NPR | Tulsa, 100 Years Later — Code Switch

Client: NPR / Code Switch | Year: 2021 | Location: Tulsa, Oklahoma | Credit: Christopher Creese for NPR

Photographing Who Gets Left Behind When a Neighborhood Gets Fixed

In May 2021, Christopher Creese was commissioned by NPR's Code Switch podcast to document Tulsa's Greenwood neighborhood on the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the deadliest acts of racial violence in American history. Published May 25–26, his photographs, credited as Christopher Creese for NPR, anchored a multimedia editorial examining who benefits from Greenwood's revitalization and who gets left behind.

Giving Visual Weight to a National Reckoning

The centennial was one of the most significant editorial moments of 2021. Creese's images captured the tension between Tulsa's historic Greenwood District and its rapid new development, documenting key community figures including local business owners, historians, and descendants of massacre survivors. The photographs were not simply illustrations for an audio story, they carried the weight of the narrative on their own, functioning as documentary portraits of a community at the center of the country's unresolved conversation about racial history and displacement.

Covering a Living Community Inside a Century-Old Wound

The 1921 massacre is not distant history in Greenwood, it is embedded in the land, in family stories, in the gap between what was there and what replaced it. For survivors and descendants, the centennial was grief, not just commemoration. For developers and civic boosters, it was an opportunity. For national media arriving to cover both, the danger was reduction, compressing a hundred years of complexity into a single narrative frame. Creese's assignment was to resist that compression and document the full range of what the moment actually looked like from inside the community.

Over 300 Black Residents Killed, and a Neighborhood Still Waiting

On May 31, 1921, a white mob destroyed Greenwood, killing over 300 Black Tulsans and leaving thousands homeless. The centennial drew President Biden to Tulsa and renewed national calls for reparations, and NPR's Code Switch coverage was among the most in-depth in national media. For CreeseWorks, the NPR assignment was part of a sustained body of work on Greenwood that included Bloomberg coverage in 2020, centennial documentary work in 2021, and Wall Street Journal portraits in 2022, establishing Creese as the preeminent editorial photographer covering this story.