The Greenwood District: The Devastation of Black Wall Street

The overlooked devastation of Black Wall Street – a wave of hate crimes destroys an affluent African-American community, in 1921’s Tulsa, Oklahoma, after the Black community is seen as a threat to white-dominated American capitalism. 

The creation of the powerful Greenwood District was intentional – in 1906 O.W. Gurley, a wealthy Black man from Arkansas moved to Tulsa and purchased over forty acres of land that he made sure to only sell to other African Americans, Gurley provided an opportunity for those migrating from Mississippi and the average income of Black families in the area exceeded what minimum wage is today. A result of segregation was a dollar was circulated thirty-six to one-hundred times and would remain in the community for a year before leaving.

The Greenwood District, known as Black Wall Street for being one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States, until on May 31, the Tulsa Tribune reported that a black man named Dick Rowland attempted to rape a white woman named Sarah Page. Many white people in the area refused to wait for any sort of investigative process and took jurisdiction into their own hands by sparking two days of unprecedented racial violence: thirty-five city blocks were in flames, 300 people died, and 800 were injured during the devastating event.

Accounts on what really happened between Page and Rowland in the elevator of the Drexel Building vary, as a result of the Tulsa Tribune’s racially inflammatory report, black and white mobs arrived at the courthouse and a fight broke out. Shots were fired and because black people were outnumbered, they fled back to Greenwood but the enraged white people weren’t far behind, looting from and burning buildings along the way. Nine thousand people became homeless because of this. White Americans erased the destruction of the most prosperous black community in America to this day.