Black people have proven for centuries that we can ‘make a way out of no way.’ So it should be no surprise that a few who lived in Oklahoma, fed up with prejudice and lack of opportunity, dared to create their own business district in Tulsa. Just imagine. The sheer audacity of it drove white people to distraction.
But let us begin with the Trail of Tears and about 1832. Southern White colonizers who wanted to increase their cotton profits drove Native Americans [Indian Removal Act] from their land in places like Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Five tribes signed on to the Act and one hundred thousand indigenous people trekked on foot or horseback, five thousand miles to Indian territory – Oklahoma. But these tribes owned four thousand Slaves – Black people. Talk about trying to fit in with White America! When they got to Oklahoma, the slaves had to rebuild what the Native Americans had lost in the deep south.
After the Civil War ended Blacks and Indians lived side by side. In 1887, the Dawes Act gave the freed Blacks among other things, two million acres of land. The land allotments allowed more than fifty Black townships to emerge – more than anywhere else in the country. In addition, after the Native Americans got their allotted shares of land, whatever was left, not valuable to whites, went up for sale.
A Black man named O.W. Gurley bought land and opened a grocery store on what would become Greenwood Avenue – the beginning of Black Wall Street. Gurley also sold parcels of his land, but only to other Black people. Soon Oklahoma got the reputation as the place to go to be free and prosper. The discovery of oil made Tulsa a boomtown. But statehood and powerful whites brought Jim Crow laws and Blacks were pushed into a very small area of about thirty-five blocks. Here’s the ‘way out of no way part.’ Black businesses flourished. As the people were confined, so was the money! Doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, bankers, builders, bakers, restauranteurs, hoteliers, numbers runners, and theater owners. Cooperation and community co-opted competition – eleven thousand strong.
But whiteness and white supremacy were threatened. The impertinence of these ‘uppity’ Black people who not only did not know their place but had the temerity to be more prosperous than some of their so-called ‘betters,’ engendered envy and anger. On May 31, 1921, Dick Rowland, a young shoeshine boy was accused of assaulting a white girl in downtown Tulsa. A lynch mob gathered to protect white womanhood. A survivor of Greenwood descendants, Regina Goodwin says, armed Black veterans from World War I attempted to stop the mob, a white man tried to take a gun from a Black man, “…a shot was fired, and all hell broke loose. It was a war on the Greenwood community.” According to Program Coordinator of the Greenwood Culture Center, Michelle Brown-Burdex, “the sheriff deputized five hundred white men who were joined by thousands of white rioters.” The fighting progressed into the Greenwood neighborhood where armed Black men in strategic locations defended their community. A descendant of the Greenwood massacre, J. Kavin Ross, spoke of a World War I veteran who “brought back a Gatling gun from the war and fired upon mobsters” as they entered Greenwood.
Whites regrouped and at 5 a.m. on June 1st, “a mob stormed Greenwood Avenue, entering buildings… looting and burning them,” said Victor Luckerson, author of Built By Fire. This was about more than Dick Rowland. Charges against him were dropped. This was about a ground and air attack on a community, massacring its people, and liquidating its wealth – a lossof about twenty-seven million in today’s dollars. It is estimated that six thousand were arrested, one thousand homes and three hundred businesses were burned, and about three hundred people were murdered. Ten thousand were left homeless. Eldoris McCondichi, massacre survivor says, “I was awakened by my mother and I was very frightened. Bullets were raining down over us. She said we have to go out, get out. The white people are killing the colored people.” When the smoke cleared, some Greenwood residents stayed to rebuild, others left – never to return.
Tulsa may be the most well-known, but it was not the only Black Wall Street. Prosperous Black communities existed in several other U.S. cities: Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, Bronzeville in Chicago, Hayti in Durham, North Carolina, Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi, and West Ninth Street in Little Rock, Arkansas.
So why don’t you know more about this part of our history? Black people did not talk about it. Some were afraid of repercussions by the government or the police. Angela Davis’ theory is that “there is a fear connected to giving voice to something. Black people remained silent because they did not want the next generation to undergo the same violence.”
During their heyday, these Black Wall Streets thrived because people worked together and supported each other. Their dollars circulated among their own. Let’s take a lesson from that.
