It was at a conference that she was first approached by representatives from Still She Rises. At first reluctant to leave Nashville, the same factors that pulled her into criminal defense in the first place ultimately lured her to Green Country.
SB 937 would have changed the name of Lake Hudson in Mayes County to Lake Markham, in honor of a family that helped settle the area around the Grand River in the 1840s.
“Our ancestors had to watch the massacre happen, watch their homes be burned and looted,” Kristi Williams said. “All we have left is those markers. No economic justice, no restorative justice, nothing for land that was our birthright.”
“Our hands are tied,” County Commissioner Karen Keith said. “There’s just not much Tulsa County can do.”
“I do not in any way condone or believe that discrimination, based on race, religion or sex, has any place within the workspace,” Tulsa County Court Clerk Donald Newberry wrote in an email. “At the same time, I and all that work for this office, have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, part of which is the protection of free speech.”
Oklahoma did away with life without parole for drug trafficking in 2015, but the law change did little to help people still left in prison.
State officials first investigated changing the name of Lake Hudson after The Frontier reported on its namesake’s ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
It turns out that giving people free money to live in Tulsa was a more popular idea than anyone guessed.
