Curious. Patient. A truth seeker.
That’s how the people who worked with and were mentored by Eddie Faye Gates remember her. Gilcrease Museum held its annual event Tuesday night at Rudisill Regional Library honoring the life and legacy of the Tulsa community advocate, educator and oral historian.
After retiring from a career teaching history at Edison Senior High School, she helped document firsthand accounts of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. She preserved the stories of hundreds of survivors and descendants before dying in 2021.
Michelle Burdex said the first time she met Gates was around 1996, when she got a job with the Greenwood Cultural Center.
“When I went to work there, my role was office assistant. And I was told to follow Eddie Faye Gates around and learn how to give tours,” Burdex recalled.
She marveled at Gates’ dedication to her work and the way she treated each person with dignity and respect. Burdex, who called herself “painfully shy,” said she did not look forward to giving tours.
“But one of the things that (Gates) often discussed was how important it was for us to tell this history,” Burdex said, referring to the race massacre. “And during that time, many people were learning about it for the first time.”
Celebrated photojournalist Don Thompson worked with Gates on interviewing and collecting survivors’ stories. When reflecting on the lessons that still sit with him, Thompson said he learned that “preserving history is connected to the pursuit of justice.”
As chair of the survivors committee for the state’s “1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission, Gates supported reparations for survivors and their descendants, he said.
“She wanted that to be acknowledged and redress given to those descendants and the survivors,” Thompson said. “There has never been any accountability. No one was ever brought to trial.”
Lynn Wallace, the library director at OSU-Tulsa, said she couldn’t do the job she does today without Gates’ insight and influence.
“She would talk about how not all history is written in the history books. And the history books primarily were written with one point of view in mind,” Wallace remembered.
She encouraged the audience at Rudisill to preserve their own family history. Her time learning under Gates left her with a profound lesson: “Being an advocate, being an ally is the minimum requirement.”
“I was a girl from south Tulsa who didn’t really know much about the massacre,” Wallace continued. “Even with her autobiography, how she’s able to tell a story was just always amazing and she made me curious.”
Members of Gates’ family also shared stories about her cooking and their travels together while a couple of her former students discussed the ways she inspired them in the classroom.
Before ending the conversation, Burdex left the audience with a reminder that the history of Greenwood is still unfolding in the events of today. Lessie Benningfield Randle, the last known survivor of the 1921 tragedy, just celebrated her 112th birthday.
“For many people, they look at the Tulsa Race Massacre and Black Wall Street as history. And for this community, it is not yet history because this history continues to be written,” she said. “I just want to encourage you to be allies and to be cognizant of this community and what we continue to process and experience and live through.”
Gilcrease Museum is the home of the Eddie Faye Gates Tulsa Race Massacre Collection. The collections are accessible online and will be available in-person when Gilcrease reopens in March.
