Don Thompson

PHOTOGRAPHER, FORMER INDUSTRIAL ENGINEER, EDUCATOR AND GREENWOOD DOCUMENTARIAN.

STORY AND PHOTO BY TIM LANDES

Don ompson has never stopped learning. It started when he was child in Los Angeles, and it continued after his family relocated to Tulsa in the mid-1950s. Whether it’s education in a classroom or learning a life-changing hobby, ompson enjoys it.

“You’ll always get an education as long as you live. You learn something new every day,” says ompson, who earned a master’s degree in 2022.

Six decades ago, he was required to take a picture while in the Army, and that moment changed his life. Since then, ompson has been documenting what he’s seen. e results have been on display at Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Philbrook Museum of Art, Greenwood Rising, Oklahoma State University-Tulsa and his books “Hush, Somebody’s Callin’ My Name” and “And My Spirit Said, Yes!”

For much of his life, photography was a hobby, but today he considers his work title “social justice documentary photographer.” ompson spent 24 years at Rockwell International and McDonnell Douglas prior to becoming a photography teacher for nearly a decade at Booker T. Washington High School before retiring in 2003.

“It was one of the greatest opportunities I ever had. I really enjoyed that responsibility,” ompson says. “It taught me a lot. I gained a lot of respect for those students who were in my class and also for the teachers at Booker T. Washington, who had spent most of their lives teaching. I became a great advocate for education because I saw the dedication those teachers had to teach their students, and I saw the respect the students had for their teachers, and consequently, the teachers had respect for their students. It was a great experience.”

WHERE DID YOU GO TO SCHOOL/UNIVERSITY? WHY?

I graduated from Booker T. Washington in the late ’50s. en I joined the Army. I went to the University of Tulsa a few years after I got out of the Army. Unfortunately, my GI Bill ended before I was able to complete college at Tulsa, so I transitioned over to Northeastern State University and in 1987 got a degree in industrial technology. I recently went to Phillips eological Seminary and received a master’s degree in social justice in 2022. Social justice is something I had been involved with most of my life. I call myself a social justice documentary photographer, and that’s what I’ve been doing all these years, documenting what I saw: the inequality, injustice and so forth. So it t right into my career path.

WHAT WAS ONE OF YOUR MOST DEFINING MOMENTS IN LIFE?

When I got married to my rst wife, Joyce. at was a de ning moment.

Another one was during the 1960s, when I was a public information specialist in the Army stationed in Würzburg, Germany. e commanding o cer asked me to write a story about the Army Chief of Sta coming to inspect our unit. He said, “also we need you to take photographs.” I looked at him and said, “I don’t have a camera. I’ve never had a camera in my life. I don’t know how to take photographs.” He said, “ is is the moment that you’re going to learn how to take photographs.” I was really nervous at the moment. Here I was a 21-year-old kid. Never had a camera in my life, never took photographs, never was interested in taking photographs. So I went to Würzburg and I talked to the camera store operator. He gave me a Yashica twin lens camera, a couple of rolls of lm and the instruction booklet. I came back to the barracks, and I got the instruction booklet. I pored over it all day and all night. at next day I got up, I loaded the camera, and I went to the appointed area where he was going to be inspecting the unit. I started taking photographs of him. I took the 12 exposures, had the lm developed, and I looked at the lm, and I was trying to nd photographs. ere was only one image on that lm that came out, and I had to print it. e print showed Gen. (Earle) Wheeler coming down the stairs, and it was perfect. I showed the picture to the commanding o cer and he said, “ is is great. is will do.” So I wrote the story and got the picture printed. at’s how I got into photography. at was my de ning moment as a photographer. I still have that picture.

WHAT AGE DO YOU FEEL RIGHT NOW AND WHY? I feel like I’m 40-45, although I’m twice that amount right now. I still feel that I have a lot of work to do. I feel energetic. I play golf. I exercise when I want to. I still feel youthful.

WHAT WAS A “WORST TIME” AND HOW DID YOU PULL THROUGH IT? e worst time was my rst wife passing away. e grief I felt and the sadness I felt has lasted all these years, and it still a ects me. She passed away in 2005 from terminal cancer. It was a devastating moment in my life, and it was a grieving moment in my life. It really a ected me. I have remarried, and some of those moments are not as prevailing as much as they used to be because I really enjoy my second wife, Barbara

HOW WOULD YOUR FRIENDS DESCRIBE YOU? Friendly. I haven’t met anyone who I come away with any ill feelings towards. I don’t have any hate in my body.

HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS? I don’t measure success by money, or anything like that. I’ve measured success by people looking up on one who’s contributing to society in some way or some fashion, helping one another, being humane to one another. Loving your fellow man as you should, being conscious of one another and not being so concerned about yourself, but being concerned about your fellow man. at’s what I feel.

WHAT IS A FAVORITE TULSA MEMORY? One is being present for the dedication service for the Pathway to Hope (in 2021), where some of those photographs I have taken in the ’60s and ’70s were on the wall along the pathway. at’s another de ning moment for me. It was a very inspirational moment to see those photographs. It brought a lot of emotional response from me. I was very happy to see that.

WHAT PLACE IN TULSA DO YOU MISS MOST? e Greenwood District as I was photographing to try to capture some of the things that I experienced in the ’60s. I do miss some of those areas that I photographed. I miss Stan’s Pool Hall. I used to go in there and shoot pool. Yeah, Greenwood District as it was back in the ’60s and ’70s. I miss that. at excitement, that entrepreneurial spirit that people had in those areas. People walking up and down the street. People who were happy and joyful. People who had smiles on their faces as they greeted one another. I didn’t realize how much I missed the excitement I saw in Greenwood back in the ’60s before urban renewal and before the Crosstown expressway came in and how these businessmen and women would be outside greeting people as people walked up and down the street. I mean it was a joyful time during that period through the ’60s and so forth. I miss that.

YOUR WORK HAS BEEN SHARED IN THE SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, PHILBROOK MUSEUM OF ART, GREENWOOD RISING, OSU-TULSA AND MORE PLACES. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SEE YOUR PHOTOS HAVE A LEGACY IN THAT WAY? It means something major. I think it’s important to me because it gives me great joy to see the photographs being recognized for what they were. I was trying to document what I was seeing. I just dedicated myself back in those days to try to save what I saw on lm before the businesses were destroyed and the people were displaced. at was my dedication to document what I was seeing being destroyed. I guess I will always regret not being able to come into the area of the Greenwood District to photograph as much as I could have. By the time I got into the area, the area I wanted to photograph was gone. e bulldozers, the destruction was faster than I was. I got a few images. I could have gotten a lot more if I was quick enough, but I wasn’t. at will probably be my deepest regret in my career as a photographer.

I’m proud of the fact I got a letter from President Barack Obama . He got a copy of my book “Hush Somebody’s Callin’ My Name.” I got a large envelope, and it said, “Washington, D.C., O ce of the President.” I called my wife and said, “I don’t know what this is. I’m afraid to open it.” I opened the brown envelope, and it was a letter from President Barack Obama. He said, “ ank you for the book. I enjoyed it,” and a few other words and he signed it. So that was a de ning moment for me also. I have that letter on my wall in my in my house.

As a photographer, you want to get some recognition for what you do. You want to be recognized and whether you get recognition or not, sometimes it’s important. Sometimes it’s not, but still yet, you got some recognition for it. I’m very happy I got those recognitions with Pathway to Hope. Very excited about that. And in Washington, D.C., and also the “Black Settlers in Tulsa” exhibit at OSU-Tulsa. ose things are really exciting. I’m really fortunate to be at this stage of my life, to have those images being recognized. I’d like to thank James Watts, a writer for Tulsa World, who has been a tremendous supporter for over 35 years in getting images and stories of my works to the Tulsa community.

HOW DID YOUR WORK WITH EDDIE FAYE GATES COME TO BE WITH THE “BLACK SETTLERS IN TULSA” EXHIBIT? I had an idea back in the ’90s. I began to see newspaper articles highlighting crime in north Tulsa. e only time you’d see a Black person on the front page would be some criminal, someone getting murdered or some drug dealer or something of that nature. And I got to saying there’s more to our people than that. All these images being shown, this is not who we are.

I contacted Eddie Faye Gates, and I asked her if she would be willing to photograph some of the successful Black men and women, businessmen, educators, lawyers, doctors, people who were contributing to our society, not only here in Tulsa, but around the world. She said she would be interested.

At that time Eddie Faye was teaching at Edison and had recently retired. She said, “I would be happy to be involved with it.” So, I contacted the Tulsa Humanities Association and asked if they would fund this and they were happy to do it. I wanted to show from our point of view, our narratives about who we are, who we are de ned as. at’s the reason why I chose Eddie Faye Gates. She was a writer. She knew a lot of people here in Tulsa. So we got together, and we started making a list of who we wanted to talk to. We started taking photographs. We not only talked to businessmen and women in Tulsa, and artists and educators and so forth, but we also talked to survivors of the 1921 massacre. And some of the images that are at OSU are survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. What we were trying to do was to show our side of the story, to give young men and women of future generations an idea of who and what they were doing and how they did it and how they were able to overcome some of the obstacles and circumstances they face in this world. TP

For

BY KRISTI EATON

When Angel Slape was 15, she became a mother, potentially dashing her chances to earn a high school diploma.

Like some other young women who are pregnant or mothers, she attended a specialized local school. But she began having some behavioral issues there, she says, and started looking for other alternatives. She learned about Street School, a nonprofi t alternative education and therapeutic counseling program that serves students in grades 9-12.

“I wanted to go to Street School because I heard it was similar but had smaller class sizes. And I just heard a lot of good things about it,” says Slape, who graduated in December 2016 from the school.

For Slape, now 24, Street School offered what she had been missing at other schools: primarily regular counseling and feeling like she was treated as an adult. She was, in fact, raising a child and felt like an adult.

“I feel like all the teachers and counselors and even the office staff and literally everyone, the cafeteria workers — everybody — treated you like an adult and were there for you,” she says.

When she felt overwhelmed or needed to talk to someone, she was able to see her counselor, no questions asked, which, she said, was immensely helpful.

“If you were having a bad day or distracted, you could just say, ‘Hey, I need to see my counselor,’ and go wait for them to be available to talk,” Slape says.

It’s that therapeutic component that really sets Street School apart, says President and CEO Lori McGinnisMadland

THE HISTORY OF STREET SCHOOL

Street School is celebrating its 50th anniversary this month, and while the mission and vision have remained predominantly the same over the years, the school has changed and evolved.

In the 1970s, there was a group of volunteers working with the Church of the Advent free store at the corner of South Elgin Avenue and East Third Street, where Juniper Restaurant is now located, says McGinnis-Madland.

“Across the street was a park at that time, and they noticed there were some teens kind of hanging around,” she says. “They approached these young people and asked them why they weren’t in school. There were a variety of reasons that they weren’t in school, but they all had in common that they weren’t able to return for one reason or another.”

The group came together and decided to start a “drop-in” center and Street School was born. It would eventually become Oklahoma’s longest serving alternative education program.

“They literally pulled these kids off the street,” she says. “And that’s how Street School got its name and how we began. That was a real grassroots effort, lots of those things that were able to start in the ’70s that might be a little more difficult to achieve today.”

Later the school moved to South Yale Avenue and East 11th Street, and in 2018, it opened a second, expanded location on the same campus.

The school offers opportunities for enrichment in a variety of ways. Slape, for example, was part of a parenting group that met every Friday. They would go to the fair or the pumpkin patch and receive quilts for the children in addition to the regular group sessions. The hours of Street School also helped Slape, she adds. Because it finished earlier in the afternoon, she was able to work at Braum’s while attending the school, bringing in income for her and her family.

From day one, McGinnis-Madland says, “Our mission has stayed the same … we are really true to what those founders wanted to see — where we are really a student-centered program with a therapeutic approach.”

Therapy At The Center

McGinnis-Madland says it’s important for any school to offer counseling, but for Street School, it’s even more imperative for the students, many of whom are dealing with past, and current, trauma.

“They are dealing with, many times, adult responsibilities as adolescents,” she says. “They have a lot on their plate, and they’re dealing with a lot of complications that are brought from issues of poverty … We know our students often don’t have the opportunity or haven’t had the opportunity to really start addressing some of those issues, so they can’t be successful until they start meeting with a therapist.”

Street School has 10 licensed therapists and a clinical director on staff — a critical piece to the school, she says.

“We’re a school obviously. We offer a full high school curriculum. We prepare students for the future, get them college ready and career ready,” McGinnis-Madland says. “But were it not for that therapeutic component, we would not have the successes that we have. It’s just crucial to our program for that. And these therapists are available to students. It’s not that they’re meeting with someone once a week for 45 minutes. They have access to these individuals every single day.”

Another unique component is the student store, which offers food, clothing and other necessities to students, free of charge.

“We have students who really use that store, in particular, for the food,” McGinnis-Madland says. “And that’s a need we have right now far more than the clothing needs.”

Some students are experiencing homelessness, adding an extra layer of trauma to the mix. Access to food from the student store is one way they can worry less.

“It’s a basic need,” she says. “And if your basic needs aren’t met, it really doesn’t matter if you know how to solve for X. So, we want to make sure our students are well-fed and are nourished from the inside out so they can be successful and realize their potential while they’re here.”

For Slape, Street School allowed her to graduate and go on to attend Tulsa Community College, where she recently graduated with an associate degree. She is now a registered cardiovascular invasive specialist at a local hospital. She’s continuing her studies at Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology.

“It opens more doors for me in the future,” she says of continuing her education. TP