M E S SAG E F R O M U C L A WAS S E R M A N D E A N T I N A C H R I ST I E
Ed&IS MAGAZINE OF THE UCLA SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND INFORMATION STUDIES
SUMMER 2021
Christina Christie, Ph.D. UCLA Wasserman Dean & Professor of Education, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies Laura Lindberg Executive Director External Relations, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies EDITOR
Leigh Leveen Senior Director of Marketing and Communications UCLA School of Education and Information Studies lleveen@support.ucla.edu CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Joanie Harmon Director of Communications UCLA School of Education and Information Studies harmon@gseis.ucla.edu John McDonald Director, Sudikoff Family Institute jmcdonald@gseis.ucla.edu Alex Polner
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Robin Weisz Design © 2021, by The Regents of the University of California
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2 UCLA Ed&IS SUMMER 2021
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s this summer issue of our magazine is published, we mark the one-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, and the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a racist White mob staged a violent attack that decimated a thriving Oklahoma community (the center of which is often referred to as “Black Wall Street”) and where as many as 300 Black Americans were killed. Though these horrific events took place nearly a century apart, the parallels between them go beyond the obvious themes of racism and violence. The events remind us that the power to reconstruct, record and share our stories impacts our role in determining what counts as “history.” The video documentation of Floyd’s brutal murder last year by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier and the collection of survivor accounts by community witnesses in Tulsa in 1921 and after have made possible the pursuit of justice and
reparations. They are also invaluable historical documents that force us, as a nation, to face the consequences of ignorance, prejudice and hate. It bears noting that two of the most crucial documentarians of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Mary E. Jones Parrish and Eddie Faye Gates, were educators. Mary E. Jones Parrish’s Events of the Tulsa Disaster (1923) was a collection of first-person recollections of the massacre, and the first published account of the event. She was one of the earliest users of the phrase “Negro’s Wall Street” to describe the vibrant Greenwood community in Tulsa destroyed by White mob violence. Among the businesses lost were Tulsa’s two Black-owned newspapers, the Tulsa Star and the Oklahoma Sun. Without local Black press to report the facts of the event, it’s little wonder that Parrish’s book became important source material for the writings on it that followed. In Events of the Tulsa Disaster, Parrish contextualized what happened to Greenwood in relation to recent attacks on Black communities in other cities, challenged false narratives of the event, and even offered policy solutions to avert future tragedies of this nature. In the late 1990s, retired Oklahoma history teacher Eddie Faye Gates was appointed to a state-sanctioned task force investigating the Tulsa Race Massacre. In her work with the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, she interviewed over 100 massacre survivors living across the country. Her video interviews are now available to view online and her research materials have been donated to the Gilcrease Museum in North Tulsa. Teachers across the United States have quickly responded to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement by engaging students in discussions of structural racism and social justice. Some school districts have implemented anti-bias training for educators and now require the teaching of history specific to marginalized peoples. Even before Floyd’s murder in 2020, some districts had mandated for curriculum use the 1619 Project, a critically acclaimed longform story project by the
