Princetta
Rudd Newman

Princetta was born in Chicago and came to Tulsa in 1956, when she was eleven. Her mother, Marie Rudd Cloman, had married John A. Cloman Sr. in Chicago. John operated J.A. Cloman Realty Company from 301 North Greenwood Avenue, and he and Marie owned Service Cab, Inc. Marie was an accomplished tailor who sewed professionally and later ran Skyline Fabrics, a North Tulsa craft shop. John's mother, Bellie Pierce, was a teacher who also owned and operated a rooming house.

John's sister, Eunice Cloman Jackson, married S.M. Jackson, who had entered Greenwood's funeral business in 1917. S.M. and Eunice survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and later established Jack's Memory Chapel in 1948. John eventually became a partner in the funeral business as well. Jack's Memory Chapel is still serving Tulsa today.

Princetta grew up with a clear example of what business could do. Her family provided housing, transportation, clothing, and funeral service — businesses that were also services people depended on, supporting families, creating work, and giving their owners a way to answer needs in the community.

Her father carried that sense of responsibility into politics. John Cloman helped organize Colored Voters of America, Inc. and worked to increase Black political participation in Tulsa. He corresponded with Martin Luther King Jr. and invited King to Tulsa. The family kept King's reply.

Princetta graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1962 and went on to Northeastern State University, where she studied speech and drama. She was one of a small number of Black students on campus, and Gertie B. Crawford, the respected Booker T. Washington educator, had encouraged her to be part of the university's integration. Princetta led the campus drama fraternity, graduated in May 1966, and returned to Tulsa that fall to teach English at Booker T. Washington, her alma mater. She later taught at Will Rogers High School as Tulsa began integrating its teaching staff.

The arts and fashion were part of Princetta's life from the beginning. She remembers the women who raised her as stylish women. She acted, directed theater, sang, designed costumes, and loved literature. She later trained under Freda D. Knight, Ebony magazine's first fashion commentator, and spent years behind the microphone narrating fashion shows for Tulsa's Black churches, clubs, sororities, and civic organizations.

That work led to an unexpected turn. Princetta went to KRMG Radio to promote Skyline Fabrics and came away with a job. In 1970, KRMG hired her as part of Tulsa's first integrated radio news staff, making her the first Black reporter in Tulsa radio news. The station was then a 50,000-watt operation with a reach far beyond the city. Princetta covered the Tulsa City Commission, county government, the Office of Community Relations Commission, the Hungry Club, downtown Rotary, and other parts of the city's civic life. She interviewed Jesse Owens, Ray Charles, and former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, and represented the station during Pat Nixon's visit to Tulsa.

After leaving KRMG, Princetta went into business for herself. She developed the Princetta Collection, designing clothing for full-figured women and taking the line to conventions around the country. She later opened United Printing on Greenwood, published and edited General News, created Bingo Lingo, a statewide bingo newspaper, and worked in public relations and communications.

United Printing brought her into daily contact with the records of Black Tulsa. Funeral homes, churches, clubs, businesses, families, and community groups came to her for printing, bringing photographs, names, programs, and family histories with them. Over time, some of those materials stayed with Princetta or were entrusted to her. Her collection now includes more than 1,500 photographs and other historical materials. A funeral program she prepared in 1999 for North Tulsa businessman LeRoy Gibbs is now held by the Smithsonian.

Printing was only one way Princetta stayed involved in the life of North Tulsa. She is a lifelong member of the NAACP and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Princetta chaired the Tulsa YWCA board for eight years and later served as vice chair of its Committee on Administration. In those roles, she advocated for North Tulsa women and girls to have the same level of resources, programs, and support available elsewhere in the city. She worked with young people and senior citizens, helped organize Black-history and cultural programs, and spent years leading Black-history programming at Seminole Hills Library.

Through Black Wall Street, Inc., Princetta produced programs centered on North Tulsa's businesses, food, culture, and history. Angel Bridge honored North Tulsa women. Other programs used food, business, and community traditions to tell stories that did not always appear in formal histories. She understood that the life of a community could be found in what people cooked, wore, printed, sold, built, and passed down.

Her work also put her in the company of people who came through Tulsa and needed someone who knew the city. She hosted or escorted figures including A.G. Gaston and Thurgood Marshall. She helped bring Satchel Paige and other Negro League veterans together in Tulsa and cooked for the players and their families herself. She remembers chicken wings, slaw, and corn on the cob as clearly as she remembers the names in the room.

Some well-known names came through family. In 1972, Joe Jackson and the Jackson 5 visited S.M. Jackson in Tulsa. One of Princetta's family photographs from that visit is now in the Smithsonian collection. A young Michael Jackson appears outside with relatives. It was a family photograph before it became a museum object.

Years later, attorney Johnnie Cochran came to Tulsa as part of the legal effort seeking justice for survivors and descendants of the 1921 massacre. Princetta gave him a Black Wall Street lapel pin.

She says she was later told that Cochran was buried wearing it.

Princetta had been taking visitors through Greenwood since the 1960s. By 1998, she had shaped that work into the escorted tours that became Black Wall Street Tours. Her printing, community work, and tours overlapped, giving her a body of photographs, family histories, oral histories, business records, and personal knowledge to draw from as she showed people the district.

Her theater background became part of the tours as well. Princetta developed historical-character presentations in which actors portrayed real Greenwood and North Tulsa residents — at one point, seventeen characters. She wanted visitors to know the business owners, teachers, doctors, lawyers, funeral directors, restaurateurs, and families whose lives made Greenwood a community, not only what happened to them in 1921.

Princetta is a first-generation descendant of massacre survivors, but she has never treated the massacre as the whole of Greenwood's story. She talks about what people built before 1921, what they rebuilt afterward, the decades of business and community life that followed, and the changes brought later by integration, urban renewal, redevelopment, and highway construction. She wants people to understand what happened to Greenwood, but also how people lived there.

Her civic work continued alongside everything else. In 1990, Princetta ran for Tulsa County Commissioner, challenging an incumbent she believed had stopped answering to North Tulsa. In 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first Black president of the United States, she helped organize a full day at the Greenwood Cultural Center for more than 400 Tulsa students. They watched the inauguration together, took part in a business fair, and returned that evening for a coronation ball.

A portion of Princetta's family photographs is now held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture as the Princetta R. Newman Collection of Family Photographs. Her photographs and knowledge have also contributed to exhibitions, publications, films, research, and art projects. Much more of the collection remains in her care.

Now in her senior years, Princetta is still doing the work. She gives tours and presentations, answers questions from families and researchers, identifies people in old photographs, and works with writers and filmmakers who want to understand Greenwood more fully. People still call to ask who is in a photograph, what business once stood on a corner, or how a name should be spelled.

She is working on a photobook series called If These Bricks Could Talk and working with kinkofa to launch the Black Wall Street Archive, which will preserve more of the photographs, records, oral histories, and family materials she has gathered over the years. She continues the work through Black Wall Street Tours, Inc., alongside a multigenerational team of volunteers and guides.