire in Little Africa (FILA) is a hip hop collective of 60 artists from the state of Oklahoma that developed a 21-track commemorative album to bring awareness to the rich history of the Historic Greenwood District known as Black Wall Street as well as the hideous act and effects of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Ultimately through the work of this collective, the artists were signed to Motown Records and accumulated a lot of communal and commercial success from the album. On April 26, the collective will be performing Fire in Little Africa at the Harvard Dance Center at 6pm. The event is open and free to the public and is sponsored by the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, the Harvard Dance Center, the Woody Guthrie Center, the Bob Dylan Center, Crowe & Dunlevy Law Firm, Be Good Development Partners, Dreamwood, The Space Program & Dr. View.

Stevie “Dr. View” Johnson, PhD is a 2023 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellow at Harvard University. Dr. View, a DJ, producer, educator and community organizer from Longview, TX, is the founder and executive producer of Fire in Little. In addition, Dr. View is the Assistant Professor of Creative Practice in Popular Music at The Ohio State University.