Woody Guthrie Center

The United States is so big and so small at the same time. On a casual drive from the east coast to west Texas and back, I was surprised by how many times I just happened to land on a point in the map where history was made, where it lives on, or where it has been preserved.

In Tulsa, I stumbled into the Woody Guthrie Center, which contains an archive of all his American folk music. Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, between and just to the south of Tulsa and Oklahoma City.

The Guthrie Center is on a street that has been fairly recently re-named “Reconciliation Way,” in remembrance of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that took 300 lives. Nearly all the victims were Black. It seems fitting that this folk music museum, with its message of love and respect for our fellow man, would spring up in a neighborhood once decimated by hate.