Growing a Just Future in Tulsa

Soil collection ceremonies offer a meaningful way to help cope with and create institutional memory of racial violence across the United States. The Equal Justice Initiative is working to keep the victims of lynching and racial violence alive in America’s collective memory by promoting a practice common across cultures—the collection of soil. Communities collect soil from sites of racially motivated killings into jars, which are then displayed at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

The Fayette County Traveling Museum collects, preserves, and shares Uniontown’s Black history. The owners sift through archives, libraries, and donated boxes of materials, which are displayed as educational resources. The museum, which before COVID-19 was set up at schools and churches, details the early history of African Americans, both enslaved and free, the town’s Underground Railroad stop, prominent Black community figures, and the area’s Klu Klux Klan presence. Video and oral histories of older residents also encourage young people to explore their history and make the information more accessible.

In an effort to combat racial injustice, former plantations are shifting the narrative typically given on tours to focus on the lives of the enslaved who once lived there instead of enslavers who owned the plantations. The initiative sprung from a need to accurately portray the history of slavery and better “inform the present.”

Students and educators across the country are discussing how to implement anti-racism curriculum in the classroom. Although it can be challenging, educators are using a myriad of methods to teach students about racism. “We are a part of the curriculum, the way that we show up, the way that we enter spaces.”

Coming to terms with the past requires reexamining the way we represent both history and art. The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA, is on the forefront of correcting the absence of enslaved craftsmen in representations of art. The museum’s exhibit on the architectural work at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home presents a fuller story by illuminating the presence and work of enslaved laborers.

Memorials are being created at rapid rates these days, but they seem to lack a long-term effect on the public. The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials project seeks to change this pattern by putting out an international call for memorial proposals, wanting a variety in visions and a collective memorial, in order to remember the torture of black detainees and racialized police misconduct.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese Canadian Museum and the Chinatown Storytelling Centre both opened in Vancouver with the goal of documenting and honoring the role of Chinese immigrants in Canadian history. Roughly 13,000 people have visited each museum since their openings, and members of the Chinese Canadian community say the exhibits preserve important stories while acknowledging the harm Chinese Candians have faced.

Richmond’s Robert E. Lee statue has become an example of American protest art as protesters have covered it in graffiti demanding racial justice and surrounded it with basketball hoops, gardens, tents, lawn chairs, and a grill for community gatherings. The site has become a symbol, a place of local pilgrimage, to collectively create a public space of belonging and protest racial injustices and systemic racism. The Lee statue is likely to be taken down soon, as all other confederate statues on "monument row" have been, because a judge recently struck down the legal challenges to the state’s plan to remove it.

A burst of creativity is helping Portland confront its racist histories. From murals appearing on boarded-up buildings, protest art on exhibit at art centers, and artists gathering downtown to display their work depicting clashes between protestors and federal troops, new opportunities have been created for the city's Black artists. Community groups are also connecting artists with affordable housing resources and memorializing displaced Black communities using murals, photography, and oral histories. While a good start, more work is needed to bring about structural changes.

A “rapid response” mural project transformed shuttered storefronts with vibrant messages of pride, perseverance, anger, justice, and unity. The project was funded by Arts in Public Places Looking Forward, a new organized formed to support artists impacted by Covid-19. An open call was posted for interested artists, and the project prioritized artists who had been affected by racial violence and injustice. More than 100 commissioned murals, and many more works of graffiti and public art, focused on support for the Black Lives Matter movement or called on an end to police misconduct.