My Fraught Visit to the Bob Dylan Center Revisited

An Experience of Erasure, Dissonance, and the Consequences of Collection to Collective Memory

Back in September 2022, I posted a piece on The Dylantantes called My Fraught Visit to the Bob Dylan Center. It tells the tale of my friend and I traveling to the Center for the first time and our experience with activists in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood was the neighborhood famously known as Black Wall Street at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was also the site of the horrors of the Tulsa Race Massacre in May and June of 1921, almost exactly 103 years ago as of this writing.

My piece was an attempt to summarize the Race Massacre, which many still have never heard of, and to grapple with the placement of the Bob Dylan Center Archive in the neighboring Tulsa Arts District, itself a site of considerable racial tension.

I am revisiting the piece because of recent news that a decades-old attempt by survivors of the Massacre to obtain reparations has finally failed in the Oklahoma Supreme Court. As unlikely as it sounds, two women who were child victims of the riot are still with us: Lessie Benningfield Randle (109) and Viola Fletcher (110). With this state court decision, any hope for even a sliver of justice for these women or the Black residents of Tulsa expires forever, just like the long-ago casualties of the racist rampage.

I wish I were revisiting this piece for the opposite reason — that these survivors have prevailed — but even that stunted degree of justice is simply not the way of Oklahoma apparently. Even if you agree with the ruling—perhaps, to be generous, on strictly legal grounds — it becomes impossible to ignore the persistent injustice still visited upon these innocent people. Indeed, it becomes impossible to deny that the cruelty is the point — a feature, not a bug, to lean on a cliche. Oh, and the racism. The cruelty and the racism.

The Tulsa Race Massacre is the century-old crime that just keeps on giving, it seems.

I hope you read or listen to this piece to the end even if you encountered it before. As Dylan fans we have a special responsibility, I believe, to understand a little better the context of the placement of the Bob Dylan Center and the horrific history of that place.

This revisited version is lightly edited from the original .

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