Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial 2021 — Documentary Photography

Client: Community & institutional partners | Year: 2021 | Location: Tulsa, Oklahoma

Documenting a City Trying to Reckon With 100 Years of Unfinished History

In May 2021, Christopher Creese was in Tulsa for the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the deadliest acts of racial violence in American history, photographing ceremonies, memorial events, descendants, and public installations across multiple days of commemoration. The resulting documentary gallery was used by museums, news outlets, and educational platforms, and received direct feedback from community leaders about the depth and dignity of the images.

A Visual Archive of Memory, Grief, and Resilience

The centennial was not a single event but a sustained reckoning, a week of ceremonies, protests, lawsuits, political speeches, and community gatherings, all happening simultaneously across a city whose national profile had exploded overnight. Creese's assignment was to produce imagery that could function as a long-term historical record: useful for museum exhibits, educational programs, and future publications, not just immediate press coverage. The images needed to bridge past and future, and to do so with the dignity the subject demanded.

Grief, Ceremony, and Political Tension — Often in the Same Hour

Documenting a centennial of this magnitude means working across grief, celebration, political friction, and institutional ceremony without flattening any of it. Survivors of the massacre, then in their late nineties and over a hundred years old, were present at events that carried the weight of final testimony. Creese deployed mirrorless bodies with 24–70mm, 50mm, and 85mm lenses, using natural light supplemented with subtle fill flash, and delivered a gallery in under 72 hours, without letting the workflow pressure compromise the sensitivity the subject required.

300 Black Tulsans Killed, and a Story the Country Had Almost Forgotten

On May 31, 1921, a white mob destroyed the Greenwood District, burning 35 blocks of what had been the most prosperous Black community in the United States, killing an estimated 300 residents and leaving over 10,000 homeless. For decades the massacre was suppressed from Oklahoma history textbooks. The centennial brought President Biden to Tulsa, renewed national calls for reparations, and produced some of the most emotionally charged public testimony in recent memory. For CreeseWorks, the centennial was the anchor project of years of sustained documentary work in Tulsa, work that also produced commissions from Bloomberg, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal.