Greenwood Rising's story of resilience

James Baldwin once said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

This quote is featured prominently on the exterior facade of the Greenwood Rising Black Wall Street History Center in Tulsa, Okla., the museum that opened in 2021 to commemorate the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. This challenging piece of history is something that Tulsa native and designer Justin Sack, of Selser Schaefer Architects, says he never learned about while attending school in the city. However, he felt honored to help tell the story of the Greenwood neighborhood and Black Wall Street through his work on the museum, which will educate people all over the world for decades to come on the rich Black history of Greenwood and the violent events of the Tulsa Race Massacre.  

We talked with Sack about the rewards and challenges of creating a world-class museum to commemorate a pivotal piece of local history. 

What were the initial conversations with the client like for this project?

It evolved over time, as many projects do. We initially approached this as an expansion of the Greenwood Cultural Center, where they have quite a few photographs and news articles from the event displayed in their lobby. That’s where things originated – [the desire for] a better place to showcase that information and some of the things that they’ve collected over the years.

It evolved over time across several different sites and different ownership.

Can you tell me about the community involvement process?

The owner and the [Centennial Commission] were ingrained with the community and local businesses in the area, who helped craft the vision for the project. We were involved in several of those meetings, presenting and showing concept progress. We worked hand-in-hand with the exhibit designer, which was a group out of New York, and they met with different community members to get perspective and historical information.

I wanted to ask you about working with Local Projects, the exhibition and media design firm out of New York, on the multimedia aspects of the museum. What was that collaboration like?

It was awesome. They were a great group to work with. We hit it off at the first meeting. They worked closely with [attorney and historian] Hannibal Johnson on the research side. They were pulling all the background information to weave into the story. We worked with their design side crafting the building to become the backdrop to the story they were telling. There was quite a bit of coordination effort there, from just creating the right-sized space, to the right lighting, the right finishes, to help [the space] become the right backdrop to the different gallery experiences. We had collaborative sessions with them, almost like design charettes, where we threw out different ideas, trying to find innovative ways to create a space that could speak to multi-generational users. There’s a technology component to some of the exhibits that relate to youth, and more traditional, tactile, narrative-type exhibits that adults can relate to.

How did you think about the history of Greenwood and Black Wall Street as it related to the building design?

Of course, we wanted to respect that history, but [represent] it in a different, new way through materiality and form. You’ll see that with the use of brick. A lot of the original [Greenwood] buildings were brick; they had nice ornamentation around different fenestrations and things like that around the facade. So that really became the base of our building.  

We selected a brick that had a pretty distinctive profile on it that printed a banding effect that paid tribute to some of that articulation of the brick structures in the past without getting too ornamental [and] keeping things a little more simplistic on our side. But what it did is raise the building up from the roots or the history of the site, using the brick and then transitioning to glass fiber-reinforced concrete panels. The white panels that you see on the facade, in this outreaching kind of expression—it utilizes a clean, hopeful backdrop within the fabric and the context of the existing buildings that are still there today.

We used the fiber cement panels to create articulation across those elements. They’re wedges that do some fun, kind of playful things throughout the day as the sun moves across the building, through shadows and light, and then take on a whole different character and appearance at night, when we’re able to illuminate it. For us, it tied into the history of Black Wall Street and how it transitioned from its business use during the day to an entertainment district in the evening.

Those penetrations, they appear random, right? They’re different sizes and shapes at different locations on the building. So it creates this kind of individuality to those pieces, and yet it creates an interesting fabric that is symbolic of the community to us.

What were some challenges inherent to this design process?

The nature of the background and the history was challenging, as well as the timeline. We wanted to have this facility open by the centennial of the event, and so it was quick and there were a lot of stakeholders involved. So, making sure that we kept the project moving forward to have [it] opened by that centennial was critical. It’s a tight site – there were some restrictive elements there, and there was another building under construction right next door. We had to coordinate with that effort.

We stretched the front entry of the building out almost to the edge of the road. We had to go through a process of vacating some air rights to achieve that and really create this building that reached out and welcomed people in.

What was the most rewarding part of this project for you?

It’s a story that I never learned about growing up in Tulsa. Being a part of creating a facility to help tell that story is a pretty cool honor, and I’m very proud to be a part of the team associated with the project. I learned more about the history and the resiliency and the courage of the community to stay in Tulsa [after the events of the massacre].

At my son’s school, an art class had recently gone to the Greenwood district with their sketchbooks. Walking through the school last week, I saw that a lot of the art students had drawn the Greenwood Rising building. It was cool to see it integrated into the community.

Katherine Flynn is Director, Digital Content at AIA.