Town Hall Seattle and Bushwick Book Club present
Original Music Inspired by Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”
Artists Respond to the Timeless Graphic Memoir
Rental Partner: University of Washington Office of Public Lectures presents
Victor Luckerson
A Scheme to Forget, a Demand to Remember
Note: A livestream will be available for this event.
Presented by the University of Washington Office of Public Lectures. For questions about this event, please contact lectures@uw.edu.
Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood was an ascendant black business district when it was burned to the ground by a white mob in 1921. Since the days after the destruction, people in power have been trying to erase the memory of the Tulsa Race Massacre, going so far as to rip pages from the historical record to hide what unfolded. This purposeful forgetting continues today, as state governments in Oklahoma and elsewhere limit what histories can be taught to children in schools. But all along black Tulsans have provided their own historical ledger, through oral histories, legal battles, and the black press. They demand that the city and the nation remember. In his lecture, Built From the Fire author Victor Luckerson will explore this century-long battle over the “terrain of the mind” in Tulsa. His talk will explore why the story of Greenwood has been wiped from the American consciousness for so long, and the ongoing efforts by black Tulsans to make that legacy more widely known.
Read More
Victor Luckerson is a journalist and author who works to bring neglected black history to light. A native of Montgomery, Alabama, Victor attended the University of Alabama, studying journalism and history. There he served as the second-ever black editor-in-chief of the school’s campus newspaper, The Crimson White. Under Victor’s leadership, the newspaper covered issues ranging from entrenched racism in the Greek system to corrupt politics in student government. The most challenging assignment was grappling with the devastating tornado that ravaged the city of Tuscaloosa and a wide swath of the South on April 27, 2011. It was the first time he and many of my friends were forced to make sense of a tragedy.
After college Victor worked for seven years as a technology and business reporter, first at Time magazine and later at the media startup The Ringer. He covered how the ascendant tech giants were transforming both physical and digital spaces, from Airbnb gentrifying neighborhoods to Facebook warping social discourse through the creation of the Like button. But Victor never really loved writing about corporations; he preferred writing about real people. In particular, he was always looking for more chances to tell black people’s stories. In 2018, Victor wrote a feature story for The Ringer about Tulsa’s historic Greenwood District (also known as “Black Wall Street”) and the 1921 race massacre that left the neighborhood in ruins. He soon realized that a single article barely scratched the surface of all that had transpired in Greenwood over its long history. In 2019, Victor quit his job at The Ringer and moved to Tulsa to pursue a nonfiction book project about Greenwood, chronicling the neighborhood’s story from its frontier origins to its place as a modern symbol of black success. The project became Built From the Fire, published by Penguin Random House in May 2023.
Sponsoring Departments: The Graduate School, Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, School of Social Work, Department of History, Department of American Ethnic Studies, College of the Built Environment, Department of Political Science, The Honors Program, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Upcoming Events
Loading view.
Town Hall Seattle and Northwest Center for Creative Aging present
Erika Crichton with Rebecca Crichton
Here’s to the Future! An Intergenerational Conversation about Aging
Adam Ross with Gabrielle Bates
Playworld: A Novel