Donald Thompson: My dad was from Alabama, and my mother was from Louisiana, but they moved to Oklahoma with their parents back in the early 1900s, which is where they met. They left Oklahoma during the Depression and traveled to California as part of the Great Migration. That’s where I was born. After more than 25 years there, they decided it would be better for us to come back to Oklahoma and start all over. So that’s how I ended up here. I had experienced a little bit of racism and bigotry in California, but nothing like I confronted here in Tulsa. It was so thick, so prevalent—truly intolerable. I was shocked and dismayed, to the point that I wanted to go right back to California. I couldn’t understand why people put up with it.
That’s essentially the reason why I became a social documentary photographer. I wanted to show others what I was experiencing and what I was seeing with my own eyes. I wanted to highlight the disenfranchisement that I was seeing in my community—the unrepresented and marginalized people, the oppressive social, political, and economic injustice that they were being subjected to. I wanted to provide an eyewitness account of what was going on. It was, to me, a horrific situation. But I think that as I became more involved with Oklahoma and Tulsa, I began to realize why it was that people put up with it. They were actually afraid to speak up, because of what their parents and grandparents had gone through in 1921. It was a brutal and traumatic experience.
— source thenation.com | Karlos K. Hill | Jun 7, 2022