Eddie Faye Gates, 2004
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Turner, Reginald
setName: label: See more items in
content: Guide to 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Oral History Collection
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Museum of African American History and Culture
identifier: label: Identifier
content: NMAAHC.A2014.240, Series 18
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: Eddie Faye Gates, born February 5, 1934, is a researcher who conducted oral history interviews with survivors of the Tulsa massacre. Gates was born in Preston, Oklahoma to a family of sharecroppers working with her family in the fields picking cotton. She graduated from Dunbar High School in 1951 and earned a scholarship to attend the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama but left before graduating. She returned to education earning her bachelor's degree from the University of North Dakota. She earned her master's degree in history from the University of Tulsa. She began teaching social studies in the Tulsa Public Schools and taught for 22 years. In 1998, Gates was appointed to the Tulsa Race Riot Commission. As chair of the Survivors Committee she made it her mission to preserve the history and stories of African Americans during the race riot, interviewing over 200 known black survivors, over 300 descendants of deceased riot victims, and about 100 white eyewitnesses to the riot. She donated her collection of research to the Gilcrease Museum with over 100 oral histories and 600 photographs. She published two works on Tulsa; They Came Searching: How Blacks Sought the Promised Land in Tulsa in 1997 and Riot On Greenwood: The Total Destruction of Black Wall Street in 2020.  She also published, Miz Lucy's Cookies and Other Links in My Black Family Support System: An Autobiography in 1996.