”Tulsa Burning” with Marco Williams

Top Docs: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmakers

Continuing their series on Emmy-nominated films, Mike and Ken delve into their first historical documentary for Top Docs in this deep dive conversation with Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Marco Williams (Banished, Two Towns of Jasper), one of the directors of the History Channel’s Emmy-nominated Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre. (Co-directed with Stanley Nelson)

Tulsa Burning traces the under told story of the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the thriving African-American community known as “Black Wall Street”, from its founding in the early 1900s through its near destruction during the tragic 1921 massacre by local whites that killed hundreds of African-Americans.

How did Marco Williams do justice to this horrific and yet all-too common story of white vengeance against Black people? How did he grapple with the crucial question of who gets to tell this story?

And, making the film during the height of George Floyd’s murder and local protests over police killings of Black Tulsans, what were the specific storytelling challenges of converging the past and the present? Join us for a candid conversation with Marco, who, after a remarkable 40-year filmmaking career, continues to approach his work with the ethos, “I’m still learning how to make films.”

You can find Marco @hiptruth

You can follow us on twitter @topdocspod

Other films by Marco Williams:

Banished

Two Towns of Jasper

Murders that Matter

Also discussed in the Pod:

Black Swan Records

Stanley Nelson’s Attica

Observational documentary as one of the 6 types of documentaries

Russell Westbrook’s Enterprises

Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws

Red Summer

The police killing of Terrence Crutcher

Greenwood Rising

Events of the Tulsa Disaster

Recommended: This New York Times 3D Model of what was lost in the 1921 massacre