Tulsa City-County Library will host its first Historic All-Black Town Commemoration,  a virtual event to explore and discuss the many historic all-black towns of Oklahoma.

The Historic All-Black Town Commemoration will be available for viewing on TCCL’s YouTube Channel at 7 p.m. on June 11. The event will feature a panel of all-black town historians with a discussion moderated by TCCL’s African-American Resource Center Coordinator Alicia Latimer.

Participants are asked to watch Kari Barber’s documentary Struggle and Hope prior to the event. An accompanying list of questions is offered as a study guide while watching the film, the answers to which will be given during the event.

Held annually since 1998, TCCL’s Historic All-Black Town Tour usually takes place on the second Saturday in June. The tour commemorates Juneteenth, or June 19, 1865, the date when slaves in Galveston, Texas, began impromptu celebrations in reaction to the delayed news of freedom and the Emancipation Proclamation. Typically, the All-Black Town Tour consists of two buses, each with a historian on board. The daylong tour departs from the Rudisill Regional Library and travels to various historic black towns around Oklahoma. The onboard historians tell guests the history of each town and its part in Oklahoma’s history.

This year, Alicia Latimer will facilitate a discussion among a panel of historians, including Jimmie White, Shirley Nero and Karla Slocum, Ph.D.

Nero, a retired educator and member of the Oklahoma Historical Society Board of Directors, and White, a historian and founding member of the Black Heritage Committee of the Oklahoma Historical Society, both regularly serve as historians for the library’s All-Black Town Tour.

Slocum teaches anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is director of the Institute of African American Research and co-founder of the Black Communities Conference, an event that connects researchers and black community members on work that supports black communities’ capacity to thrive. Her book “Black Town, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West,” a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award nominee, explores the histories, victories and challenges faced by citizens of Oklahoma’s all-black towns today. 

For additional details, call AskUs hotline at 918-549-7323 or visit www.tulsalibrary.org.