Last month, the journalist Victor Luckerson published “Built from the Fire,” a comprehensive history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and its enduring consequences and resonances in Greenwood, the heart of Black North Tulsa. On May 31st of that year, and continuing into the next day, an armed mob of hundreds of white men invaded Greenwood, looting, burning, and murdering. Despite Jim Crow and merciless segregation, trickle-down prosperity from an oil boom in its third decade had made Greenwood boom, too; its thriving commercial district was celebrated as Black Wall Street. In a matter of hours, thirty-five blocks of houses, businesses, professional offices, churches—all of it—had been reduced to ashy ruins. Thousands of Greenwood residents became homeless, and as many as three hundred others died, making the massacre one of the deadliest known episodes of racial violence in American history.
A native of Montgomery, Alabama, Luckerson first visited Tulsa in the spring of 2018, to report for the Web site the Ringer on preparations for the massacre’s centennial. Soon after his six-thousand-word dispatch was published, he knew that he wanted a more expansive canvas—what would become his first book—and the following year he settled in Tulsa. (“I had a somewhat romantic notion of, when I turned thirty, moving someplace where I didn’t know anyone and starting a new life, so to speak,” he said.) For research assistance, he had in mind an ideal candidate, his then thirteen-year-old cousin, Stanley (Jacks) Stoutamire, Jr.—“one of the smartest people” he knew.
During a Zoom conversation on the book’s publication date, the week after Stoutamire’s graduation from high school in Birmingham, he and Luckerson discussed the movement in many red states to prohibit the inclusion of the history of events like the massacre in public-school curricula. In what did not seem like a coincidence, a couple of weeks before the centennial, Oklahoma’s governor, Kevin Stitt, signed House Bill 1775, which banned, among other things, classroom discussions that would cause any “individual [to] feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”
Stoutamire began working for Luckerson the summer after his freshman year of high school, in 2020, within days of the broad-daylight murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minnesota. One of his first assignments was to immerse himself in the summer of 1919, known as the Red Summer, when an epidemic of white-supremacist attacks and lynchings terrorized Black people in more than thirty American cities, prefiguring the Tulsa Race Massacre.
“In the teaching of American history,” Stoutamire said, “there’s a focus on signal events—the signing of the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the big moments that make America as good as we would like it to be. Growing up and going to school in Birmingham, there were lots of conversations about the civil-rights legacy of the city. I attended Catholic schools and feel that I received a really solid education. Certain things are deemed essential. Working with Victor on this book introduced me to the many chapters of Black history that are often not considered essential.”
In the fall of Luckerson’s freshman year at the University of Alabama, in 2008, he voted for the first time in a Presidential election—for Barack Obama. “My parents grew up in Jim Crow Alabama,” he said. “And to go from their experiences to me voting for the first Black President, I got this idea in my head that American progress might be linear, and that the country might just keep progressing in a positive way. The experience of the last ten years, the ongoing and escalating conservative backlash to racial progress, has opened my eyes. Progress is actually very cyclical. I think a lot about where I was when I was Stanley’s age compared to where I am now. Stanley is way ahead of the curve.”
“Working with Victor on ‘Built from the Fire,’ ” said Stoutamire, who will enter Princeton in September, “has always been a project about both education and inspiration, especially doing research about subjects like the Red Summer. Understanding that there are not just dark but distinctly bloody chapters in American history. I think the inspiration for me is understanding that the darkest days are typically not the last days, that there is a future. But now there are laws targeting books like ‘Built from the Fire,’ and I had no idea that was coming. I always approach things with the idea that people have the best of intentions in mind. To target works of literature or history because they are uncomfortable is just totally bewildering to me. Throughout my four years of high school, in all my English classes, we talked about how good literature is supposed to challenge you. The same with history. If you feel one hundred per cent comfortable with the history that you’re learning, then you’re either not paying attention or not learning all of it.” 
Building Victor Luckerson’s “Built from the Fire”
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