Home renovations shows generally have a very formulaic approach to them. Whether you’re watching Fixer Upper, Property Brothers or Love or List It, they all feature a reno that starts out OK, runs into a huge obstacle, then ends with a gorgeous reveal. That’s how a standard episode usually plays out. However, OWN is adding a Black history element to its new series, Rebuilding Black Wall Street. Hosted by The Best Man star Morris Chestnut, it features citizens of Tulsa, Okla. reinventing their community, while also honoring the victims and survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Builder/construction consultant Ananda Lewis worked on “The Mansion,” a project where the team upgraded Skyline Mansion, a former meeting site for KKK rallies, into a studio for local rap group Fire in Little Africa. She spoke to The Root about the emotional impact of this project and how she felt especially connected to it though her grandmother, a Tulsa Massacre survivor.
For the series’ team, the stakes are emotionally higher than they are on other home renovation shows. They are taking one of the most tragic moments in Black history and not only honoring it, but building something new out of it. Lewis never lost sight of how meaningful it would be for the community.
“Rebuilding Black Wall Street is absolutely special and different because of the history that’s steeped into the restructuring and into the rebuilding. Many of the people who are doing the projects are descendants of survivors of the Tulsa Massacre from 1921,” Lewis told The Root. “They’re reclaiming this area that was decimated by mobs, and even by bombs dropped by the U.S. government on its own territory and soil. It’s different, special and amazing, and I’m so happy to be a part of it.”
Ananda explained that while she felt connected to the project, she also felt pressure, because her grandmother was a survivor of the massacre, and it was important that she honor her through her work on the series.
Lewis revealed that when her great-grandmother knew the mob was coming, she opened the front and back doors to her home, so you could see straight through the structure. She and her children then “hid quietly under the floorboards, heard a mob walk through the front door and through the back.”
“It has even more meaning for me because my grandmother loved her hometown of Tulsa so much. It was such a big part of my upbringing because it was such a big part of who she was,” she said. “I feel this full circle giving back, reclamation and healing for her, that I got to do on her behalf. It was so powerful and so beautiful. Rebuilding Black Wall Street is going to be a game changer.”
This show couldn’t have come at a more crucial time, as it’s no secret that Republicans are desperate to pretend that tragedies like the Tulsa Race Massacre didn’t happen. Lewis recognizes that “there’s this huge eraser shaped like the United States of America and it’s going real hard on our backs.” In addition to honoring the victims and remembering the violence inflicted on them, she wants the series to highlight how extraordinary Black communities were before “the horrors” they suffered.
“It’s important to know and never forget, but to also look at the beauty that we had before the horrors and remind ourselves that we did that, and we can do it again,” Lewis said. “The beauty that can come from the ashes of decimation is a real thing. It’s important, not just in Tulsa where we’re telling the story, but everywhere, especially in all the other towns that the erasing happened to back then. That the decimation happened to back then. That the massacres happened to back then, to never forget, so that we never repeat.”
Rebuilding Black Wall Street premieres Sept. 29 on OWN, and will also be available to stream on Max.