TULSA, Okla. – In the real world, 74-year-old Donald Shaw is walking on the empty, parched grass slope by Tulsa’s noisy crosstown expressway.
He's on the other side of the city’s historical white-black dividing line from where President Donald Trump will hold a rally Saturday with his overwhelmingly white supporters.But Shaw can conjure stories and images of so much more — the once-thriving black community that stood on this same ground, destroyed nearly a century ago by white violence and ensuing decades of repression.“Just imagine, in your mind, all these homes,” Shaw said one morning this week, describing the black-built, black-owned houses and churches that once covered dozens of blocks where he's walking, the site of Tulsa's 1921 race.