Tulsa: Where Politics Are a Little Different

Candidate Trump is holding his first post-shutdown rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20^th, with more than 20,000 supporters expected to fill the city-owned arena, to the horror of public health officials at all levels who cite a doubling of new COVID cases since the highs set in April.

Tulsa’s a city in a deep red state whose governor on June 1^st lifted all restrictions on public gatherings. It’s a city that fits Trump’s pattern: “When he finds himself under attack or slipping in popularity, he often holds a rally in a place like this: a diverse blue city that’s home to liberal protesters but surrounded by red suburbs and rural towns filled with Trump supporters who will turn out in droves.”

But the city of Tulsa also defies easy categorization. Yes, it has a Republican mayor, but its history includes the 1921 white rampage in the then-prosperous Greenwood district—“Black Wall Street”—that killed 300 people, a history that was suppressed for fifty years.

Mayor G.T. Bynum says he won’t attend the rally, though he will greet the president on his arrival. And his actions since his election in 2016 don’t fit the current red-state mold. Bynum campaigned on investing in public education, and after the shooting of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed Black man, by a Tulsa police officer, he advocated for independent oversight of the police department.