TULSA, Okla. — Dozens of people filled the pews at Vernon A.M.E. Church, listening to plans to convert their roughly 3,000-square-foot basement into a $1.5-million interpretive center focused on Greenwood's history.
“Every brick, every beam absorbed the trauma from the massacre, but it also absorbed the great times too,” said Kristi Williams. “So, those are the stories that we’re wanting to tell and to show through the architecture.”
Kristi Williams is heading up the project for the Vernon Witness Interpretive Center.
“It’s just going to be an amazing project that Tulsa needs,” said Williams.
The work is personal for her. Her great aunt experienced the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre firsthand, and she’s a member of the one building on Greenwood that survived it.
“It just always meant something for me to not keep these stories to myself but to share them not with just this community but with the world,” said Williams.
Renderings show what the space will look like when it’s finished, including some of the more than 5,000 artifacts they’ve recovered.
Williams says it’ll provide a holistic view of Greenwood.
“There is more to Greenwood than the massacre,” said Williams. “There was a life that happened before it and a life that happened after it and a life that is happening now, and we want to capture all of those stories because it gets lost in just the tragedy.”
Just this summer, more than 1,800 people toured Vernon’s basement, seeing firsthand the heat indentations on the beams that support the church and other historic features.
The refuge room is part of the church's history that it wants to highlight. They say 300 people hid inside during the Race Massacre, highlighting the double brick walls as instrumental in protecting the people inside.
With the project funded by the Mellon Foundation, Senior Pastor Keith Mayes Sr. says it’ll bring even more people through their doors.
“Now on a larger scale a more professional scale people will be able to come in and experience it while the story is being told,” said Rev. Keith Mayes Sr.
He says the center will be a beacon of the community’s resilience.
“We can inspire this next generation to be more self-sufficient, to be entrepreneurs, to be producers and not just consumers,” said Rev Mayes Sr.
The work is expected to start this spring and should take 18 months to finish. The Interpretive Center is phase 1 of the project.
Their ultimate goal is to create a full-scale museum on the church’s property.
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