Avenging the Tulsa Race Massacre With Hip Hop

When Steph Simon first visited the mansion home of Wyatt Tate Brady, a Ku Klux Klan leader who’s better known as one of Tulsa’s founding fathers, it was to shoot photos and videos for his 2019 rap album Born on Black Wall Street. The album title is a reference to the historic black Tulsa neighborhood formally called Greenwood and pejoratively, “Little Africa” by white Tulsans in the early 20th century. The mansion, a sprawling 8,352-square-foot, three-story manor with white front porch pillars, sits atop a hill that overlooks Greenwood, with a design inspired by the Arlington, Virginia, home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Simon found no ghosts of Brady when he arrived at the mansion. Instead, he was surprised to find that his long-lost childhood friend Felix Jones, a former Dallas Cowboys running back, now owned the house. After catching up and touring the mansion, Simon convinced Jones to not only let him shoot his music video, but to open a studio there for other Tulsa hip hop artists. Today, the mansion is the new headquarters for an emerging hip hop movement in Tulsa, one that few outside of Oklahoma knew existed, until now. Next year, a collaborative of more than 50 Oklahoma hip hop artists will release an album project called Fire in Little Africa, a reference to the Tulsa Race Massacre, which happened May 31, 1921.