When I look back on all that history and all that time and what happened down there of
people being killed and shot and murdered and burnt to the
ground. You know, that was during a time when Blacks were forced to
to live together.
They spent their money among themselves.
That Black dollar would go around 30 times in their community.
They had hotels, banks, they had airplanes.
And it was Black Wall Street of America, of the world.
It started off as a Tulsa race riot.
It wasn't a riot, it was a massacre.
The first time I heard about it, probably when I was grown because it wasn't taught in the schools
and wasn't talked about in the community, and most of us didn't know anything about it.
My grandfather, Joe Eaton, had a shoeshine stand down there on Greenwood.
And I guess when the massacre took place, he was probably in his early 20s or something like that.
He came over here on Norfolk Avenue and built a home right here.
And then he built the building where the barber shop was, and it's a duplex.
There's one side of it that he put together for family where the radio station is
right now. Bobby Senior is my dad,
who's been here in the community for several years doing activism.
He worked along the side of my grandfather.
And so I was able to catch some of the very end of Black Wall Street.
I remember that all these African-American iconic men
in the community would come into that barbershop to get their hair done.
They come in there and be talking about economic development and they'd be talking about jobs.
They'd be talking about everything that you can even imagine in a barbershop.
The barbershop is inoperative, so nobody goes in there.
It's very sentimental to my dad, so I don't even really go in there.
But I'm in the radio station, which is next door, the property which grandpa had for family.
My mother passed away in 2018.
She was the love of my life, she supported me in everything that I've ever done.
And my dad is still alive.
He's here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He's 85 years old.
And you can catch him down on Greenwood and on any given day.
At first, I didn't want to move back to Tulsa, because I know Tulsa was very highly
racist. Being African-American, moving back to Tulsa, you have to create
something for yourself.
And when I came back, there wasn't a lot of music to be played.
So I had to really actually reinvent myself.
So I said, "Well, we got bad communication here in Tulsa, so I'm going to open up a radio
station." And that's just what I did.
You can tune in to our radio station via FM radio,
Internet, radio, livestream on Facebook and other social entities.
We're running commercials.
We play a lot of old school music and music from the '70s, '80s, a little bit of
'90s. And we talk about economic development jobs.
We talk about incarceration.
We talk about single parent moms.
I talk about my grandfather, my dad and my family, on our radio broadcasts
all the time. I educate young people who may not know of this history.
The elders passed away, the community change.
A lot of people didn't keep their property.
Now, if you come to Tulsa and you go down on Black Wall Street, you'll see a little bitty small
section of the remaining little buildings that were left down there.
They ran a freeway through it, and just all of this
gentrification, big old schools, and it's really kind of sad.
And the house has been around for a long time, thinking about even selling it,
you know, and I would hate for that to happen.
I'm just going to stay here as long as I can stay here, you know, and try to keep the family
legacy up and going.
The Black Wall Street entrepreneurship that my grandfather had has influenced a
lot of my family members.
No matter where I may go in my life, I'll always have that spirit within my heart.
We are still traumatized here in north Tulsa, Black Tulsa, from
that massacre.
When things like that happen in your community, you have to start doing healthy
things like I'm doing the radio station.
We got to talk about racism.
We got to talk about the disparities of what has happened.
If we don't discuss it, we can't grow.
African-Americans, we're more consumers.
We got things going out, money going out, rather than coming in.
And when that happens, there's no economic development in the community.
I just hope that people in the community take some of their
finances and start the rebuild, purchase land, we can get into
our communities and rebuild our community.