Reclaiming History: The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street
February 5, 2023
Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister
After the Civil War, the 5 Indigenous Nations living in what is now Oklahoma gave a group of freed people land on which to start new lives. Word got out that the Territory was a safe place for newly liberated people, creating a land rush that only got more intense through the rest of the century.
In 1889, OW Gurley, born to freed people in Alabama, moved to Oklahoma where he purchased 40 acres with the idea of supporting other Black people to buy land and build homes and businesses. Often called the Architect of Greenwood, the neighborhood in Tulsa sometimes referred to as Black Wall Street, Gurley provided loans and other support to encourage the creation of a new community for Black people. 10 years later, he was joined by JB Stradford, a Black lawyer from Kentucky, who built homes and businesses including a luxury hotel. In that intervening decade, restaurants, doctor, dentist and lawyer offices, schools, grocery and candy stores, banks, churches, pool halls, hair salons, and theatres had opened up and by the turn of the century Greenwood was a destination for Black people to settle or vacation. They even had their own hospital and newspaper, the Tulsa Star, founded and run by an activist committed to telling the story of this thriving Black enclave. You could live in Greenwood and never leave. Covering about 35 square blocks – from Lex to 7th, from 35th to 42nd st., everything a family needed could be found in walking distance. Families were accumulating wealth and were spending it in their own community, keeping the neighborhood self-sufficient, while the people were interdependent.
There are some lovely stories of the Greenwood neighborhood. Ellis Walker Woods walked from Memphis to Oklahoma after seeing a flyer advertising for Black teachers. As a college-educated man, he soon became the principle of the Booker T. Washington High School. Simon Berry, a pilot, learned that the taxi service in Tulsa only served white people, so he borrowed the money for a Model-T Ford to drive Black people where they needed to go. He then expanded creating a bus line and then a charter plane service for wealthy Black oilmen. Mable Little arrived in Greenwood with $1.24 and was able to open a hair salon with the help of other female entrepreneurs who were committed to supporting each other in this new world they were building.
On May 30th, 1921, 19 year old Dick Rowland, a Greenwood resident working in greater Tulsa, got on an elevator run by a 17 year old white female elevator operator named Sarah Page. When the elevator opened, Ms. Page accused Mr. Rowland of attempted rape. In subsequent investigations, it seems clear that nothing actually happened on that elevator, but the accusation was all that was needed. Rowland was arrested the next morning and brought to a Tulsa jail. By then, rumors were circulating about an assault, fed by a front page story in the primary Tulsa paper accusing Rowland of raping a white teenager.
As evening fell, a group of white men gathered outside the courthouse demanding the Sheriff release the teen to them. He and his deputies refused and barricaded themselves into the top floor. About 25 armed Black men showed up offering to help the Sheriff protect Rowland, but he turned them away, telling them to stay outside or go home. As the evening progressed, as many as 1500 white men were at the courthouse where the 25 Black men, now joined by their neighbors and totaling 75, stood guard. Shots were fired and the Black men retreated, heading back into the Greenwood neighborhood. Assuming the shots were from the Black men, the Sheriff deputized some of the white mob and asked for help catching them.
That white mob, now acting on behalf of the law, and soon joined by even more people coming in from all over Tulsa, descended on Greenwood and started to burn it down. Firefighters came to the scene but later reported that they were threatened at gunpoint when they tried to put out the fires. The rioting went all night and into the morning. In the end, more than 300 people were dead, almost entirely Black, more than 6,000 of the 10,000 Greenwood residents, including children, were arrested and put in holding cells, and every home and business had been looted or burned to the ground. Almost 1300 private homes were flattened along with schools, theatres, their media outlets, and even their hospital. All gone. No white people were ever charged with anything related to the violence in Greenwood.
A few days later, Rowland was released from jail without charges. It seems he’d accidentally banged into Ms. Page during the ride. He never returned to Tulsa.
Newspapers called it a race riot. In Tulsa it was called a Race War. No one called it a massacre, which is, of course, what it was. The Boston Massacre saw 5 killed. The worst riot in American history until then saw 119 dead, and they were on both sides as were death tolls of most other American riots.
Not only did they not call this a massacre, within weeks, no one talked about it at all. It was a big story with major newspapers covering it in the immediate aftermath. There were even white people taking pictures, creating postcards, and selling them as souvenirs. But by August, no one was talking about it at all. It seemed to have been largely erased from American history, until recently.
At the 75th anniversary in 1996, the City of Tulsa created a Commission to investigate. It’s from them that we have most of our statistics. Even with that acknowledgement, we were looking at the 100th anniversary with most Americans having never heard of the Tulsa Massacre.
The decision not to tell the story was the result of a cultural conspiracy from both white and Black people. On the one hand, the people of Greenwood were traumatized. Everything they knew was gone. Their homes. Their clothes. Their neighborhood. Their neighbors. They were terrified it could happen again, which was a legitimate fear since the Ku Klux Klan increased in both size and visibility right after the massacre. Their numbers swelled to over 10,000 in the city, ensuring that Black people remained silent. And white people didn’t want to keep talking about it either. The city officials were afraid of scaring off oil tycoons with talk of riots and other residents were just happy it was all behind them. So as not to embarrass the city, people in charge agreed not to include the incident in history books and many newspaper accounts were removed and archived to microfilm. Black residents didn’t want to pass on the pain to their children, or to dampen their ambitions and white residents didn’t want to admit any of this had happened at all. Together, they ensured that the story was never told.
It became part of the American conversation in 2019 when HBO aired the first episode of The Watchmen which opens with a depiction of that horrible night. Like so many Americans, I watched and assumed it must be fiction, as the rest of the show is. But curiosity was piqued and some vocal historians injected the conversation with facts, which are now making their way back into American culture, adding depth and texture to our understanding of who we are, where we come from, and how much work there is still to do.
We have entered Black History Month and I have to ask myself, “How can we celebrate Black History when we don’t even know it?” And I’m asking that question during a spasm of intentional, institutional mis-educating, history-erasing, fact-denying activity. Right now – Even Now – Still Now - the governor of Florida is doing everything he can to make sure people don’t know and can never learn American history. An Advanced Placement course was recently updated to include Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, the relationship between varying oppressions, and explanations of Critical Race Theory. Specifically rejected from the course outline is an article on intersectionality and violence against women of color, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s groundbreaking article on reparations, and a book by James Baldwin.
AP classes are designed by a national board with the intention of helping high school students gain college credit; they are open only to the most accomplished students in the school and are completely optional. Rejecting the curriculum in one state means that no student in any state will have access since AP classes are created for national standardization. This particular course was designed in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute. They have now gone back to rework this Black History course so as to eliminate – or what I’d call WhiteWash - much of Black history.
They’re also eliminating queer history, and gender history, and the very concept of intersectionality in this course. It is not to the benefit of those in power to allow a framework to be taught that recognizes the relationship between oppressions. They would prefer to target individual people or singular groups with accusations of resentment or entitlement, rather than acknowledge a massive system of oppression undergirding the entire American narrative.
Greenwood was not unique in its destruction. Have you heard of Bronzeville in Chicago? In the summer of 1919 they suffered a series of massacres and mass burnings of homes. Or West 9th street in Little Rock, or the 1906 riots in Sweet Auburn, Atlanta where white people randomly killed Black people en masse. I can’t find a death toll for that one either. The stories of so many of these places isn’t told, wasn’t investigated, and has moved into the dark underbelly of our country.
And that’s where conservatives would like it to remain. Unseen. They would like to retain power by keeping We the People uneducated lest we learn from our past or embarrass or make anyone uncomfortable in talking about it.
Timothy Snyder is one of our most respected writers and thinkers on political repression. He has a tiny, critically acclaimed and powerfully necessary book called On Tyranny in which he lays out the steps to resisting the shift away from democracy. The very first thing he tells us in this book is, “Do not obey in advance”. Very often, especially in the early stages of the shift into authoritarianism, power is given freely to autocrats. We see what they want, and we let them have it. Sometimes, like the case of Ron DeSantis wanting the college board to change the curriculum, they ask for it or even demand it, even though they have no moral or legal standing for such a thing. In response – maybe because we want to avoid a fight or maybe because we want to seem flexible or maybe because we’re intimidated by the power being wielded – we acquiesce. We obey. We figure there are ways around whatever they want. Or, we decide it’s not that big a deal. How many students are even taking this course?
And that’s how we end up, 100 years later, not knowing about a night of penetrating violence that killed hundreds, traumatized thousands, and burned a thriving neighborhood to the ground. We obeyed. We didn’t want to embarrass anyone. Make people uncomfortable. We stopped talking about it and thought it went away.
One month a year – and the shortest month at that – to talk about Black history seems a little absurd. But, that’s only if we forget that Black history is American history. We take one month to make sure the past is in sharp relief. We look carefully, thoughtfully, meticulously investigating, pulling at all the threads we have yet to consider. Then we weave those threads into the rest of our larger story.
The story of Greenwood is part of the story. The story of the GOP trying to erase that history is also part of the story. We reclaim our history by telling these stories, and by reclaiming the narrative, pushing back when someone tries to stop us.
There is hope in the struggle. There’s hope in the fact that people are struggling, that we haven’t just acquiesced, that we are raising our voices and using our pulpits. And, I’d like to encourage you toward a little curiosity. Investigate what you don’t know. See if there are stories no one is telling, and start telling them. Maybe post them in our Facebook group. Send them to me or to each other. Tell them over coffee or at the diner. The trauma inflicted on the Greenwood community wasn’t unique and isn’t over. The people of Memphis can assure us of that. Let’s commit to keeping those stories alive.
And when we do that, we keep our communities alive. We keep our history alive. We keep ourselves alive. Each of us. Nurtured by Truth so we can Embody Justice.
