Thursday, June 19, 2025 – Shared Indigenous and Black history: the Tulsa Race Massacre and a ‘dismal’ swamp

Tulsa, Okla. Mayor Monroe Nichols is championing a $105 million reparations package for the survivors and families of his city’s 1921 Race Massacre. It’s a philanthropy-driven city and housing rejuvenation project to offset the continuing repercussions from the coordinated attack more than a century ago. At the time, thousands of white residents besieged what was among the most successful and affluent Black communities in the early 20th century. Three hundred Black people died and more than a thousand homes and businesses were destroyed. Years of efforts to compensate descendants for the violence have failed. We’ll get perspectives from Freedmen descendants about the importance of this ambitious effort to set things right. (Photo: Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge by Rebecca Wynn/USFWS, via Flickr/CC) Also, we’ll learn about a swamp with connections to Indigenous people going back thousands of years. On the homelands of the Nansemond Indian Nation in Virginia, the Great Dismal Swamp was a safe space for tribes. It also became a refuge for Black freedom seekers escaping slavery. Federal officials are exploring it as a new National Heritage Area. GUESTS Hannibal B. Johnson, author, attorney, and consultant Saché Primeaux-Shaw (Ponca, Yankton Dakota, Seminole, and Chickasaw Freedman), historian and genealogist Sam Bass (Nansemond Indian Nation), Chief Emeritus of the Nansemond Indian Nation  Alexandra Sutton (African American and Yesàh), co-founder of the Great Dismal Swamp Stakeholder Collaborative and executive director of Indigenous East Eric “Mubita” Sheppard, co-founder of Mubita LLC   Break 1 Music: Healing Song (song) Red Hawk Medicine Drum (artist) New Beginnings (album) Break 2 Music: Maybe (song) Mogley & the Zoniez (artist) Better Late Than Never (album)