More than 100 years ago, a violent white mob destroyed the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing hundreds of people and destroying a prosperous community, including a district known as Black Wall Street. Descendants of those who survived the so-called Tulsa Race Massacre have for years been agitating for reparations, to no avail.
In the meantime, a new generation of Tulsa’s residents is rebuilding what was lost. Writing about it for YES!’s new “Realizing Reparations” series is journalist Anneliese Bruner, whose great-grandmother, Mary E. Parrish, survived the Tulsa Massacre. Bruner spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about her story, “Rebuilding Tulsa With or Without Reparations.”
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Sonali Kolhatkar joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name. |
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