Opinion | Massacres and museums: Education or exploitation?

At the center of one of the latest battles are the estate and intellectual property of one of the massacre’s most famous victims, Andrew Chesteen (A.C.) Jackson. In June 2021, Jackson’s family sued Greenwood Rising — a $30 million museum dedicated to the memory of Greenwood — seeking to prevent the museum from using the doctor’s image. (Tulsa’s Hille Foundation, which donated the land on which the museum sits, was also named in the suit.)

Before we get into all that, though, a little background on A.C. Jackson. He was one of Tulsa’s most celebrated doctors, who treated White and Black patients. He was an expert on diphtheria and scarlet fever and, according to his great-great nephew Jon Adams, invented several medical devices. When racial tensions broke out in Tulsa in May 1921, Jackson sent his wife, Julia, to Chicago, while he stayed behind to help. He was tending to injured victims when he encountered a White mob. According to Adams, the sheriff at the time told the mob not to shoot Jackson, as he was a doctor. They shot him anyway and he bled to death later in a detention center.

Adams has been representing the family, trying to gain legal control of Jackson’s estate, image and intellectual property. In an interview, he told me that he and his family had been researching his famous relative for decades and were incensed when, a few years ago, Tulsa officials and centennial commissions began using Jackson’s story and image to promote centennial activities without the family’s permission. The then-new Greenwood Rising museum used a small photo of Jackson in its exhibit. All of this was after the city had long been refusing to offer reparations to survivors and descendants.

“The reason why my family decided to bring the suit,” Adams said, “was because we saw people profiting and monetizing his image. We’ve already lost tons of money, after we’ve gone through generational trauma and lost generational wealth. We see people today who really didn’t give a damn about Dr. Jackson when he was killed.”

In March, Adams dropped the suit against the museum over the image but went to court to be granted the opportunity to maintain control of Jackson’s estate and intellectual property, including possible patents for medical devices. The family has said book offers and film deals have been coming their way — they just want to be able to leverage resources to do more research and help control the narrative about their relative.

In previous litigation, District Court Judge Kurt G. Glassco ruled against Adams and his family. After petitioning Glassco to reconsider the decision, the judge denied the motion on Tuesday.

I talked with Greenwood Rising’s representatives and legal team, who maintained that the museum, which opened during the massacre’s centennial in 2021, is a nonprofit trying to get up off the ground and does not make money from its work. “We only started charging for tickets this year,” Jessica Lowe-Betts, a former Greenwood Rising board president who hails from Dallas, said as we sat in the conference room of the museum’s $20 million building. “We are just tired of being sued; we want to just do our work.”

When I asked Hannibal Johnson, a historian and curator from Arkansas who has lived in Tulsa for more than three decades, about the museum’s use of Jackson’s image, he put it this way: “We are not exploiting anybody. It’s like accusing a textbook manufacturer of improper exploitation of an image because they used a historical figure in a textbook on Oklahoma history. Sure, textbook manufacturers are making money off of textbooks. But we need the textbooks to be able to teach people about the human experience.”

Johnson added: “I don’t see the benefit of stirring up controversy within the Black community. We have enough problems already.”

I asked Greenwood Rising’s attorney, Danny Williams (who is also Black) about why the museum won’t leave the estate issue alone. “We offered to drop our objection last week in Court if the Estate’s attorneys would agree not to sue us in the event the Estate was open,” he wrote in an email. “But [Adams’] attorneys implied that they would likely pursue further litigation against Greenwood Rising for the third time.” Williams added that the museum had the right to defend itself in court against “groundless accusations.”

So goes the internal bleeding within Tulsa. On one side of the pain are entities such as Greenwood Rising, Tulsa’s White-run corporations, the city itself and many Black Tulsans I’ve spoken with over the years, elite forces that have been denying individual victims of the massacre and their descendants material reparations. On the other side are people such as Adams, who told me that no one from the city, Greenwood Rising or any other entity had contacted his family for any permissions or collaborations — for anything at all.

It might be terrible optics to have Black museum leaders and lawyers pitted against a Black civil rights attorney and the family of a massacre victim. Yet this conflict is a direct consequence, not of Adams’s lawsuit but of the original, calamitous White violence of 1921 and a century of denied justice.

Instead of the reparations Black Tulsans have sought, downtown Tulsa has multimillion-dollar museums led by Black people propped up by White money. Many of the Black Tulsans I talked to were bothered that Black people who have no ties to Tulsa have been trying to tell them what’s right for their community.

When it comes to victims of terroristic and colonial violence, where is the line between education and exploitation?

Yes, museums can be sites of education. But they can also perpetuate harm by ignoring the demands of victims and aligning with the interests of elites. In such conditions, traumatized families have every right to protect the intellectual property of massacre victims, especially when so much has been stolen from them. And families have every right to demand that they not be ignored. At the same time, we do deserve to know the stories of people such as Jackson.

Ultimately, Glassco ruled against Adams. In a statement, Damario Solomon-Simmons, the family’s lawyer, said that A.C. Jackson’s legacy had been “insulted by our court system.” He plans to appeal and take the battle to the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

The monster that is the 102-year-old massacre lives on.

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