In one Tulsa, Oklahoma classroom, 74-year-old Sharon Mitchell is discovering ancient Egypt, feeling the pride of her ancestry. In another, 8-year-old twins are studying Black entrepreneurs, allowing their imaginations to run free as they sketch images of their own potential future businesses. In this space, entire families come together to recite the African Pledge and burst into joyful renditions of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” They’re all participants in Black History Saturdays, a free community program that teaches Black history and has enrolled nearly 400 adults and children since its launch in 2023.
Kristi Williams, a community activist and direct descendant of the victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, launched the program in response to state efforts to restrict the teaching of race and Black history in schools.
In May of 2021, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed HR 1775 into law, a measure that prohibits K-12 schools and public universities from teaching key concepts having to do with race, racism, sexism and other controversial topics. (A federal judge later blocked key provisions of the law from being enforced.) Since then, however, as many as 44 stateshave introduced similar bills, with twenty of them becoming law.
Critics argue that policies like HR 1775 have the power to bury the truth about historical events like the Tulsa Race Massacre when white mobs murdered hundreds of Black residents and decimated the thriving African American commerce district known as Black Wall Street.
Stitt has said that the law was needed to avoid making students feel “guilt or shame” based on their race or sex in classrooms.
When she first heard about the bill, Williams was livid. “I started going to the state capitol,” she said, “writing emails…I was so angry.” But then it occurred to her that she was approaching the issue in the wrong way. “I thought, ‘Why am I wasting my time fighting people when I can just hire educators and teach it myself?'”
And so, that’s what she did.
Williams, who served as Chair of the Greater Tulsa African American Affairs Commission and is the current chair of the city’s Beyond Apology Commission on reparations, decided to create a program called Black History Saturdays, which allows entire families—children, teenagers and adults—to come together and learn Black History.
She utilized space in a former school building owned by a friend, and on February 4, 2023, she launched the program with her first 120 participants.
“I did a lot of begging,” she said, during the first two years. She organized fish and chicken dinners at the school and at her church to pool funding. “People would put in $10.00 here and there,” she said.
Several churches and organizations made significant financial donations, such as the Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry ($15,000), 2892 Miles To Go ($10,000), the Tulsa Economic Development Corporation ($5,000) and the Fellowship Congregational UCC Church, which raised money to purchase TVs for all eight of the classrooms.
Others offered support in the form of food, supplies, promotion and space for events, including Edurec Tulsa, The Black Wall Street Chamber of Commerce, the Historic Greenwood Main Street and Williams’ own church, the historic Vernon A.M.E., where she serves as executive assistant to Pastor Keith R. Mayes, and hosts landmark tours of the church’s basement. The church is the only “intact, standing Black-owned structure” that remains from the Black Wall Street era. Guiding tourists and visitors through the building, Williams explains how Black residents hid underground for three days while as many as 10,000 white citizens terrorized their community.
A natural storyteller, Williams channels that gift into the monthly Black History Saturdays program, held from February through November. The day begins at 8:45 a.m. with a communal breakfast, where participants recite the African Pledge and sing the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” At lunchtime, history is served — literally. A guest chef prepares culturally significant dishes, using food as a teaching tool. “He does Caribbean meals. Meals from Nigeria. Creole food,” Williams explained. “While we’re eating, he’s giving us a lesson.” Participants are grouped by age for deeper learning, and the day concludes with families coming together for a closing reflection and discussion.
For Mitchell, a Tulsa native, who attends the sessions regularly along with one of her sisters and an 18-year-old grandson, she recalls how she and her eight siblings grew up with a set of encyclopedias in their home, the “How and Why Wonder Books,” and the “Dick and Jane Series” that was used in classrooms until the 1970s. “Now, I see how polluted that was,” she said. “Those books were all white. But just because you see all white doesn’t mean it’s alright.”
As the first Black woman maintenance steelworker at the Tulsa plant where she worked for 42 years, Mitchell said she appreciates how Black History Saturdays goes all the way back to Egyptian times. “That was personal to me. To know that I am somebody.”
For Bryan Dorn, 63, the experience has deepened his understanding of Oklahoma’s unique Black history—from the legacy of all-Black towns and Black cowboys to the roles of the “Five Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, Chickasaw and Seminole).
Like many Black Oklahomans, Dorn and Kristi Williams are descendants of Black Creek Freedmen—people of African descent who were either enslaved by citizens of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, lived freely within the Nation, or were of mixed ancestry and later categorized as Freedmen after emancipation. Their ancestors were recorded on the Dawes Rolls, a federal registry used in the early 1900s to determine tribal membership and land allotments.
It’s a complicated history that’s not easy to explain to children, which is why Williams has tailored the curriculum of each classroom to age-appropriate discussions. What’s especially difficult to talk about with her 8-year-old twin boys, said Marticia Childs, 41, is why the Tulsa Race Massacre happened in the first place. “It’s hard to articulate it to them without making them feel down, or ashamed about their color, or afraid,” she said.
While some Oklahoma legislators crafted HR 1775 to make sure white students don’t have to experience these painful emotions in the classroom, they offered no such protection for Black and brown children.
In 2024, the success of Black History Saturdays was recognized by National Geographic, which named Williams an official explorer and awarded her a coveted Wayfinder grant, given to just 15 applicants worldwide. Sponsored by Kia, the funding provided Williams with $100,000 to continue her program, which now serves 385 participants and includes a staff of five public school teachers and three college faculty members, one of whom is Tulsa City Councilor, Vanessa Hall-Harper.
While deeply grateful for the support, Williams said she worries about how long such grants will last in the current political environment. “Sometimes the revolution has to be funded by us,” she said. “For everyone who has ever said ‘Black Lives Matter,’ now this is the time to show it.”
She is also building a “Banned Books Library” at the school, collecting titles that have been removed from shelves nationwide, such as Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”
“They banned our books, and they censored our stories,” Williams said. “But they didn’t stop us. Black History Saturdays is our resistance. And we’re just getting started.”