Digging through the Oklahoma red dirt, journalist and professor DeNeen Brown uncovers stories of Tulsa’s racist past

DeNeen Brown, an associate professor at UMD’s Merrill College and accomplished journalist for The Washington Post, teaches students about the power of the writing voice through her own groundbreaking work. (Phillip Merrill College of Journalism)

Wearing an emerald green dress underneath a bright blue sweater with gold pearl necklaces layered around her neck, DeNeen Brown, an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, entered the classroom. 

Her colorful ensemble matched her demeanor and she commanded the room with her confidence, charisma and cheerful tone. Upon observation, one would not think of “shy” as a word to describe her, but she would.

A quiet, creative girl born in Oklahoma and raised in Kansas, a young Brown didn’t foresee a career in journalism, but she has taken on a role that is far from how she would self describe. She spent her childhood playing in the Oklahoma red dirt and now spends her adulthood digging to uncover the truth of one of the worst acts of racial terror in American history that happened on that same soil.

After spending decades reporting on various topics for The Washington Post, Brown zeroed in on reporting on the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and produced a series of articles with Tulsa as the focal point. 

“I want people to know that real people, Black Americans, citizens of this country, were killed in our history not that long ago,” Brown said.

She has inspired work in and out of the classroom, including writing stories that pushed Tulsa to search for the mass graves of Black Americans murdered in the massacre.

The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland used Brown’s work as the foundation to launch a project researching how newspapers were often the driving forces behind racial violence in the United States, just as one did in Tulsa. “Printing Hate,” brought together students, editors and faculty from UMD and other universities. The project has received awards from the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization and News Leaders Association since its publication in 2021.

Powerful storytelling is Brown’s main vehicle for teaching her students. Mark Feldstein, the Richard Eaton Chair of Broadcast Journalism and fellow Merrill College professor, said Brown’s work has made her an incredible asset to the school.

“She talks about writing being her superpower. She teaches students how to find their own voice and shows them through her work how she does it,” Feldstein said.

Brown’s thorough coverage transcended print stories and came to life in another medium: documentaries. She contributed to two films, National Geographic's “Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer” and PBS’ “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten,” where her research took center stage.

“As a Black reporter, I think it’s so important that our stories be told and telling the stories of the history of this country that has tried to deny Black people citizenship and even deny their very existence as humans,” Brown said in “Rise Again.”

Flower-child

A self-proclaimed “flower child” in her youth, Brown knew she was different, yet she knew she was gifted. She enjoyed reading books, adventuring outdoors, playing the flute and writing poetry. 

Her parents divorced when Brown was young, but Brown maintained a strong relationship with them both. She spent most of her childhood with her mother in Kansas and would stay with her father in Oklahoma during the summer.

Whether it was learning about different time zones or climbing trees, Brown said that she loved learning about the world around her. What she didn’t know as a child in the 70s was how the world perceived her.

“My mom and dad never talked about how society viewed Black people … that they thought Black people were inferior or brutes or just not smart,” Brown said. “Nobody told me that, so it didn't form my thinking. ”

This mindset prepared Brown to be part of the first generation of Black children integrating Kansas public schools. Her mother sent her on a bus to a different part of town when Brown was about six years old and she didn’t think to object. 

One of her first memories of discrimination was from the words of a white classmate as they prepared for their afternoon snack.

“She had to go around the room and ask us to show her our hands to see whether they were clean or dirty … and when she got to me, she said ‘Ew! I can't tell whether your hands are clean or dirty because they're all brown,’” Brown said.

Even at a young age, Brown knew not to internalize the girl’s reaction. Instead, she relied on her self-confidence to repel the words off her. Interactions like this strengthened Brown’s foundation for how she views herself.

“I believe that I'm smart. I believe that I'm beautiful. I believe I can do anything I want. So you're going to have to change the setting here and adapt to me. That is still my philosophy,” Brown said.

Her strong will and determination blossomed throughout her school career. Debate team, track and volleyball were only a few of the ways Brown displayed her ambition. She was the first Black head cheerleader of her junior high cheerleading team and bought her first car by the age of 14.

She balanced her high level of involvement with even higher levels of academic merit. By her senior year, Brown received multiple college scholarships.

On a scholarship to the University of Kansas, Brown said she intended to become a lawyer until she thought she might need something to fall back on. Her passion for writing persisted and she enrolled in an advertising writing class at the KU School of Journalism. 

Susanne Shaw, a former professor and associate dean at the journalism school, recognized Brown’s advanced abilities and advised her during her time at the university. Brown was initially reluctant to take her advice but she complied and became Shaw’s summer intern at The Coffeyville Journal, a newspaper covering the city of Coffeyville, Kansas.

Brown’s obedience gained her dozens of offers from major newspapers when she graduated from college. Having family in the D.C. area led Brown to accept a position as a summer intern at The Washington Post.

After more than three decades at the newspaper, Brown still remembers how Shaw paved the way for Brown’s successful journalism career.

“All this for a shy, Black girl who could write,” Brown said. “It just created a path for me, for me to become a journalist.”

As a way of paying it forward, Brown became an associate professor in UMD’s journalism school in 2019. Her goal is simple: to do for students what was done for her. 

“A real-life superhero”

Every Monday at 2 p.m., students sit sporadically around Room 1101 of Knight Hall for JOUR371: Feature Writing. Their spread-out proximity does not represent the nature of the intimate group. At this point in the year, one student could recant each of her peers’ specific plans for their final projects off the top of her head.

Brown doesn’t rely on a regular syllabus. She tasked her students with researching and reporting on events in Tulsa and collaborating with a real newsroom. She propped a web camera on a tripod at the front of the room so that editors from The Oklahoma Eagle, a historically Black newspaper in Tulsa, could join virtually via Zoom. For their final, Brown’s students are to write a feature piece for the newspaper to publish.

A meticulously-prepared PowerPoint, that Brown created over the weekend in between her own deadlines for The Washington Post, appeared on the screen. Brown took the students through exercises that focus on the power of showing with words, rather than simply telling.

Brown used herself as an example and lifted her tall, white thermos to her lips, asking students to describe the scene. The cup was filled with warm coffee, sweetened with honey, nutmeg and cinnamon. These were the details she encouraged students to observe and ask about, nudging them to use an inquisitive approach in their writing. 

The room of seven glanced intermittently at laptops as they worked to finish up assignments, still actively participating in the lecture. It seemed to run more like a conversation than a long monologue.

When one student, with worry in her voice, asked “What if I don’t finish?” referring to her final assignment, Brown responded, without hesitation, “What if you do?”

That optimism is how Brown guided the day’s lesson, answering student qualms in a level-headed, reassuring voice. Brown knew what her students were capable of.

The writing voice is Brown’s superpower and she spent the semester teaching it to her students.

“That kind of confidence to walk into this world that tries to define you, tries to belittle you, tries to disempower you, tries to break that magic that we have in us,” Brown said. “That's literally why I came to teach. So that I can transfer some of that knowledge and some of that confidence to my students.”

Students gravitate toward her, ready to absorb every morsel of knowledge she has to offer.

Senior multi-platform journalism major Caleigh Bartash is one of Brown’s feature writing students and sees Brown as a “real-life superhero.” Bartash is finishing a story about three generations of a family and how their history intertwines with the gentrification of what was previously an all-Black school in Tulsa. It’s a story she feels Brown has equipped her to tell over the course of the class.

“She just is very reassuring …even if you're not the fastest writer or the best reporter, once you go through her class, you'll be so much better than you were before,” Bartash said.

For Bartash, Brown has not only prepared her to write powerful stories, but she has also taught her important life lessons.

“I always remember Professor Brown saying ‘treat everybody how you would treat the President of the United States,’” Bartash said. “She just has respect for every single person she meets and I think that's something that's really important for both journalism and in general.”

Beyond the classroom

Brown’s commitment to her role as a professor doesn’t detract from her true passion: writing. She was determined to establish herself as skilled when she started at The Washington Post. 

She shadowed journalists on the night police beat and learned to cover D.C. crime. She picked it up quickly and despite being a copy editor, Brown got her stories published. Her editors noticed and hired her as a reporter.

Brown has covered “night police, education, courts, politics and culture,” according to her biography on The Washington Post website. As a foreign correspondent, Brown traveled the world and became the first Black woman to cover Canada for the newspaper.

She has published thousands of diverse stories, but her work began to take a specific route in 2018.

After a trip to cover the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, Brown stopped in Oklahoma to visit her father.

While eating lunch with him on the streets of Greenwood, a historically Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Brown looked around and saw modern businesses and eateries. She realized that a city that once experienced racially-charged mass destruction and violence was being gentrified.

On May 31, 1921, a headline in the Tulsa Tribune accused a Black man, Dick Rowland, of sexually assaulting a white woman. Despite the false accusation, white mobs stormed Greenwood, also known as “Black Wall Street” for its African American prosperity. This massacre resulted in several deaths and the destruction of livelihoods for the Black community. 

When Brown returned to the newsroom in D.C., she told her editors about her findings and they gave her the liberty to report on the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Her reporting led the city of Tulsa to excavate the mass graves of the Black people who were murdered, according to the Washington Post.

Racial tensions brewed across the country during the summer of 2020 and Brown recognized that her work could go even further. She met with Merrill College deans and faculty to discuss how the school could address how journalism had contributed to racial violence in the past. 

The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism launched “Printing Hate: How white-owned newspapers incited racial terror in America” in the spring of 2021. 

The project involved students and faculty from UMD, the University of Arkansas and historically Black colleges and universities around the country who published more than 40 stories. In December 2021, the project was released on an online database that featured a short documentary, graphics, photos and audio, the Merrill College website said. 

Maddy Peek worked as a reporting intern for the project and studied the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s relation to the Elaine Massacre of 1919. Through research and a visit to Elaine, Arkansas, Peek saw how a lack of newspaper coverage contributed to conflicting accounts of what took place.

Brown’s talent and ability to tell impactful stories are what motivated Peek to apply.

“She has a particular style of writing that I really admire. It's very in-depth and places the reader in the situation,” said Peek, a junior criminology and criminal justice and journalism student at UMD. “She taught us how to always dig into those details and weave together a narrative.”

The Investigative Reporters and Editors organization awarded the project a 2021 IRE Medal and Award in the Student Large category. The project also won the News Leaders Association’s Punch Sulzberger Innovator of the Year Award in April.

“Picking up where Ida B. Wells left off, this is an exceptional exercise in journalistic accountability and a memory project for the ages,” NLA judges said.

Brown’s work reporting on the Tulsa Race Massacre did not stop there.

“Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten”  featured Brown as she reported on Tulsa’s search for mass graves from the 1921 massacre, Brown said.

Encompassing more than just the history of the Tulsa massacre, “Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer” focused on Brown’s deep dive into the Red Summer of 1919, a series of race riots incited by white supremacists. 

As an on-air personality, filmmaker and producer, Brown contributed on and off the screen. She conducted several interviews and added to National Geographic’s expansive “coverage on the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre,” she said.

National acclaim continued to pour in, a century after the massacre. In May 2021, Brown achieved a front-page story in The Washington Post, a feature on the cover of the National Geographic’s June issue and her story “The devastation of the Tulsa Race Massacre” was tweeted by former President Barack Obama.

Brown’s impact and accomplishments are a product of her search for truth, not recognition. She is working to honor the enslaved Black people that came before her, every time she walks into a room.

“I show up with a thousand ancestors at my back,” Brown said. “And I hope that the work that I do makes them proud.”