90.1 FM San Luis Obispo | 91.7 FM Paso Robles | 91.1 FM Cayucos | 95.1 FM Lompoc | 90.9 FM Avila
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Venita Cooper--invigorating Tulsa’s Black Wall Street with sneakers and a $1m VC startup

Ways To Subscribe
"Coop" Cooper (left) with Tom Wilmer at her Tulsa, Greenwood District Silhouette Sneakers & Art store.
Jillian Parks
"Coop" Cooper (left) with Tom Wilmer at her Tulsa, Greenwood District Silhouette Sneakers & Art store.

Venita Cooper shares her journey that led her to Tulsa, her sneaker shop, and tech startup.

 Join correspondent Tom Wilmer for an insightful visit with Venita “Coop” Cooper at her trendy Silhouette Sneakers & Art in the heart of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, Greenwood District.

Sneaker art at Silhouette Sneakers & Art, TULSA
Sneaker art at Silhouette Sneakers & Art, TULSA

Coop’s Silhouette Sneakers & Art is a curated retail experience that brings limited and authentic sneakers and streetwear to Tulsa.

Tulsa's Greenwood District's Silhouette Sneakers & Art
Jillian Parks
Tulsa's Greenwood District's Silhouette Sneakers & Art

Coop also shares fascinating insights about her brilliant startup, Arbit. Succinctly, it’ a pricing algorithm that empowers both buyers and sellers in the sneaker resell market. Coop says. “It’s not a marketplace. It’s an unbiased pricing B-to-C tool that informs buy and sell decisions in all sneaker marketplaces.”

She says. “Our boutique features an art gallery showcasing a rotating selection of street-inspired art. We also deliver programming that links sneaker culture enthusiasts and cultivates a new generation of sneakerheads”.

Coop’s Sneaker shop is located in the exact spot where a shoe store reposed before it was arsoned in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

Excerpt from a May 24, 2021 New York Times article about the terror attack on the Greenwood neighborhood:

Brick and wood-frame homes dotted the landscape, along with blocks lined with grocery stores, hotels, nightclubs, billiard halls, theaters, doctor’s offices and churches.

Greenwood was so promising, so vibrant that it became home to what was known as America’s Black Wall Street. But what took years to build was erased in less than 24 hours by racial violence — sending the dead into mass graves and forever altering family trees.

Hundreds of Greenwood residents were brutally killed, their homes and businesses wiped out. They were casualties of a furious and heavily armed white mob of looters and arsonists. One factor that drove the violence: resentment toward the Black prosperity found in block after block of Greenwood.

The financial toll of the massacre is evident in the $1.8 million in property loss claims — $27 million in today’s dollars — detailed in a 2001 state commission report.

For two decades, the report has been one of the most comprehensive accounts to reveal the horrific details of the massacre — among the worst racial terror attacks in the nation’s history — as well as the government’s culpability.

 

Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer is featured on the NPR.ORG Podcast Directory
NPR.ORG
Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer is featured on the NPR.ORG Podcast Directory

You are invited to subscribe to the seven-time Lowell Thomas Award-winning travel podcast, Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer, featured on the NPR Podcast DirectoryApple Podcastand more than twenty other podcast hosting sites including iHeartRadio and Spotify

Tom Wilmer produces on-air content for Issues & Ideas airing over KCBX and is producer and host of the six-time Lowell Thomas award-winning NPR podcast Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer. Recorded live on-location across America and around the world, the podcasts feature the arts, culture, music, nature, history, science, wine & spirits, brewpubs, and the culinary arts--everything from baseball to exploring South Pacific atolls to interviewing the real Santa Claus in the Arctic.
Related Content