Ever since the dust bowl (both my mom and dad lived through that), and especially since "Grapes of Wrath" (which is about Okies, not Oklahoma).
Like many places in America, the freeways are often nicer than the places people actually live.
When you keep a lid on what people are allowed to hear and see for many years, folks are largely passive about the injustices done around them. People get used to endemic poverty and blame minorities for all the crime. Most of the crime happens at the white collar level and nobody ever gets caught.
Aubrey McClendon was the CEO of Chesapeake Energy, the leading "fracking for natural gas leasing" corporation in the US. They conducted a massive ponzi scheme of mineral rights leasing across the country. According to the sources in his wikipedia article, "On March 1, 2016, McClendon was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiring ...to rig bids for the purchase of oil and natural gas leases in northwest Oklahoma."
On March 2, not wearing a seat belt McClendon apparently drove his Chevy Tahoe directly into a concrete abutment at 88 miles per hour.
"On June 8, 2016, the Oklahoma medical examiner officially ruled the crash which killed McClendon was an accident." Not a suicide, mind you. An accident.
That's what makes Oklahoma a special place. Rich people keep getting away with murder by killing other people. Scorsese just made a movie about the Osage murders last year. "Silkwood" is another movie where locals are poisoned by Kerr-McGee (the predecessors of Chesapeake). Of course, the Oklahoma state government has finally acknowledged the 1921 Tulsa Race riot, but not its own part in concealing it.
OKC is also home to Ackermann-McQueen, the ad agency who converted a gun safety club, the National Rifle Association, into a political sledgehammer for the gun manufacturers.
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