On the Oct. 4 edition of HLN’s “Michaela,” singer and songwriter Charlie Wilson talks about Tulsa, Oklahoma’s long history of racial tension.
The Tulsa native formed the Gap Band as the Greenwood Archer and Pine Street Band to honor the victims of the 1921 Tulsa race riots. In the clip, Wilson tells host Michaela Pereira that the riots impacted him even though the band’s music would not suggest that.
“… I didn’t know what the word riot meant,” he recalls. “So I asked [my grandmother] what the word riot means. ‘That’s when people burns things, burn your house down and they come and kill your family.’ … I was shocked to know that it happened.”
Pereira asks Wilson to comment on the Terence Crutcher shooting and other cases of police brutality around the nation. However, he issues a caveat stating that he is not political. But Wilson’s following comments say otherwise.
“[We] have a new lynching … When you are handcuffed they can tase you to death. They can kick you in the head … Dead is dead whether you are lynched or kicked to death.”
