Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford wants a huge part of downtown Tulsa to be moved to federal control thus directing ownership and future development. This will likely hike property taxes for everyone else in Tulsa County as this land goes off common property tax rolls – an area that stretches from Archer Street north beyond Pine Street, and from Elgin Street east to Peoria Avenue generally encompassing over 60 city blocks of downtown Tulsa to establish a memorial for a “massacre.”

Introduced in the U.S. Senate December 14, 2023, Sen. Lankford proposes the “Historic Greenwood District—Black Wall Street National Monument in the State of Oklahoma and for other purposes (S.3543).” If enacted, the area will be under the authority of the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.

Editor’s Note: A recent story on Sen. Lankford’s Massive Tulsa National Park on Substack referenced Ed Wheeler’s story published in 1997 on TulsaToday.com. Wheeler’s story went first to the printer in the 1971 June-July issue of Impact Magazine. His investigative report proves false the national narrative that the civil conflict in Tulsa had been hidden until 2021 (The first Tulsa Today posting in 1997 is available on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine) and, second, the event in 1921 was a massacre. It was not. Here is the story as it was first published in 1971.