"The history of the Greenwood District and North Tulsa is filled with great successes and tragedies. From the early 1900s through the 1940s, North Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, Oklahoma was known as “Black Wall Street.” The discriminatory “Jim Crow” laws of the time limited shopping, commercial and land ownership by African-Americans to only the north side of Tulsa. As a result, the African-American community developed a profoundly successful and enviable infrastructure. Prior to 1921, the 36 square block area, known as “Little Africa”, encompassed hundreds of businesses and approximately 11,000 people. Among these African American residents were several PhD’s, attorneys, doctors and many people who had earned advanced degrees. There were 21 churches, 212 restaurants, 2 movie theaters and more than four hundred (400) businesses in North Tulsa at that time. All of this changed in the late spring of 1921. On May 31, 1921 a mob of approximately 2,000 white people assembled outside of the Tulsa Courthouse and jail in anticipation of the possible lynching of a black man accused of assaulting a white woman. A group of fifty to seventy-five black men arrived at the scene. In hopes of preventing the lynching, a shot was fired. The tension which had reached an uncontainable level, exploded into one of the worst race riots in American history. By the time order was restored two days later, “Black Wall Street” had burned to the ground. The Black man accused of molesting the white female elevator operator was acquitted. The official report of the riot is listed thirty-six people killed. Working from 1997 through 2001, a legislated state appointed Race Riot Commission found that three hundred people may have been killed."
- (from the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce: The Story of Black Wall Street)
"Believed to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history, the bloody 1921 Tulsa race riot has continued to haunt Oklahomans to the present day. During the course of eighteen terrible hours on May 31 and June 1, 1921, more than one thousand homes and businesses were destroyed, while credible estimates of riot deaths range from fifty to three hundred. By the time the violence ended, the city had been placed under martial law, thousands of Tulsans were being held under armed guard, and the state's second-largest African American community had been burned to the ground."
But the question that haunts me is, why do I want to see a revival of "Black Wall Street? Is it racist to want to assert my civil rights by what I now consider the "last means necessary" - the economic vote, or voting with my dollar? This certainly would not be anti-American, because this always has been and, certainly still is now, the American way. Is it wrong to make a conscious effort to spend my money with black-owned businesses to ensure that I am not dependent on businesses, politicians and lobbyists who work against my benefit and won't consider what I have to say, because they believe that I still think I have no other real choices? Well, I won't if I do not consciously commit to that investment now.
I truly believe that the last bastion of racism in America is tied to economics. I may even contend that in the overall scheme of things it has always been the only true bastion of racism, because at the end of the day, perhaps when our senses are dulled by nightfall and we are not vigilant enough to keep watching, it is that Greed that causes the sleepless among us to formulate our sinister schemes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth, eds., The Tulsa Race Riot: A Scientific, Historical and Legal Analysis (Oklahoma City: Tulsa Race Riot Commission, 2000). Eddie Faye Gates, They Came Searching: How Blacks Sought the Promised Land in Tulsa (Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 1997). Loren L. Gill, "The Tulsa Race Riot" (M.A. thesis, University of Tulsa, 1946). Robert N. Hower, "Angels of Mercy": The American Red Cross and the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot (Tulsa, Okla.: Homestead Press, 1993). Mary E. Jones Parrish, Events of the Tulsa Disaster (Tulsa, Okla.: Out on a Limb Publishing, 1998).
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