Breaking silences: Lessons from Tulsa and Charlottesville

Andrea Douglas is the founding executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. She was recently appointed to the Governor’s Commission to Study Slavery and Subsequent De Jure and De Facto Racial and Economic Discrimination and to the board of Virginians for the Arts. She is also the co-chair of the President’s Commission on the Age of Segregation at the University of Virginia and serves on Monticello’s Advisory Committee on African American Affairs as well as the state’s History of Lynching in Virginia Working Group. She has served on the City of Charlottesville Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Monuments, and Public Spaces, the University of Virginia’s President’s Commission on Slavery at the University, and was chair of the city’s PLACE Design Task Force.

Scott Ellsworth has been researching and writing about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre for 45 years. His newest book, The Ground Breaking, details how the massacre was deliberately covered up for a half century—and of the determined individuals who finally got the story out. He teaches at the University of Michigan.

Kevin K. Gaines is a Miller Center faculty senior fellow and the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia. He received his BA degree from Harvard University and his PhD degree from Brown University in the Department of American Civilization. He is author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin book prize of the American Studies Association.