Musical about the Tulsa massacre comes to Kansas City. Here’s how you can see it

When Mia Walter asked her family, who lived an hour and 45 minutes away from Tulsa, Oklahoma, about the massacre that decimated the city’s predominantly Black business district and killed hundreds — she got a room full of blank stares.

At the time, Walter was a high school junior working on a class project. She had never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre and her family was too afraid to discuss it in detail.

“It was one of those things they couldn’t really talk about because they thought someone would come after them,” Walter said.

To her, the history of the atrocity had evolved into a wrongfully kept secret, one that stopped her older relatives’ from mourning a harrowing instance of persecution and denied her peers the stories of Black resilience able to inspire their generation.

Now at 38 years old, Walter has turned the secret into a play. Her show, Deep Greenwood: The Hidden Truth of Black Wall Street, is coming to Kansas City Saturday. Tickets start at $70 each and are available online. The show previously toured multiple cities in North Carolina.

The play focuses on the building of Black Wall Street, the 35-square block Tulsa business district plundered by a series of racially motivated mob attacks in 1921. Tickets for the one night only, 7 p.m. Kansas City Music Hall performance are available on Ticketmaster.

“A lot of people told me not to do the play,” Walter said, recalling her early research for the production.

The show is based on interviews with survivors of the massacre, conversations with historians, court transcripts and books, which Walter started collecting in 2012. The main characters, J.B. Stratford and O.W Gurley, were the real-life founders of the Tulsa business community. They purchased block after block of land and exclusively sold to Black entrepreneurs in the early 1900’s. The area grew to house over 70 Black businesses, including grocery stores, doctor’s offices and hotels.

“A lot of the dialogue is basically quoted from documentation from when they were trying to build their city back,” Walter said.

“I wanted to make sure I stayed true to who these people were to give them their due respect.”

The show follows the founding members of Tulsa’s Greenwood district as tensions with White Tulsans mounted, culminating in a mob looting and burning the area to the ground over a two day period. No white people were charged for murder or any offenses related to the rioting. In some instances, accounts of the massacre were removed from newspapers, according to the Tulsa World newspaper.

Walter tucked away her research for three years, partly due to requests from her family.

“They feared for my life,” she said. “I didn’t understand the gravity of why they were so afraid.”

Walter explained that the destruction of “Black Wall Street” left many living in fear and vulnerable to intimidation. When the show premiered in 2018, Walter knew she would have a target on her back. She financed the production on her own. But after four shows in 2020, the pandemic shut the play down.

For two years, Walter’s work was put out to pasture. Then, with the help of a promoter and an Oklahoma City pastor, the production picked up again by touring theaters in 2022.

Walter felt a duty to share the story with audiences who may never hear of Black Wall Street, or only ever learn of the trauma that afflicted Black Tulsans. While understanding the tragedy is important, Walter said, so are the triumphs of Black Wall Street.

A New York Times virtual rendering of the area prior to the attack shows a thriving community of commerce with over 10,000 residents, theaters, newspapers and restaurants.

If she had been taught more about the area in college, Walter said, it would have inspired her early-on to build something of her own. She hopes viewers feel similarly inspired after leaving the performance.

The show stars renowned gospel singers Bryon Cage and Shirly Murdock, who are guaranteed to bring tears of joy and hope to your eye, according to the show’s promoter Michell Sudduth.

“This is about the awareness of African American history, as we know it,” he said. “If we don’t know what’s happened in the past, we’re bound to repeat it in the future.”