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[0:05] Donnie L. Betts: Fresh for your ears, tell everybody. The new podcast from the producers of Destination Freedom Black Radio Days comes The Eclectic. Interviews with difference makers, artists, authors, bold thinkers, people we love who get stuff done. The Eclectic is produced by Donnie L. Betts and No Credits Productions, LLC. Our guest is Harold Fields. For years, Harold has led conversations on race with the Tuesday Race Group. He works for reparations for former enslaved Africans. He advises on DEI issues for organizations. His list of involvement in the Colorado community and national community is far too long to list in our conversation. We asked Harold to join us to speak about the Tulsa Race Riot and Black Wall Street. We hope you enjoy.

[0:57] Donnie L. Betts: Hello, Harold. How are you doing?

[0:59] Harold Fields: Thank you, Donnie. I'm very happy to be talking to you.

[1:02] Donnie L. Betts: Well, I'm happy to have you. Whatever the subject is, you always know a lot about it. So I'm just honored that you'd be with us in this new format we call The Eclectic. It's been a great journey of collaboration for over a number of years.

[1:19] Harold Fields: I agree.

[1:24] Donnie L. Betts: So let's just jump right into it. You know, this year there was a lot of celebrations. There's been films, there's been newspaper articles, there's been podcasts like myself about Black Wall Street, the Tulsa Race Riot. You have a real intimate view of this incident that happened in 1921. Let's talk about that. Let's first talk about Tulsa; it's your home, correct?

[1:52] Harold Fields: That's right. I grew up, was born and raised in Tulsa.

[1:56] Donnie L. Betts: And then, what would you mind sharing what years those were?

[2:02] Harold Fields: It was 1946, so I'll be seventy-five this month.

[2:06] Donnie L. Betts: Youngster.

[2:10] Harold Fields: So when you were growing up, did people talk about this incident at all?

[2:16] Harold Fields: Not at all, Donnie. It was not a topic that I heard about until I was out of college, and I first learned about it at a reunion, a high school class reunion. We had a guest speaker, Don Ross, who's the state representative, and Don was responsible for getting the Tulsa Race Riot Commission put together. He was the older brother of one of my classmates, and he talked about that at a banquet we had, and this was the first time I heard about it.

[2:59] Donnie L. Betts: Wow.

[2:59] Harold Fields: And I will tell you that not only was it the first time I heard about it, but many of my classmates whose parents were survivors didn't learn about it—one of them until her dad was on TV and talking on a documentary. Somebody called her up and said, "Turn on the TV, your dad's talking about the race riot." And I found out just recently that I was one of those people; my father was living and working in Tulsa, and he was eighteen years old when this happened. He never talked about it with me as well, but he did talk about it with some of my older cousins.

[3:44] Donnie L. Betts: Okay, okay. So during the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred over 18 hours from May 31st to June 1st, 1921, a white mob attacked residents and homes and businesses in the predominantly Black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It still remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history, and all was started by a lie. And you sent me most recently a newspaper article about what fueled a lot of this race riot and massacre that happened in 1921. Can you describe that newspaper article?

[4:20] Harold Fields: That article was published in the Tulsa Tribune newspaper, and I think the headline said, "Mad Negro for attacking white girl."

[4:38] Donnie L. Betts: Yes.

[4:38] Harold Fields: And later on, the very next day, there was an editorial that was published in the same newspaper saying that there was going to be a lynching. And so, of course, what had happened was far from somebody attacking a white girl. Dick Rowland was a teenage shoe shiner, and there was only one place in downtown Tulsa where Negroes at the time were allowed to go to the bathroom. That was on the top floor of the Drexel building, and he got on the elevator, and Sarah Page was the elevator operator. Sarah was also a teenager at the time. And I think you can remember in the old days, elevators didn't have buttons to push; they had something like a cage door that would be closed, and then they had to have an operator, and the operator had to be very skilled at stopping it at the right place.

[5:51] Harold Fields: And those movements could be kind of jerky, and I think that there was a jerky movement, and Dick stumbled and bumped into her, and she screamed or cried out, and then he ran away. They arrested him the next day, so he didn't attack her at all. But the person who was watching saw Dick run out; one of the clerks there reported that he attacked her. Of course, in the 1920s and even beyond and before, attacking a white girl or woman meant rape; that's how everybody interpreted that.

[6:38] Donnie L. Betts: Right.

[6:40] Harold Fields: So anyhow, this newspaper article was published by Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and in an interesting twist of fate, I had a Tulsa Tribune paper out when I was a teenager.

[7:03] Donnie L. Betts: Wow.

[7:04] Harold Fields: And the editor of the newspaper at that time was Jacob's son, Richard Lloyd Jones. And Richard Lloyd Jones happened to be a customer of my dad. My dad owned a plumbing company called Fields Plumbing Company, and he was one of our customers. I was in and out of his house doing things, collecting money and working with my dad, having no knowledge that it was his father who instigated this riot. It really put the fuel on the flame to cause that.

[7:45] Donnie L. Betts: Yes.

[7:45] Harold Fields: And also, that house in a very nice part of Tulsa was designed by their famous cousin, Frank Lloyd Wright. So that's quite a connection there.

[8:01] Donnie L. Betts: Yeah.

[8:02] Harold Fields: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But of course, my father had to know of this connection, but he never talked about it to me. He had somewhat of an attitude: "You gotta move on, you gotta keep going forward."

[8:19] Donnie L. Betts: This is your father?

[8:20] Harold Fields: My father. My father is Abraham Fields, yes. So, when I grew up, my dad had formed a plumbing company. I think one of the pictures that I sent you was a picture of almost a dozen men.

[8:36] Donnie L. Betts: Yes.

[8:37] Harold Fields: And that was Fields Plumbing Company. They looked like a bunch of bankers in that picture.

[8:45] Donnie L. Betts: Fantastic picture.

[8:47] Harold Fields: He, my dad, was the one in the upper left-hand corner, but he trained his brothers, his nephews, and cousins to be in the business and helped them get started. So at one point in time, we had at least a dozen—he had at least a dozen men working for him. So that was part of the example of the richness of Black Wall Street. But that was after the massacre; he was part of the reconstruction. Dad had told a cousin of mine who used to work with him that they may have burned it down, but we built it right back up. And that was, like you said, some of the beauty and resilience of the Black community at that time and still exists today. The part of Greenwood, part of Oklahoma's Tulsa, Oklahoma was called Greenwood, but most of the Black residents were about ten thousand people. And that, you know, the growth of that city was fueled by all. But it still was a very segregated city. My understanding is it's still pretty segregated today too.

[9:58] Donnie L. Betts: You spoke about the photograph, and I hope I can put that up on the website so people can see that from the podcast. Beautiful picture. But people owning their own business, making their own way. That was not here a part of the reason why when the mob got so intense, they wanted to burn it down because they were jealous of the success of the Black people in that town?

[10:25] Harold Fields: Especially as well. It was economic envy; it was a large part of what was going on because in the minds of white people at that time, and maybe even today, these Black folk didn't deserve to have the wealth and the possessions and the success that they had. But people had been drawn—Black folk had been drawn to Oklahoma years before because Oklahoma was, at one point in time, before 1900, considered to be the possibility of making it an all-Black state and a place where Blacks could migrate to, to get away from the Black codes and the horrible things that had happened after the end of Reconstruction.

[11:19] Harold Fields: So Tulsa wasn't an all-black town, but there were over fifty all-black towns in Oklahoma. And my parents came from two of those all-black towns. My dad came from Vernon, Oklahoma, and my mother came from Rennesville. And Rennesville was the place where John Hope Franklin, the noted historian, was born, and they were just two months apart. They were classmates. We grew up knowing his family and his relatives, and there's that connection as well. So I'm glad you mentioned the other black towns. People know of all the Oklahoma towns, but not all the other resurgents that were in the state of Oklahoma when it came to that time period, nineteen hundred and a little beyond. There was a big insurgence led by, you know, quote unquote, black exodusters coming to Oklahoma and settling in Oklahoma, building those towns, you know, Langston, Bowley, you mentioned the two towns that your parents are from.

So that had that history and tradition of building their own. I think that what you said, that was the envy, the economic envy that led a lot of this ride to happen too. An interesting note that people should know about Dick Rowland. You mentioned that he was a young man that stumbled into Sarah Page, was her name, the elevator operator that caused this. And the newspaper that led to really the ride. But you know, what I really found out from looking at the history some years ago, and then a lot more recently, is you know, the group of armed black men who were there to try to protect him. First that was 25, then maybe a bunch of certified, 75. But there were at least 1,500 white men who were armed as well, who were gonna take him out and hang him.

And so people always have the assumption that we just lay down and let things happen, but this was not the case. They were just out at all. That's what it really boiled down to. And these were black veterans from World War One who were determined to protect Dick Rowland. Tulsa had a history of a year or two before of people being taken out of the jail and hunted. And they knew that. But they would even do the let the white people. And so they were determined not to let this state happen to Dick Rowland. And they went out and offered their services to the sheriff. And he told them, "Nope, we don't need your help. Go away, I got this." And right afterwards, people were gathering, and some of them got to be deputized, and they even broke into gun shops and took guns and got ammunition and were ready to attack.

There was a coordinated effort. There was a little skirmish initially, and then it got quiet. But then the white people had amassed by the thousands and waited for a signal, a big whistle went off, I don't know, three, four o'clock in the morning, next morning, and that was a whistle for them to attack. And you know, there were machine gun volleys, they destroyed churches, and they even had airplanes that were dropping dynamite, shooting from the airplane and dropping flaming turpentine balls on homes. So it was the first time that American citizens had bombs dropped on them. It happened right in Tokyo. Wow. And this was over an area about thirty-five city blocks, correct?

[15:51] Donnie L. Betts: That's correct.

[15:53] Harold Fields: So when you said you didn't hear about this and didn't really learn about this until you were in college, after you were in college. Wow. Okay. And you know, part of that was you think about people who went through the Holocaust, some of them didn't want to talk about this. But in Tulsa, there was a lot of trauma associated with it, and many of the perpetrators were still in power, still in control. And they had put out warnings, "If you talk about this, we'll do it again." And they made a concerted effort to erase this from the history, from the newspaper. The front page newspapers that original copies of were destroyed and taken, cut those pages were cut out, and when there were anniversaries of the event, ten, fifteen, twenty years later, they never talked about it in the Tulsa papers, even though this was the biggest thing that had happened in America at that time. But it was a distinct effort to get rid of that. And so I don't think our parents wanted us to grow up with that kind of fear. And that's one of the reasons why they didn't talk about it very much.

[17:22] Donnie L. Betts: Yeah.

[17:29] Harold Fields: That's right. That's right. And so you can understand the fruits of that in terms of the prosperous neighborhood that got rebuilt, even though there was no insurance money, there were no government claims that were honored, none of that happened. So people were industrious enough, entrepreneurial enough, to recreate and to make it even bigger and better than it was before. Beautiful. And that's the world that I grew up in, in which the money turned over within the black community dozens of times before it left. Now part of that, of course, was the cause of segregation. Almost had no choice. But it fed us, it nurtured us, and we had great schools, great educational opportunities there. My mother was a teacher at Dunbar Elementary School, she was a speech and drama teacher when I was growing up.

And we had schools with names like Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Charles S. Johnson Elementary, George Washington Carver Junior High School, Booker T. Washington High School, and I would tell you that we had teachers who just poured their hearts into us. We had the best science teacher in the state of Oklahoma at our high school. We had the best math teacher in the state of Oklahoma, recognized and awarded that way. And now that high school, Booker T. Washington, is recognized as the best high school in the state of Oklahoma.

[19:35] Donnie L. Betts: Wow.

[19:35] Harold Fields: So there's a tradition that came out of Black Wall Street that still lives on today educationally, and it's kind of a shock to me sometimes to encounter young white people who say, "Oh yeah, I graduated from Booker T. Washington as well," 'cause that's not the way it was when I was there.

[20:06] Donnie L. Betts: Exactly.

[20:06] Harold Fields: Things changed a little bit.

[20:10] Donnie L. Betts: Yeah.

[20:10] Harold Fields: So part of why I think it's so amazing that it was rebuilt after what happened, there were all kinds of laws that were trying to be put in place. You mentioned that a lot of those people involved in it were still around and in power. There was something called the discrimination ordinance that went out. But I was reading the research, a gentleman named B.C. Franklin, who's our attorney from Oklahoma himself too, was part of that move just before the massacre, and he helped to try to strike down some of those laws. Did your family have any connection with him?

[20:42] Donnie L. Betts: What was that question again?

[20:49] Harold Fields: So the question was, as part of the rebuilding, your father owning the business that he had and built the great business up, this is not too many years after the riot, you know, twenty years or so after the massacre, I said there were other people who had helped in this resurgence. I was a gentleman by the name of B.C. Franklin, who was an attorney that helped kind of strike down these laws that were keeping people from rebuilding. I asked if your family had a connection with B.C. Franklin.

[21:21] Harold Fields: Well, we certainly did because B.C. Franklin was John O. Franklin's father.

[21:29] Donnie L. Betts: Gotcha.

[21:30] Harold Fields: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So my mom knew him, and I'm sure my dad may have worked with him, but he was long gone by the time I was a kid. But there were other attorneys who lived up the street from us. My dad helped build his house. And you know, it's very interesting. When looking at the documentaries and reading the books that have been published, I kept seeing pictures of people that I knew who were friends of my family. And many of them I didn't know that they were survivors, but I found out by looking at pictures on walls and pictures on the back of pianos of people, and began to understand that my parents, especially my dad, he wasn't a five-year-old kid. He was eighteen. So he knew a lot of these folk, and a lot of them were customers of ours, years later, the hotels and things like that.

[22:44] Harold Fields: And um so yes, we we had a we had a connection to the Franklin as well.

[22:50] Donnie L. Betts: Now you mentioned also that um uh survivors.

[22:56] Harold Fields: Um can we can you speak on that a bit? The surviv survivors that you knew and your relationship to them and how they kind of talked about what happened once they began to talk about what happened.

[23:11] Harold Fields: Well, um one of them was uh Rosa Davis Skinner. She was uh one of my Sunday school teachers and uh seen her in numerous documentaries uh talking about uh her experience. But of course, this is not something she ever talked about because I grew up. And uh her her grandson is a good friend of mine and and uh you know who became a teacher at the at the at the school at Booker T himself. Um Joe Burns uh was um the father of a a good friend of mine, Joanna, and he's the one who was uh on on the commission and uh she didn't know about it until he was uh in a documentary. Um but but interestingly enough, my best friend, Paul Alexander, his father, John Alexander, is a named plaintiff in Alexander v Oklahoma.

And I'm in and out of the house. Paul and I were born twelve days apart, uh our mothers knew each other before uh while they were pregnant, and so we we've sort of been uh joined before before birth and um and and it it was his dad, um, who was who was the plaintiff in in the in the co case that actually went to the Supreme Court and and then got denied there because uh statute of limitations. It got defined in terms of loss of property. But you know, I I never thought that there was a statute of limitations on murder.

[24:54] Donnie L. Betts: Correct.

[24:55] Harold Fields: Um and uh so um but but that was a signal from the uh the highest court in the land that there was not going to be much of a legislative remedy for for reparation and for and repairing the arm and the damage. Um that was the signal that there's gonna have to be uh legislative. Did I say I said that wrong. There was a signal that it's not gonna be a judicial remedy for this, but that there would probably have to be a legislative remedy for this problem.

[25:32] Donnie L. Betts: We speak with Mr. Harold Fields, who was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We're speaking about um Black Wall Street and a Tulsa race massacre, uh his personal recollection of individuals that he knew, still knows, and his parents' role in the Renaissance uh that lifted the community after this massacre and uh survivors that he knew and just this it's just a amazing history of that era. He mentioned Jo John Hope Franklin.

[25:57] Donnie L. Betts: I know that Cornell West um went to Booker T Washington High School, is that correct? Am I you know?

[26:04] Harold Fields: Uh no, Cornell and um and I when we got together, um found out that Cornell was born at Mowden Hospital. He's born the same hospital that I was born in. And he was um a toddler when his family moved from Tulsa to California.

[26:24] Donnie L. Betts: Okay.

[26:24] Harold Fields: Okay.

[26:25] Harold Fields: But he w but his grandfather was there, so he'd come back um periodically in summer times and spend time with his grandfather, uh, who was a pastor of a a Monroe Baptist church there.

[26:37] Harold Fields: So Reverend C. L. West. And um but also I found out that Cornell's parents were married at my church, Paradise Baptist Church. Um the original Paradise the the one that um well I guess it were three of them. One that got burned down but then they rebuilt it and uh as I grew up um I went to the rebuilt one but then we built another one and my dad had built a new modern edifice around nineteen sixty.

[27:17] Donnie L. Betts: Okay.

[27:18] Harold Fields: Uh but but Cornell's parents were married at uh that that second Paradise Baptist Church.

[27:24] Donnie L. Betts: Thank you. Thank you for correcting I misspoke there. I knew that was a connection um to the city and to you. So I d um thank you so much for explaining that. Once again it's amazing those connections that you talked about. Um I wanna go now into your most recent visit there um to Tulsa.

[27:41] Donnie L. Betts: Uh as we know there's been a lot of activity uh from the state of Oklahoma from the city itself uh in trying to find mass graves uh of the citizens that were lost during that period. Can you describe what you uh experienced when you went there on your most recent visit the hundredth commemoration was held uh during the Memorial Day weekend and because the event happened uh in uh Memorial Day holiday uh back in nineteen twenty one.

[28:17] Harold Fields: And it was it was so touching for me to spend time with my some of my cousins visiting the graves of uh our our relatives um and then going to um the site where they believed that there were mass graves were uh coming out of the uh the massacre. And the city of Tulsa had had finally after ninety-nine years, uh the mayor uh finally agreed to allow um archaeologists to search and to dig to see if they could find any evidence of uh mass graves and and they did find it.

[29:07] Harold Fields: So, um on the last day that I was visiting in Tulsa, I went by the uh the cemetery or in the one corner of the cemetery where the they believed that there was evidence and um I when I was standing there seemed to be a ritual I imagine this must happen every day, but uh there was a prayer. It would start the day with uh the prayer for the souls of those persons that they were searching for. And then when that was over the the hats went on and I waited until they put their hats back on um just out of respect and that's when I took a picture. They'd already opened up an area that they were going to be searching. And it was that day that they found seventeen more bodies right where I was standing.

[30:01] Harold Fields: So i i it was i it felt like my ancestors and the ancestors of unknown persons were connected that day for me since I just been a day or two before at the at the cemetery for for my for my relative.

[30:19] Donnie L. Betts: Wow wow thank you so much for sharing that um who So you know Don I want to say one other thing.

[30:27] Harold Fields: Yes.

[30:28] Donnie L. Betts: Um couple years ago before the COVID pandemic uh shut things down my wife and I left uh took a drive from Denver here to go through uh the South and we went to ten HBCUs and talked to administrators and we we went to the Lynching Museum and um we walked over Edmund Hedge Bridge when it was a hundred and three degrees a day.

[30:56] Harold Fields: Um there's about a five thousand mile drive uh to Little Rock and uh just to South Carolina, just so many many places.

[31:04] Donnie L. Betts: Yes.

[31:05] Harold Fields: And and when we went to the lynching museum, of course I'm I'm looking at O the the at the columns with names for Oklahoma and the the biggest one was for Tulsa County. Things were organized by County or Parish and um at the museum. And Tulsa had dozens of names on it.

[31:31] Harold Fields: And it was just kind of blown away. But then I looked more carefully and the names all had the same date, May thirty first nineteen twenty one.

[31:43] Donnie L. Betts: Oh my god.

[31:44] Harold Fields: And that was the first inclination that I had that not only were people shot and killed, but probably mentioned that day as well.

[31:55] Donnie L. Betts: Yes.

[31:56] Harold Fields: Yes.

[31:57] Donnie L. Betts: Yes.

[31:57] Harold Fields: That's why it's so important to to this uh this dig to find out exactly if you can find those mass grades because you know the quote unquote official count was thirty-six uh people killed twenty-six black and ten white but we know it's and of course there were people who were tossed into the Arkansas River, the Arkansas River goes right beside itself.

[32:17] Donnie L. Betts: Right.

[32:17] Harold Fields: And um those those would be bodies where never be accounted for.

[32:22] Donnie L. Betts: Exactly.

[32:23] Harold Fields: In many ways sort of like bodies that were thrown over on the middle passage from the ships.

[32:28] Donnie L. Betts: But never be accounted for.

[32:30] Harold Fields: Yep.

[32:31] Donnie L. Betts: Yeah.

[32:32] Harold Fields: Let's talk about now another subject that you're really passionate about and been working very hard about especially related to this subject as well too that's reparations. Can you talk about that work?

[32:46] Harold Fields: Yes. Um I I'm now the chair chairman of two f reparation funds. One of them is the fund for reparations is housed at the the Denver Foundation. And the other one is the Denver Black Reparations Council. And this came out of those years of running the Second Tuesday race for you know, for twenty-three years I was involved with uh facilitating a citywide dialogue on race and um helping people make connections with each other, make connections to to history with what's going on today, uh learn a vocabulary, build trust and uh and there were a number of people in the group who discovered had discovered that their family had uh owned enslaved persons and and were at a point where they said, I gotta do something about it, I have to take some action about this.

[34:01] Harold Fields: And they several of them got together and created an affinity group, reparations affinity group at the Denver Foundation, and I consulted with them because I had been on the board with the Denver Foundation for six years and they asked me to be chairman of the fund and we made the decision that when we put out a request for application for grants, there would be a group of African Americans who would be the ones who decided how that money would get used to benefit and to help heal.

[34:42] Harold Fields: And so that's why we created the Denver Black Reparations Council. That's the organization that will be able to make those decisions. But in addition, money from the Denver Foundation can only be given to 501c three nonprofit organizations. But we know that in the black community there are businesses, there are organizations that are not 501c three, community organizations, they're individuals. And we didn't want them left out of this equation. We wanted to go beyond the bounds of philanthropy, even though philanthropy could be a major part of this effort. But we sought a way to create a separate revenue stream to be able to address the businesses, non-501c three organizations. So we're just about ready to roll out the carpet and let the world know that we're here and I guess by talking to you on the radio, the word will be getting out now. But we're working on our website and have a group of eight of us who have been working for over a year to prepare to do this work.

[36:09] Donnie L. Betts: What happened next, you think in Tulsa?

[36:11] Harold Fields: Well, what would you like to see happen next in Tulsa?

[36:16] Harold Fields: Well, there are some things that are in the process of happening right now. There is a museum that is called Tulsa Rising that is right down to the heart of Deep Greenwood. We call it Deep Greenwood, although Greenwood goes for a mile and a half north of there and I grew up right in the middle of that area. I want your listeners to know that the renaissance of Tulsa is something that needs to be explored more thoroughly so people understand that resilience and how people collaborated to make an economy that wasn't exactly capitalistic, but it was one that supported the residents there. But then that got destroyed the second time by what we all know as urban renewal and some of us call it urban removal.

And that's when Interstate 244 got put right down right in the middle of deep Greenwood and that was part of an interdispersable loop which was designed sort of like the Los Angeles freeway system with spokes going out in different directions and that cut Greenwood off and then they started buying up properties and letting it just lay fallow for ten, fifteen, twenty years and that was forcing people out of the neighborhood. So it was urban renewal in the sixties and seventies, actually the seventies is when it really got rolling, that it came through and destroyed Greenwood again. So I would like to see Greenwood recover from that. It's more than just putting this museum there which will tell the story much like the most African American museum in Washington DC tells the story nationally and places like the Lynching Museum and like the Underground Railroad museum in Cincinnati.

These are destination places and they're hoping that Greenwood Rising would be a destination location to revitalize Denver. I mean, tough, but I'll tell you that it's in an area that now has been heavily gentrified.

[39:35] Harold Fields: Yes. And so it's not the black folk who are getting the benefit from all that traffic. There are others who were newcomers and who have a financial interest because that was always the interest in destroying Greenwood in the first place. We get that land, it's valuable property, we should get it and claim it. But we fought back and we didn't let them claim it even though they made it hard for us to rebuild. So I would like to see Greenwood come alive again and more and more people are beginning to try to do some things there. I will tell you one of the things that was very disturbing was that last month, a month before last, there were three living survivors of that massacre. Three living survivors of that massacre.

And sixty million dollars or more had been raised to build this museum and not a penny of it was allocated to those living survivors. And I think that's, I don't think that's the right way to view how you repair things. The focus needs to be put on the people who went through it. There are survivors who were denied opportunity to build and to have land and to grow their wealth. And so with a lot of pressure, a decision was made to give I think a hundred thousand to each of those living survivors, but nothing to their descendants.

[41:21] Donnie L. Betts: Yeah.

[41:21] Harold Fields: So again, the generational wealth is once again starting from scratch all over again.

[41:29] Donnie L. Betts: That's right.

[41:29] Harold Fields: That's right. You know, the whole idea when we talk about reparation, the concept of forty acres of a mule was something that when Africans freed Africans were asked what they wanted, they said we want land. We want to be able to have our own property and our own land to farm on and to exist on. And so in the Carolinas there was an area that seized property was divided up and given but of course Andrew Johnson after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he was not in favor of what was going on with reconstruction and he brought reconstruction to an end and gave most of that land back to the white farmers who had it in the first place.

[42:35] Donnie L. Betts: Right.

[42:35] Harold Fields: My grandfather on my mother's side, my maternal grandfather had eighty acres and two mules. And one of those mules was named Rude and I think my grandfather just won, there were times when he wanted to kill that mule because that mule cracked his ribs, kicked in the crack his ribs. But you know, he didn't stuff, they're very stubborn. They're very stubborn. And a two by four is a good way to get the attention of a mule, but I still have about thirty five of those acres leased out down there. But it is important to be able to pass on some generational wealth.

[43:30] Donnie L. Betts: Yes.

[43:30] Harold Fields: And it's very important. Yeah, like you said at the beginning of the conversation nobody received a dime of not just these last three survivors, but any of the survivors and their descendants that received a dime from insurance companies or anybody else from Congress and so on and so forth. So hopefully that can be a fight that people can, that's still there and people like yourself continue that fight.

[43:57] Donnie L. Betts: Mr. Harold Fields, we want to thank you so much for being a guest on The Eclectic. So much information. We ask that you come back and join us again and give us updates on everything that you're doing, especially when it comes to reparations and talking about the Tulsa Massacre.

[44:16] Harold Fields: It would be my pleasure.

[44:17] Donnie L. Betts: All right, thank you so much again. Mr. Harold Fields, I'm Donnie Betts, and this is The Eclectic. It's produced by Donnie L. Betts and No Credits Productions LLC. You're listening to The Eclectic, the series mixed by Maurice Smith, aka Reese. Please subscribe to our podcast at Spotify, Radio Public, iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Facebook at No Credits Productions LLC, Instagram, on Twitter at Donnie Betts, or at The Eclectic the Podcast. I'm Donnie Betts. Talk to you soon.