Tuesday, June 1, 2021

A What If Historic Website

No, the Internet isn't 100 years old and there are no websites that date from 1921, but consider this for a minute:

You may have been keeping up with the news reports and commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa, Oklahoma race riots, a tragedy where tens of Black owned businesses were destroyed, homes burned, and Black citizens killed by mobs of whites.

So the question I heard on television today was "what if those businesses still existed today?  Wouldn't they have a website, perhaps a social media page (or two, or three), and a mobile site?  Wouldn't they be engaged in e-commerce?  Why not teach disadvantaged youngsters how to code, and teach them about history at the same time?"

It's being done in Tulsa.

You may want to check this website out:  Historic Black Wall Street is an effort by an organization called the Urban Coders Guild to do just that.

The website contains a directory of various businesses that were located in the district, as imagined by the students.  They did research, including some menu items of a local cafe, and the phone numbers of the various business.  For other details, they had to use their imagination.  What would the hotel be charging now?  What would its lobby have looked like in 2021?

This website will expand over the coming months to include more student projects connected to this history that is being uncovered by the residents of Tulsa.

I don't know if other cities that experienced these kinds of riots are doing something like this, but, to me, it sounds like a wonderful idea.

What do you think?

8 comments:

  1. ...when history is written by white men, it becomes whitewashed.

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  2. Sounds like a cool way to teach a useful skill and combine it with history. Very meaningful. Kudos to the ones who came up with the idea.

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  3. Oooh, that's wonderful. What a great idea.

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  4. Getting important history AND new skills into kids in one clever project? Absolutely brilliant!

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  5. Yes, there are many Black Wall Streets that were destroyed!

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  6. What many have written and what makes me so angry, is that this was a thriving community and when it was destroyed and the people were killed, we LOST and they LOST: educated Blacks for the future; the prospects of doubling, tripling their earnings so that they would take care of their community and their people. It is all disgusting to think whites didn't want anyone but whites to prosper. So much of the sorrows of the Black community devolve down to white hate and ignorance.

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