Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial
The Associated Press | Published May 25 & May 28, 2021
100 years after Tulsa Race Massacre, the damage remains
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — On a recent Sunday, Ernestine Alpha Gibbs returned to Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Not her body. She had left this Earth 18 years ago, at age 100. But on this day, three generations of her family brought Ernestine’s keepsakes back to this place which meant so much to her. A place that was, like their matriarch, a survivor of a long-ago atrocity.
Albums containing black-and-white photos of the grocery business that has employed generations of Gibbses. VHS cassette tapes of Ernestine reflecting on her life. Ernestine’s high school and college diplomas, displayed in not-so-well-aged leather covers.
The diplomas were a point of pride. After her community was leveled by white rioters in 1921 -- after the gunfire, the arson, the pillaging -- the high school sophomore temporarily fled Tulsa with her family. “I thought I would never, ever, ever come back,” she said in a 1994 home video.
But she did, and somehow found a happy ending.
“Even though the riot took away a lot, we still graduated,” she said, a smile spreading across her face. “So, we must have stayed here and we must have done all right after that.”
Not that the Gibbs family had it easy. And not that Black Tulsa ever really recovered from the devastation that took place 100 years ago, when nearly every structure in Greenwood, the fabled Black Wall Street, was flattened -- aside from Vernon AME.
The Tulsa Race Massacre is just one of the starkest examples of how Black wealth has been sapped, again and again, by racism and racist violence -- forcing generation after generation to start from scratch while shouldering the burdens of being Black in America.
All in the shadow of a Black paradise lost.
“Greenwood proved that if you had assets, you could accumulate wealth,” said Jim Goodwin, publisher of the Oklahoma Eagle, the local Black newspaper established in Tulsa a year after the massacre.
“It was not a matter of intelligence, that the Black man was inferior to white men. It disproved the whole idea that racial superiority was a fact of life.”
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Prior to the massacre, only a couple of generations removed from slavery, unfettered Black prosperity in America was urban legend. But Tulsa’s Greenwood district was far from a myth.
Many Black residents took jobs working for families on the white side of Tulsa, and some lived in detached servant quarters on weekdays. Others were shoeshine boys, chauffeurs, doormen, bellhops or maids at high-rise hotels, banks and office towers in downtown Tulsa, where white men who amassed wealth in the oil industry were kings.
But down on Black Wall Street — derided by whites as “Little Africa” or “N——-town” — Black workers spent their earnings in a bustling, booming city within a city. Black-owned grocery stores, soda fountains, cafés, barbershops, a movie theater, music venues, cigar and billiard parlors, tailors and dry cleaners, rooming houses and rental properties: Greenwood had it.
According to a 2001 report of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, the Greenwood district also had 15 doctors, a chiropractor, two dentists, three lawyers, a library, two schools, a hospital, and two Black publishers printing newspapers for north Tulsans.
Tensions between Tulsa’s Black and white populations inflamed when, on May 31, 1921, the white-owned Tulsa Tribune published a sensationalized report describing an alleged assault on Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white girl working as an elevator operator, by Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoeshine.
“Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” read the Tribune’s headline. The paper’s editor, Richard Lloyd Jones, had previously run a story extolling the Ku Klux Klan for hewing to the principle of “supremacy of the white race in social, political and governmental affairs of the nation.”
Rowland was arrested. A white mob gathered outside of the jail. Word that some in the mob intended to kidnap and lynch Rowland made it to Greenwood, where two dozen Black men had armed themselves and arrived at the jail to aid the sheriff in protecting the prisoner.
Their offer was rebuffed and they were sent away. But following a separate deadly clash between the lynch mob and the Greenwood men, white Tulsans took the sight of angry, armed Black men as evidence of an imminent Black uprising.
There were those who said that what followed was not as spontaneous as it seemed -- that the mob intended to drive Black people out of the city entirely, or at least to drive them further away from the city’s white enclaves.
Over 18 hours, between May 31 and June 1, whites vastly outnumbering the Black militia carried out a scorched-earth campaign against Greenwood. Some witnesses claimed they saw and heard airplanes overhead firebombing and shooting at businesses, homes and people in the Black district.
More than 35 city blocks were leveled, an estimated 191 businesses were destroyed, and roughly 10,000 Black residents were displaced from the neighborhood where they’d lived, learned, played, worked and prospered.
Although the state declared the massacre death toll to be only 36 people, most historians and experts who have studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300. Victims were buried in unmarked graves that, to this day, are being sought for proper burial.
The toll on the Black middle class and Black merchants is clear. According to massacre survivor Mary Jones Parrish’s 1922 book, R. T. Bridgewater, a Black doctor, returned to his home to find his high-end furniture piled in the street.
“My safe had been broken open, all of the money stolen,” Bridgewater said. “I lost 17 houses that paid me an average of over $425 per month.”
Tulsa Star publisher Andrew J. Smitherman lost everything, except for the metal printing presses that didn’t melt in the fires at his newspaper’s offices. Today, some of his descendants wonder what could have been, if the mob had never destroyed the Smitherman family business.
“We’d be like the Murdochs or the Johnson family, you know, Bob Johnson who had BET,” said Raven Majia Williams, a descendant of Smitherman’s, who is writing a book about his influence on Black Democratic politics of his time.
“My great-grandfather was in a perfect position to become a media mogul,” Williams said. “Black businesses were able to exist because they could advertise in his newspaper.”
Smitherman moved on to Buffalo, New York, where he opened another newspaper. It was a struggle; eventually, after his death in 1961, the Empire Star went under.
“It wasn’t a very large office, so I’d often see the bills,” said his grandson, William Dozier, who worked there as a boy. “Many of them were marked past due. We didn’t make a lot of money. He wasn’t able to pass any money down to his daughters, although he loved them dearly.”
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At century mark, Tulsa Race Massacre's wounds still unhealed
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — The Black Wall Street Market is nowhere near Black Wall Street.
The original Black Wall Street vaporized a hundred years ago, when a murderous white mob laid waste to what was the nation’s most prosperous Black-owned business district and residential neighborhood. When Billie Parker set out to memorialize the name with her new development, she built it far from Tulsa’s historic Greenwood neighborhood.
She followed the trail of the city’s Black population. There were roughly 10,000 Black Tulsans in 1921; displaced by the massacre, they would be pushed farther and farther north into what is unambiguously an underdeveloped and underserved section of the city today.
Parker’s Black Wall Street Market is a ramshackle outpost on a 3-acre lot abutting a two-lane road, a far cry from the booming city within a city that was Greenwood, with its Black grocers, shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, newspaper publishers and other businessmen and women.
But Parker thought it was important to lay claim to the name and its legacy.
“We were taught not to even think about that,” Parker, who is in her 50s, said on a recent Saturday morning after opening up the market’s gift shop. “We had to hush up. So, I say it’s time for us to put Black Wall Street out there.”
The 6 miles between the old and new incarnations of Black Wall Street belie the dire connection that links them: Racial and socioeconomic inequality on Tulsa’s north side has its roots in the 100-year-old atrocity of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
First, a racist mob stripped an almost unknowable amount of wealth from Black Tulsans overnight. Then, desegregation and urban renewal further upended the post-massacre Black business community that was rebuilt. Insurance claims for massacre victims’ losses were denied and their civil lawsuits against the city and state seeking financial relief were tossed out.
No Black survivor or descendant has been justly compensated for their losses. That timeline left a gaping wound unhealed for a century -- and that wound is still open on Tulsa’s north side.
The question is: What can be done now to help it heal?
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According to a U.S. Census Bureau estimate, the median household income for Black households across Tulsa was an estimated $30,955 in 2019, compared with $55,278 median income for white households. In a city of an estimated 401,760 people, close to a third of Tulsans who lived below the poverty line in 2019 were Black, while 12% were white.
A quick drive between south and north Tulsa shows a clear difference in development. Some paved streets don’t have streetlights or traffic signals. Until recently, the entire north side had easy access to just one grocery store. Many homes are in need of repair and renovations.
The Gibbs Next Generation Center, a small shopping mall and office park run by descendants of a woman who survived the Tulsa Race Massacre, is located in the same ZIP code as Parker’s market. LeRoy Gibbs II and his wife, Tracy, purchased the center in 2015 — the property used to be the location of businesses run by LeRoy’s grandfather and grandmother, LeRoy and Ernestine Gibbs, who was a teenager during the massacre.
The younger generation of Gibbs has revived the center with the hope that it brings jobs and revenues to the Black community. They rent office space and storefronts to six tenants, including a graphic design shop, a legal defense aid organization, a Black beauty boutique and a candy store.
But the Gibbs have also grown frustrated with the stark inequality of Tulsa’s north side.
“One thing we have to remember is when the 1921 Race Massacre occurred, people’s homes and businesses were destroyed,” said Tracy Gibbs, CEO of the center.
The community didn’t just lose structures and buildings, they lost an educational base of residents who knew how to start and grow businesses, Gibbs said.
“You lose all of that history as it relates to businesses and that information being passed down from generation to generation,” she said. “You have African American businesses that are striving and struggling to turn a dollar, make a dollar, keep a dollar in a community because of that lack of education that’s there.”
Look around, says Brandon Oldam, a native north Tulsan and member of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, and you’ll see the cascading effects of a 100-year-old massacre: “We don’t know how the wealth that would have been passed down would have changed the trajectory of millions of people.”
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Greenwood -- where the massacre occurred -- has seen some improvements. There are white-napkin restaurants, a bookstore, a gourmet dessert bar, and a jazz club within blocks of the district. Silhouette Sneakers and Art, on Archer Avenue, is a Black-owned boutique that opened in 2019. Prior to the massacre, it was Grier-Shoemaker, a Black-owned shop.
And soon there’ll be a $30 million history center at Greenwood and Archer avenues. Greenwood Rising will honor the legacy of Black Wall Street, with exhibits depicting the district before and after the massacre, according to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission.
But Greenwood’s expansion appears choked off by the development happening around it, in Tulsa’s Art District. And for Billie Parker, any revitalization of Black Wall Street in Tulsa should be where Black people reside -- and that’s not in Greenwood, 6 miles south of her lot.
“I’m sorry to tell you that we don’t own it (Greenwood) anymore,” Parker said.
She owns her lot, on North Osage Drive, and uses it as an incubator for Black entrepreneurship and an events venue.
It’s a fixer upper. There are no paved parking spaces at Black Wall Street Market. A museum consists of a glass case displaying Black cultural antiques. The gift shop is organized inside of a one-room trailer, where Parker sells dashikis, African shea butter, black soap, body oils, jewelry made from cowrie shells and other vintage Black culture trinkets.
To the left of the gift shop is a hoop house, where she allows her neighbors to plant and grow vegetables and herbs in raised garden beds. The produce is sometimes sold in the gift shop.
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