TULSA, Okla — Tonight, at the inaugural Greenwood 120 Gala in Tulsa, Oklahoma, three of the most consequential voices in American public life will be recognized not just for their individual achievements — but for what their work means in the long arc of a community that refused to be erased.
Justice for Greenwood, the organization at the forefront of reparatory justice for survivors and descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, has gathered 250 leaders, advocates, and descendants to mark a convergence of milestones: 120 years since the founding of the Greenwood district, and 105 years since the night a thriving Black metropolis was burned to the ground.
“This gala is a celebration with a purpose. Tonight is about honoring Greenwood and driving forward the essential work of preserving its legacy for generations to come. As the country looks toward its 250th year, we are reflecting on the foundational pieces of our own story: 160 years since the Creek Treaty, 120 years since Greenwood’s founding, and 105 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre,” Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons told The Black Wall Street Times.
“These anniversaries emphasize the need to advance reparatory justice now. There’s no greater reminder than having our beloved Lessie Benningfield Randle, known as ‘Mother Randle,’ the last known living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in attendance,” he added.
The three honorees — Angela Rye, Bryan Stevenson, and John W. Rogers, Jr. — each carry a piece of what Greenwood represented at its height: the power to speak truth to power, to demand justice from systems designed to deny it, and to build wealth in the face of those who tried to take it away.
“Carrying that same spirit of endurance into the future, we are proud to honor Angela Rye, Bryan Stevenson, and John W. Rogers Jr. for their contributions to our community by preserving Greenwood’s legacy and ensuring it is neither forgotten nor frozen in history.”
Truth-Telling as a Form of Power
Angela Rye has never been interested in softening the edges of American politics. The Seattle-born lawyer, commentator, and self-described “bringer of truth” has spent years making uncomfortable conversations impossible to ignore — on cable news, in the boardroom, and now, in your podcast feed.
Rye is the co-host and executive producer of Native Land Pod, an iHeart political podcast she co-founded through Reasoned Choice Media alongside Bakari Sellers and Andrew Gillum. The show guides listeners through the political landscape with what its creators call “unapologetic analysis” — connecting Black Americans and marginalized communities to the ongoing fight for the place they call home.
She is also the CEO of IMPACT Strategies, a political advocacy firm, and serves as a special correspondent for ESPN, where she brings race, culture, and social justice into sports coverage. She sits on the boards of Wilberforce University, the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, and Black Futures Lab.
“It’s an honor to be recognized by the community, culture, and descendants of the historic Greenwood Massacre. We have much work to do to ensure our communities are resilient and protected in these harrowing times,” Rye told The Black Wall Street Times.
The connection to Greenwood is direct for Rye, the community was not just an economic phenomenon. It was built on a community of educated, informed, and self-determining people. Rye’s work to democratize political knowledge lives squarely in that tradition.
Confronting America’s Moral Failure
Few people alive have done more to expose the brutality embedded in the American legal system than Bryan Stevenson. The founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and the author of the bestselling memoir Just Mercy, has spent more than three decades doing the work most lawyers won’t touch.
Founded in 1989 in Montgomery, Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative has won relief for more than 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and secured reversals, releases, or reduced sentences for hundreds more. Stevenson has argued multiple cases before the United States Supreme Court, including a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children 17 and under — a decision that changed the lives of thousands.
But Stevenson’s work has never been only about the courtroom. He led the creation of EJI’s Legacy Sites: the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park — national landmark institutions that trace the unbroken line from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration. The EJI Sculpture Park was recently hailed as an essential American experience.
The Fight for Our Rights & Dignity Award recognizes those who confront injustice through advocacy, litigation, and moral leadership. For Stevenson, that description barely scratches the surface of a career that has, as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu once said, “shaped the moral universe.”
For a community whose residents were arrested en masse in the aftermath of the 1921 massacre — with perpetrators walking free while survivors lost everything — having Stevenson in this room on this night carries a weight that goes beyond symbolism.
A Greenwood Descendant Builds Black Wealth at Scale
Of the three honorees tonight, John W. Rogers, Jr. carries perhaps the most personal connection to the Greenwood stage. Rogers is not just a financial titan or a champion of Black wealth creation; he is a Greenwood descendant.
In 1983, at just 24 years old, Rogers founded Ariel Investments with $200,000 raised from family and friends. It became the first Black-owned mutual fund company in the United States. Today, Ariel manages over $16 billion in assets, with offices in Chicago, New York, and Sydney. The firm’s flagship Ariel Fund — launched in 1986 with a focus on undervalued small- and mid-cap companies — holds $2.4 billion in assets and carries the longest track record in its category.
Rogers’ investment philosophy, built around patience and long-term thinking, has always been about more than returns. For nearly 30 years, he has promoted financial literacy and wealth-building in Black communities through the Ariel Education Initiative. He has pushed for diverse corporate boards — serving on those of Nike and McDonald’s himself — and advocated for what he calls making “good trouble” in the boardroom.
More recently, Ariel Alternatives closed Project Black, a $1.45 billion private equity fund — one of the largest first-time private equity funds ever — designed to invest in minority-owned businesses of scale and position them as Tier 1 suppliers to Fortune 500 companies. It is, in its ambition, something Black Wall Street itself would have recognized.
“We created a brand around patience. If you’re 24, who’s going to give you money to manage a pension fund? You have to build trust from the ground up,” John W. Rogers, Jr. said.
The We Are Greenwood Award honors descendants who preserve and advance Greenwood’s legacy. In Rogers, it honors someone who took the founding spirit of Black Wall Street — the audacious belief in Black economic self-determination — and scaled it into an institution.
The Greenwood 120 Gala and the Modern Continuation of Black Wall Street
What unites Rye, Stevenson, and Rogers is not just achievement; it’s the specific shape of their achievement. Each, in their own domain, has done what the original builders of Greenwood did: refused to accept the terms the world offered and built something better on their own.
Greenwood, at its height, was a community that told its own story (its own newspapers, its own institutions), fought for its own rights (in courts and in the court of public opinion), and owned its own economy (banks, hotels, law offices, theaters). Tonight’s honorees are, each in their way, the living continuation of that project.
The gala also falls at a moment when the fight for reparatory justice is far from settled in Tulsa and across the African diaspora. Nevertheless, the City of Tulsa has set a goal of securing $105 million in assets for the Greenwood Trust. Whether that promise is kept, and whether Greenwood’s future is shaped by repair instead of remembrance alone, remains an open question.
