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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Do you know the Alfred I. duPont Awards given out by Columbia University every year? They are the most prestigious awards in broadcast or digital journalism. This year's winners were announced on Tuesday night. Winners include PBS for four different shows including the documentary series Philly D.A. about the progressive prosecutor there, Larry Krasner. Norah O'Donnell, the CBS Evening News anchor one for her report on sexual assault in the military. Amazon Studios for their documentary My Name Is Pauli Murray, and several others.

I am delighted to announce that the WNYC podcast series Blindspot: Tulsa Burning co-produced with a History Channel and KOSU public radio in Oklahoma, also won a duPont. That was the six-part series about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, one of the deadliest incidents of white supremacist terror in American history which so many Americans only learned about for the first time this past year. WNYC's KalaLea reported this series, spending a lot of time in Tulsa and speaking to many people there with family connections to the massacre and its reverberations to this day, and even to 107-year-old Viola Fletcher who remembers it herself.

Viola Fletcher: I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home. I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fur. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day.

Brian Lehrer: Viola Fletcher, 107 as of last May, from the Episode 5 of Tulsa Burning which came out last spring. We'll hear a few more amazing audio bites as we go. Since then, as the series reported in its epilogue, a new law in Oklahoma limits how teachers can teach the Tulsa Massacre in Tulsa schools. We'll talk about that too. With us now, with a live epilogue, is KalaLea, host of Tulsa Burning. She is also a producer for The New Yorker Radio Hour and other WNYC shows. Hi, KalaLea, welcome back to this show, and congratulate on winning a duPont. That's so exciting.

KalaLea: Hi, Brian. Thank you so very much. Yes, we were very excited, the whole team. It was such a big surprise and such an honor as you know. Thank you for having me on the show. How are you doing today?

Brian Lehrer: I'm doing okay. KalaLea, you're working as a reporter I see. You're always asking people how they're doing.

KalaLea: I care. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] Just so people who don't know your work yet hear and see your name correctly, you go by one name, KalaLea, no space, like Madonna or Prince or other one-named people, right?

KalaLea: Yes, that's right. Many years ago I dropped my last name and that's a much longer story. Yes, just one name, KalaLea. That's fine. Four syllables, that's plenty.

Brian Lehrer: That's enough for one person. That's how many are in my first name and last name combined. Your Twitter handle is @kala_curious. How do you get curious enough about the Tulsa Massacre to do this series?

KalaLea: Honestly, the project came to me. It was brought to me by my executive producer and manager at The New Yorker Radio Hour. Emily Botein who you well know is vice president there at WNYC Studios. It was, I believe, brought to Emily through KOSU or somebody in Oklahoma. They had this idea knowing that the Centennial was soon to happen. I guess it was pitched the year before the Centennial. They had reached out to me to see if I would be interested in hosting and working on it. It's funny they didn't say hosting. I just immediately thought I would only be a producer. It didn't really occur to me probably until right before my first interview that I was really going to be the host, it's very strange, or until we got a sheet of everybody's roles.

That was a really big shock to me. I'm happy that it happened. It was tough but really glad that we did it and that more and more people around the country know about what happened in Tulsa in 1921.

Brian Lehrer: You were such a great host right from the beginning where you told that personal story of something traumatic that happened to you as a child that affects you to this day and drew the parallel with something that happened to people in the City of Tulsa 100 years ago that reverberates with people living there today. Remind people listening right now of the basics. This was in a part of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which Tulsa, to most New Yorkers, might as well be Mars, to begin with. A section of Tulsa known at the time, a century ago, as Black Wall Street. Tell us about that setting and what happened there.

KalaLea: It was in a community called Greenwood and it's in the north part of Tulsa. It was, what I could understand, a thriving community where a lot of people who were migrating due to the six million people, the great migration that was happening, a lot of people were coming into Oklahoma because of oil and because of the opportunities there. A lot of those people were Black people. Native people had already been there because of the things like The Trail of Tears that had happened like 200 years or so prior. Please forgive me if the dates are wrong.

From what I can understand, it just was one of those places where you have a lot of people who are industrious and creative and smart and hustlers and people who just wanted to make a really good life for themselves and their families, who were highly educated and put a lot of work and energy in educating the youth that lived there in their community. They had one of the first-- a really amazing school. I wish I could have included this. The curriculum at Booker T. Washington High School, at that time, I don't think anybody would be able to get through some of the subjects. They had Latin. They were into English literature. Their science curriculum was so far in advance to a lot of other school curriculums around the country at that time.

It was just a remarkable neighborhood and community. When I say neighborhood, I'm saying 40 square blocks, a very vast neighborhood with thousands of homes and buildings and three or four movie theaters. They had their own library. It was a really thriving community.

Brian Lehrer: Then came this massacre.

KalaLea: Yes, then came the massacre. Just another, what I would call crazy-making behavior that caused this massacre. I can't exactly say why but I would suspect that it had a lot to do with envy and jealousy and hatred and all the negative things that we should all steer clear from as human beings. It just culminated in 36 of 48 hours of mayhem and just destruction and abuse and a whole lot of death and a lot of harm.

Brian Lehrer: Hundreds, from what I've read, of people died. No white person was ever prosecuted for any of it, as you report. Here's another clip from this series. This is from Episode 1 and not just important history and reporting, but I'll also say since you won this duPont, great radio technique. This is a grandson of a Tulsa Massacre survivor, Chief Egunwale Amusan, who gives what he calls The Real Black Wall Street Tour. This clip is a montage of him giving parts of the tour and talking about giving parts of the tour.

Chief Egunwale Amusan: One of the reasons we named it The Real Black Wall Street Tour is because there were other tours taking place but they were watered down. I wanted it to be so tangible that you felt like you were living the experience as I tell the story. I wanted you to be able to smell Greenwood. I wanted you to be able to hear the music on Greenwood. I wanted you to be able to smell the burning on Greenwood. I want you to have a total holistic experience. "You could go do any and everything within walking distances in the Greenwood District. Most people have no idea that the original Cotton Club was right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The one in New York--"

We started right in the core, in the heart of Greenwood. I show people what was and what is no more.

"This is the location of the Stratford Hotel. In 1918, this was declared the crown jewel of hotels in the United States of America, owned by a Black man."

I take them to the places where bodies were dumped. I take them to the home of Wyatt Tate Brady, the city founder Klansman.

"He said, 'Yes, I'm a member of the Klan. I'm a proud member of the Klan, so was my father a member of the Klan.'"

So that they can see that he built a home that is the replica of Robert E. Lee. I take them to Standpipe Hill.

"They occupied these hills and fought for their lives."

The battleground location where Black men fought to defend Greenwood. This explains why it was necessary to bomb Greenwood, because it was a losing battle on the ground.

Brian Lehrer: That from the podcast series Blindspot: Tulsa Burning from WNYC in the History channel, now the winner of a duPont Award, the highest honor in broadcast journalism and digital audio. The host and reporter KalaLea is our guest, after the award was announced on Tuesday night.

KalaLea, can you talk just about the production technique going in and out of the tour and his reflections on it? That was so brilliant. I couldn't take my ears off it. Did you have that in mind when you interviewed him?

KalaLea: Probably not, Brian. I think, this whole entire project, it was really collaborative. Definitely, in talking to Chief Amusan, there was a conversation we have to-- What I really wanted and we really wanted for the first episode for you to feel like you were there in Tulsa and you got a sense of what it was like, and what a better way than to go on a tour. It's something that a lot of people do when they go to new cities, if you're unfamiliar with it and you want to get a sense or a lay of the land. You go on a tour.

When we came across Chief Amusan, who, by the way, gives this tour, he works a full-time job doing something completely different. He uses his vacation time, he uses his time after work where he would normally be with family, to do these tours along with a family member, I believe his cousin, and maybe a couple other family members. He's taking away from his personal time because this is how important and significant this event was and for people to really know what happened. He's such a great-- in radio, we say such a good talker, so powerful. We really wanted to layer him giving the tour with him talking to me, but just to give it a feel like you were there, like you were actually on tour, but you were also getting him a behind-the-scenes or a directorial look at his thinking. You know what I mean?

I want to also credit on Joe Plourde who was our technical director, so phenomenal. The sound design and the music, that's him. The music, Hannis Brown. Oh my God, please, Hannis, I'm sorry if I'm saying your name-- Hannis also did a lot of the music, and Amari Ford, who's based there in Oklahoma. The sound design, music, technical direction, I remember just getting a lot of the tape along with our producer, Caroline, and just saying, "Use these pieces of tape." The way that they weaved it in between, just phenomenal.

It was, again a team effort and just so fun to me. I definitely put a lot more energy in myself into Episode 1 because it was the first episode, and then pretty much from there we were just riding the wave as we were getting information, having regular daily conversations as to like, "What do we want to do next? What's really important?"

Brian Lehrer: For people who think of podcasting as sitting in your pajamas and spewing to the world whatever you think, not in this case. Podcasting was a real team sport. When you accepted your duPont award Tuesday night, I see you said, "I would give up this award to reverse the events of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. If it never happened, we would all be better for it, but it's not too late for some course correction and healing." Did you get the impression, through your reporting, that people in Tulsa, descendants of the victims and anyone else, have an idea of what real healing from something like that looks like or how much is even possible?

KalaLea: Honestly, when I said that, Brian, I was really thinking about the descendants of the perpetrators and not so much the victims or the survivors or the descendants of survivors.

Brian Lehrer: Really? Of the perpetrators?

KalaLea: Yes. To me, to take somebody's life or to steal and rob somebody's home and then kill grandparents inside that home or set the home on fire, that is a real sickness. It just really breaks my heart that people can be okay with doing things like that to other people. I feel like they're the ones that really, really need to focus on the healing. The people who perpetrate massacres, people who take people's lives all the way up to today, where you may know that you have evidence that can clear somebody and not sentence them to life in prison or on death row, then you can just look away for your own career advantage or to have some power. I think that's a real sickness, Brian.

As you can see, I'm getting emotional because I really think about it.

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in and say, also on healing, here's one more clip from the series and back to Episode 5 for this. A psychologist named Resmaa Menakem. He's dealing with healing on the other side of the equation that you just laid out, descendants of the victims or even just people living with the repercussions of there having been such victims in their city 100 years ago. Here's Tulsa psychologist Resmaa Menakem from Blindspot: Tulsa Burning.

Resmaa Menakem: The idea of just white supremacy people end up doing a head gymnastics with it. The moment you say white supremacy, everybody knows, oh yes I really know what that means. People just start. It's really an intellectual thing that they're talking about. For me, white body supremacy is visceral. It breaks bones, it thwarts people's movement, it rapes, it steals land, it genocides people, it enslave-- Do you understand what I mean? There is a visceral component to it. It's not just a moniker white people and whiteness, it is actually a philosophy and structure that's ensconced in law.

Brian Lehrer: KalaLea, can you reflect on one aspect of that clip? I don't know if people noticed it very much, but he didn't just say white supremacy, he said white body supremacy. The title of that episode was called The Body. How come?

KalaLea: Early on, I just knew that this was taking a toll on all of our bodies. Everybody that worked on it, a lot of times we would talk about-- we had to change our daily routine just to get through it and it was really hard. It's really hard to read about so much, like people wanting to harm people that look like you, and to read about death. I love his approach. That's the one thing I would say, I knew about this when they said that they wanted me to work on this and to host it and to possibly do a two-way interview to give us a little space and a breather from doing narrative or feature-like episodes. He was the first person that came to mind. We have to have Resmaa on the show because I had been following his work and I just felt like he would be perfect for it because there's so much. We take our bodies with us. It doesn't matter what you're doing. If you're perpetrating a crime, if you're harming a colleague, and even small ways, it's your body that is with you in that and that is going to be impacted, and the same thing, obviously, when you are harmed. It just felt like just the perfect. When we had this thing, Jenny, our executive producer and our fearless leader, a lot of times I would give her "Whatever we want to name it, let's just--"  I wouldn't fight about it. The Body just sounded perfect for the episode. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Yes, it draws attention to just that important central point. The final episode of the series, which you call The Lesson, I'll tell everybody, dropped about a month after the centennial of the massacre, drew so much media attention at the end of May, beginning of June, last year. The attention to this piece of black history, American history, was good. You refer to some Tulsans worrying that a backlash has already begun. What kind of backlash?

KalaLea: At that time, it's already passed now but Oklahoma was trying to pass a law at that time to prevent people teaching what they call critical race theory in schools. What it was important for us is to determine, what does that really mean? Because when you actually dig in and do research as to what is critical race theory, it wasn't really being taught, especially not in elementary or middle schools, maybe towards your senior year in high school. It's a legal term that was created by Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw-- I'm blanking on the name.

I wanted to make sure that the listener understood that it's not just that, it's teaching of something like the Tulsa race massacre, it's teaching, okay, we can talk about Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, but the letter he worked from Birmingham Jail, which, if you haven't listened to it, please, it was also one of the things that was being banned. Essentially, what it felt like to me was it's a war on context and another form of erasure just when people are making progress.

This is the first multicultural generation in US history where people are going to schools, and having families together, and interracial families. I have that in my own family. I feel like the people who want things to stay the same, to stick to the status quo, for whatever reason, are obviously getting nervous. In Oklahoma in particular, which is-- I don't want to get into politics, but it is a very red state. This was one of the first things that they were attempting to do, especially now that this story had come out, that more people are learning about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. This was one of the first actions that was happening within their Congress. Excuse me, within their--

Brian Lehrer: State legislature.

KalaLea: Thank you, state legislature.

Brian Lehrer: Let me play-

KalaLea: It's effectively been passed now that they've actually banned it.

Brian Lehrer: How does it apply to the history that you report it, and of course, others have written in great detail, because you reported that a new Oklahoma law limits how the Tulsa Massacre may be taught in schools? It's bad enough when you get some governors and state legislatures who, with an abstraction, that may be based on affection, as you were just indicating, say, "Oh, you can't teach critical race theory." It seems to me, it's another wound if the Oklahoma State Legislature says that you may not teach about the Tulsa Massacre that happened there in certain ways. Do you know how specific it got?

KalaLea: What I understand is that you can say that the Tulsa Race Massacre happened, but you can't say that it was white people, the white residents there, that crossed over into Greenwood and looted, and burned, and murdered people, so that white children wouldn't feel bad about their race. You can say that it happened but you can't talk about the specifics of who perpetrated the crimes or the acts and who were the victims of that particular massacre.

It strikes me as, again, just so insane because for all of US history, no one seems to be concerned about how history and how students are taught, at least not thinking about marginalized communities like the Native American population, Black Americans, or many other groups of people, Asian Americans, Latino/Latina Americans, whether or not their feelings would be hurt, or they would feel bad by teaching the history that has been taught over the several centuries.

I just find it very astonishing that now there's a concern over what certain children take away and feel. I don't want white children to feel bad but they're facts. We had a fact-checker. I'm not [unintelligible 00:25:46] shout out. Those are the facts. It wasn't like we were lying about what happened in Tulsa Race Massacre. There's now a number of books, there's plenty of evidence to show what happened. Why don't facts matter in this in this scenario and they matter in other cases?

Brian Lehrer: WNYC's KalaLea, host and reporter of the six-part podcast series, Blindspot: Tulsa Burning, co-produced with the History Channel and KOSU public radio out there at Oklahoma State University. That series has now won a duPont Award, the highest honor in broadcast journalism and digital audio, announced Tuesday night by Columbia University. We will leave it there except to ask, what's your next project? Anything you can announce?

KalaLea: I wish I could. I'm waiting for something to being greenlit right now. Maybe we can talk about that another time. I'm just working back at the New Yorker Radio Hour and trying to make the best, most powerful radio that is. I definitely came into doing this work to champion certain voices and to hopefully to bring awareness to things like the Tulsa Race Massacre, and to what's happening even in Oklahoma today. I'm so grateful that we, as a team, and that I, as a person, was able to do that. I really want to stress to you, Brian, and everybody that this wasn't important to me, it isn't important to me because I'm a Black woman or a Black person, it's just because I'm a human.

These type of things are wrong. We all know that by now. It's just part of embracing our humanity and to doing what I hope that we can do which is do the work of healing and doing the work of, of course, correction.

Brian Lehrer: Hear, hear. Thanks, KalaLea. Thanks a lot, and congratulations again.

KalaLea: Thank you so much, Brian. I appreciate it. Have a great rest of the day.

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