In Tulsa there's increasing talk of changing the name of the Brady Arts District, which is named after Tate Brady, one of Tulsa's founding citizens. This is spurred largely by the reporting done over the last several yearsby Leroy Chapman of This Land Press, who's been writing about Brady's role in preventing the rebuilding of the African American section of Tulsa (Greenwood) and his close connections to the Klan. (This Land Press has had other coverage of Brady here. Also, just to put things into a little perspective, the Klan was rampant in post-riot Oklahoma.)
I'm generally skeptical of name changes -- in large part because I think that facilitates forgetting. But the current residents have, I suppose, as much say in this matter as the people who did the initial naming -- and we need to look carefully at what was known when the initial naming took place and who had a say in the naming. And I think it makes sense to take some measure of how we think about the person honored with a name now. On that score, Tate Brady has fared less well than some. I began a short commentary, "Tate Brady, The Magic City, and the Dreamland," on Chapman's extensive work a couple years back in this way:
Tate Brady, as Lee Roy Chapman points out, did a lot of good for Tulsa, but the positives came with lots of negatives. It is the tragedy of this story that building the city of Tulsa involved violence. In Brady’s case, it was violence against workers and African Americans. Therein lies a story we hear much about in American history at this time.
And now Jaime Adame has a very nice story, "The Meaning of Change," in Urban Tulsa Weekely. I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about this story in the months to come. Just another of the many examples of the law and morality of building renaming that we periodically face. Soon I want to talk a little bit about my strangely unsettled attitude towards a Confederate monument I saw up in Lunenburg County a few weeks back, as well as the Sussex County Confederate monument.
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