ESPN Coverage of Race Riot Legacy Game ECU v TU
- Thread starter HuffyCane
- Start date
This is such a great thing for Tulsa and TU. I've been here for going on 30 years and probably was never aware of the race massacre until maybe 8-9 years ago. The city sort of pushed it to the closet and there weren't any civic leaders really bringing it to the forefront. The history classes I took at TU never mentioned it (and one was taught by an expert in OK history). I hope Coach Haith can add a Legacy Day to basketball season too in February.
This is also the type of thing I think all of our coaches can use in recruiting (albeit a side effect of the true reason to do it). Coach Fletch is killing it here. He has truly embraced being in Tulsa.
This is also the type of thing I think all of our coaches can use in recruiting (albeit a side effect of the true reason to do it). Coach Fletch is killing it here. He has truly embraced being in Tulsa.
The University terminated the teaching contract of a history professor in 1990 in part due to his interpersonal pushback when he refused to abandon plans to include it in his Oklahoma History elective. He was quickly scooped up by the University of Oklahoma, was later nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and became a member of the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.
Wow, can't believe they were still that way about it then. A friend of mine did a video project for a class at TU on the Race riot. I drove him around while he did the filming. And I filmed a scene where he was speaking in camera for the project. Did he ever do a class with this in the plan before he got terminated? The project would have been around '89 or '90. Was just thinking he might have been taking a class with him? That name is familiar to me, just can't remember if the class was with him or not.
There was definitely yellow journalism abounds then. All stories done in the Tulsa newspapers at the time, were taken out of their records immediately after it occured, and destroyed. They wanted to eliminate any historical record of it ever happening.
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It was a complex deal. Nearly everyone involved is dead, all retired.
It mostly had to do with professional jealousy. They didn’t consider Oklahoma history to be a legitimate history discipline and felt his regional notoriety impacted their reputations as respected Back East historians marooned in Oklahoma. They thought Danney was the type of historian no better than the little old ladies who hang out in small town libraries and talk about relatives. He also had liberal political connections they craved.
So he got considerable push back because they didn’t believe the incident was as significant as it was, doubted conflicting testimony and the absence of sources, the reliance on oral history and other problems. They didn’t think bringing up “old wounds” was history. Thankfully, we live in a different world today.
Its simply speculation but there were major donors at the time whose relatives bore some responsibility. I think that played into it as well.
Danney didn’t handle the encroachment into academic freedom very well, nor the disrespect of the History faculty. In the end, it was the mutual disrespect that caused him to leave, but there’s plenty of us who remember too well how he was treated and why.
He later wrote the Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report around 2000 btw.
Virtue will always shine through.
It mostly had to do with professional jealousy. They didn’t consider Oklahoma history to be a legitimate history discipline and felt his regional notoriety impacted their reputations as respected Back East historians marooned in Oklahoma. They thought Danney was the type of historian no better than the little old ladies who hang out in small town libraries and talk about relatives. He also had liberal political connections they craved.
So he got considerable push back because they didn’t believe the incident was as significant as it was, doubted conflicting testimony and the absence of sources, the reliance on oral history and other problems. They didn’t think bringing up “old wounds” was history. Thankfully, we live in a different world today.
Its simply speculation but there were major donors at the time whose relatives bore some responsibility. I think that played into it as well.
Danney didn’t handle the encroachment into academic freedom very well, nor the disrespect of the History faculty. In the end, it was the mutual disrespect that caused him to leave, but there’s plenty of us who remember too well how he was treated and why.
He later wrote the Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report around 2000 btw.
Virtue will always shine through.
Boy was their vision for the historical significance of the event proven wrong, in spades. They just added on to the yellow journalism back in the day it occurred.
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Goble was such a bad hombre of history and he let me get away with murder in back in 89-90 bc I did Workstudy for his friend Alana who ran the A&S Honors dept.
He used to roll into class with a cut-off sleeves sweatshirt (UNLV of all things) and a motorcycle helmet under his arm. I knew I was in the right place at the right time.
And then six months later, I met another legend JP Ronda. Proud to have enjoyed both men’s lectures. I have all the books and mounds of notes I took from those two dudes.
Much love and respect to both!
He used to roll into class with a cut-off sleeves sweatshirt (UNLV of all things) and a motorcycle helmet under his arm. I knew I was in the right place at the right time.
And then six months later, I met another legend JP Ronda. Proud to have enjoyed both men’s lectures. I have all the books and mounds of notes I took from those two dudes.
Much love and respect to both!
We will have to swap Danney stories when I’m back in town. And it sounds like we had a class together, though I don’t recall that. He was the baddest of the bad. I told him I needed an extra day to turn in some of the editing I was doing on his Oklahoma history textbook so I could go find an apartment for the summer. He reached into his pocket and took a spare key off his key ring and told me I was at his house enough already, I should just live there rent free until the book was done. You don’t get badder than that. Good luck finding that type of faculty guidance at OU or OSU.
