24th Annual Historic Oklahoma All-Black Town Bus Tour

Join Tulsa City-County Library's African American Resource Center and the Tulsa Library Trust for this annual bus tour to commemorate Juneteenth. Purchase tickets at Rudisill Regional Library.

This ticketed event includes breakfast, lunch and museum fare. The tour will visit the historic areas of Rentiesville and the Honey Springs Museum and Battlefield Site as well as the D.C. Minner Down Home Blues Club. This year, Shirley Ann Nero, distinguished historian, native of all-Black town Clearview and board member of the Oklahoma African American Educators Hall of Fame, and Jimmie White, historian and founding member of the Black Heritage Committee of the Oklahoma Historical Society, will return as our tour guides. 

The tour serves as the African American Resource Center's celebration of Juneteenth, which commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans and is now a federal holiday, observed each year on June 19. It was on this date in 1865 that African American people still enslaved in Texas, particularly Galveston, were declared free by a general order. The annual All-Black Town Tour celebrates existing and historical towns and communities that were built after emancipation.

The bus will leave at 8 a.m. from Rudisill Regional Library and return to the same location at 5:30 p.m. Breakfast and sign-in will begin at 7 a.m. inside Rudisill Regional Library.

Tickets, which are nonrefundable, can be purchased for $45 each in advance and in person at Rudisill Regional Library via cash or check only; credit and debit cards will not be accepted. Seating is limited on a first-come-first-serve basis, and seat sharing is prohibited. Youths ages 17 and under must be accompanied by an adult guardian.

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