Tulsa Race Massacre VR Experience 'Greenwood Avenue' Crowdfunding Through Seed & Spark
With the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre approaching, one team wants to bring the history behind the horrific event to life again through Greenwood Avenue: A Virtual Reality Experience. The project is currently holding a Seed & Spark campaign through September; it's currently 31 percent funded, raising $4,696 of the $15,000 it hopes to gain for post-production.
The project will take viewers through the two days in which 300 black people were killed in Tulsa, OK by white rioters who were inspired by Birth of a Nation. As the logline states:
"Greenwood Avenue is a groundbreaking, emotional exploration into the lives of the African-Americans living in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, during the era of Black Wall Street, the second rise of the KKK, and the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, told through the eyes of an elderly Black female protagonist named Agnes Bess."
"We want to give folks a taste of what it was like living in the 1920's as a person of color," wrote the team in a statement in the press release. "Lynching was on the rise but folks felt safe living in Northern Tulsa. It was a place to grow a family and build a business. We want people to experience it firsthand."
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I mentioned before this project is being done by one of my former students (she's the producer). There is a link in the article to the funding source, but I am hoping this will get spread far and wide among different communities. This is a part of American history which is rarely discussed, and many times, it is whitewashed in such a way that it sounds like a "blip" in our collective history, but it needs to be acknowledged. Notice how it is not being billed as a "riot" but as what it truly was, a massacre!