The Threatt family is trying to restore their Route 66 filling station in Luther and turn it into an interpretive center. The National Trust for Historic Preservation listed it as one of its 11 most endangered historic sites and included it among 40 Black historical sites receiving a total of $3 million in grants.
Credit Oklahoma Historical Society
This summer has brought help to a family trying to restore their Luther, Oklahoma, gas station that was likely the first and only Black-owned and -operated one on Route 66.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation recently included Threatt Filling Station in a $3 million total grant award to preserve 40 Black historic sites in the U.S. That came after the trust named it one of its 11 most endangered historic places in the country. According to the trust, less than 5% of sites they designate “most endangered” have been lost.
Credit Oklahoma Historical Society
The Tulsa City Council unanimously passed a resolution Wednesday night acknowledging and apologizing for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
It also says they and the mayor will establish a community-led process by the end of the year to look at various proposals for reconciliation, including those from a state commission 20 years ago that call for reparations. Still, the council made it clear reparations are not part of the resolution.
More than two dozen people at the council meeting to comment on the resolution were overwhelmingly in support of reparations and had the support of the Rev. Jesse Jackson; former Asheville, North Carolina Councilman Keith Young, the architect of that city s reparations plan; and Evanston, Illinois, Alderman Robin Rue Simmons, who led the charge in her city approving a first-in-the-nation reparations plan.
NPS Photo - Teri Jobe
The narrative about the Sand Creek Massacre among white historians and lawmakers hasn’t always stayed true to what actually occurred.
Originally published in Denverite April 19, 2021.
Otto Braided Hair’s great-grandparents survived the deadliest day in Colorado history.
On Nov. 29, 1864, U.S. soldiers attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people in eastern Colorado back when the state was a territory. Troops brutally killed more than 200 people most of them women, children and elders during what’s now widely known as the Sand Creek Massacre.
“It’s more of a generational trauma,” Braided Hair said. “We still have strong feelings and emotions about our history and what happened to our old people, especially in this instance where they were wronged.”