The History of Black Wall Street and the Legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre

Gary Lee is the managing editor of The Oklahoma Eagle, a Tulsa-based, black-owned media company. Lee joined The Motley Fool's Bill Mann to talk about:

• The history of Black Wall Street, and the rise of the Greenwood community.
• The legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre and Tulsa's path forward.

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This video was recorded on Feb. 26, 2023.

Gary Lee: Incredibly, the community was rebuilt. The rebuilding pretty much started right away. People didn't hang around saying woe is me. They said, OK, we've got to rebuild. Gradually by the 1940s, this is from '22, in the next two decades, it became bigger and more thriving than it had been before the massacre.

Dylan Lewis: One of the most important events in Americas economic and racial history is one that hasn't been discussed often. Gary Lee is the Managing Editor of the Oklahoma Eagle, a Tulsa-based and black-owned media company. Lee joined The Motley Fools' Bill Mann to talk about the history of Black Wall Street and the rise of the Greenwood community and the legacy of the Tulsa race massacre and the city of Tulsa's path forward.

Bill Mann: I wanted for us to spend some time talking about the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa and a period of history that even as someone who was a student of history, to me was not particularly talked about, which was the rise of Black Wall Street, which is the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa. Then in 1921, the Tulsa race massacres. What can you tell me about the rise of Greenwood and why it was so important?

Gary Lee: Yes. So this is something that's on my mind daily because I work right in the middle of that neighborhood and the community that The Oklahoma Eagle really serves is that same Greenwood community. Let me see where to start. I'll try to make a really long and colorful story as concise as I can.

Bill Mann: We are your canvas, Gary, so please take your time. I really want people to hear from you.

Gary Lee: Oklahoma became a state in 1907, and leading up to its statehood, there were all kinds of thoughts about what to do with this part of the country. It was called Indian territory. One of the ideas was to create a black state. There was a process that went on of people here, started recruiting blacks from the south, from different places to come to Oklahoma and Tulsa was one of the centers that was places where they were trying to attract people and lots of people came. It was already a very strong black community based on what people call the trail of tears. Indian tribes coming from the south who brought with them blacks as slaves and when they came to Oklahoma, they had blacks and which they couldn't have slaves in what was a federal territory at the time.

That groundswell of blacks plus those who came that basically had an incredible entrepreneurial spirit. They started to apply that to this neighborhood, which became known as Greenwood. Eventually, it became shop after shop, business after business of all black-run businesses, which was the center of this incredibly thriving community. That was driven in part by segregation, that Jim Crow laws. The blacks who came and did commerce and had hotels and burning ounces really traded among each other. There was no trade with the white community. Some people worked as basically in a service class in the white community in Tulsa. This was all going more or less parallel with the growth of Tulsa's oil boom. Tulsa at one point was considered the oil capital of the world, so that was parallel to this growing on. That's what gave way to what then was known as the Negro Wall Street. That's how long ago. The name Black Wall Street was really applied later to it. But that was the basis of the growth of the community.

Bill Mann: Sorry go right ahead.

Gary Lee: One other thing that I have to mention is that parallel to this entrepreneurial growth, there was also the growth of white supremacy on the klan that was developing in Oklahoma and around Tulsa. That community had clearly a great deal of animosity toward the boom of this black community right in the middle of the city. That basically led to the Tulsa race massacre, which you mentioned of 1921, in which what was then known as the Greenwood community. It was pretty much devastated, and I think approximately 300 people were killed.

They're still looking at mass graves to see that the whole community are pretty much, most of it was destroyed and fires before kill, there was a white mob that attacked the neighborhood. Then I'll just add one other thing and we can go on. Then incredibly, the community was rebuilt The rebuilding pretty much started right away. People didn't hang around saying woe is me. They said, OK, we've got to rebuild, and gradually by the 1940s, this is from 22, in the next two decades, it became bigger and more thriving than it had been before the massacre. There's more history to sell, but I'll stop there.

Bill Mann: When the massacre happened, I don't believe they ever figured out how many people perished, but it was more than a 1,000 homes were destroyed. What was your exactly right, given the Jim Crow laws that there was a great separation between the black commercial community and the white commercial community? What were the actual origins of the animosity that led to this violent act. Was it just sheer jealousy or was there a belief that black-owned businesses were taking over the town? What was the source?

Gary Lee: Well, good question, Bill. There was an event that triggered it, the massacre, and that is that there was an incident where a young black guy got into an elevator in downtown Tulsa. There was a young woman who was white, who was the elevator operator, and the story is not quite clear, but what spread in the media is that the young black guy had a grasp the young woman in some way, he was maybe not, I don't know, tried to come onto her. That story has never been clarified. But anyway, he was taken to jail. Then the leaders in the black community said, well, this is wrong, and they marched down to the courthouse and tried to release him from jail and there was a backlash against that.

That was the incident that started it. That was what you'd call the match struck. But leading up to that, a couple of things were going on. One is that the prosperity in that Greenwood community was overshadowing a lot of things going on in white neighbor, it's in Tulsa. In Oklahoma you had lots of people who were coming from other places looking to make a better living and many of them were not fairing that well. There was that I wouldn't say necessarily jealousy, but competition or why are they doing so well and we're doing so poorly? There was that plus you did have a fairly active, growing Ku Klux Klan movement in the area at the time. There was that political oppression.

Also, I think that the third thing which is still something of an issue is that that land where then the Greenwood community, which is a vast track of land, is something that business people at that time and other that the city leadership had been eyeing for a long time, they wanted that land they wanted to figure out a way to get at it. These three things came together in a way to lead to the race massacre. Let me add one other thing is that you are right, Bill, in mentioning that they haven't figured out how many people had died until one of the lingering aspects, this is now more than 100 years ago. One of the lingering aspects is that there is a search for graves of people who went missing in that period who have not been discovered. This mass graves search, which is administered by the city, and it's actually not the main site that they're looking at called Oakland cemetery is not very far from where I'm sitting right now.

Bill Mann: One of the areas that I would love for you to delve in and I understand that some of this it would be conjectural. What do you think that Tulsa and Oklahoma, we know very directly what the people who were attacked lost. I mean, that is they lost their lives, they lost their livelihoods, they lost their homes. It was absolutely devastating. There is something powerful in being around an economically vibrant area. What do you think that Tulsa lost and Oklahoma lost as a result of the massacre?

Gary Lee: Bill, that's really a great question. I think to answer it you would have to frame up a little bit what Oklahoma had.

Bill Mann: Sure.

Gary Lee: Oklahoma was the frontier state. It was a place where I mentioned that Tulsa became known as the Oil Capital of the World. Lots of sectors, business was booming, people came, they were making lots of money. It was in some ways considered the American dream destination. You could come here, you could make lots of money. You could get a big house and all those things that people in American history wanted to have. All that growth was going on at the time and it was booming and for many here were relative harmony in it. I think that with the massacre Tulsa lost its innocence in that regard. It lost its feeling that it was a sense that this was a destination that was open for anybody to come and thrive in.

I feel if I could maybe compare it a bit with what happened in New Orleans with Katrina. We all started New Orleans as well, it's fantastic, French corridor, we love it, go down, get some drink. Then Katrina exposed that that really wasn't true for a lot of people. I think to massacre exposed that that really wasn't true for Tulsa. Then once I think the outside world had the opportunity to look at Tulsa from that angle, then other inequities started to surface. I mentioned this was known as Indian territory before and injustices to Indians started to emerge as well. That's a big part of what Tulsa lost. Let me mention one other thing that's really super important. That is that for decades, nobody really talked about the massacre. It was hush, hush, it was hush, hush in the white community, it was hush, hush in the black community.

Bill Mann: You mean in Tulsa?

Gary Lee: In Tulsa, I remember even as a kid, 11 years old, want to be journalists, kid like that, I would ask my relatives, even my uncle, my dad, and they would say, well, you know, we're really not supposed to talk about what happened there. That veil of secrecy was all over the city until the early 1990s. There was a woman named Susan Savage who became mayor. She said, basically, what's going on. We should be looking at this and she appointed a commission to really examine what had happened. It's really in that time that people started telling the story.

One of the things that came out of that was the creation of something called the John Hope Franklin Center for Racial Healing. That center, among other institutions, has been devoted to, OK, why can't we recapture that we lost? As you know, from Adam and Eve and whatever. Once you lose certain things, you really can't recapture them. But I have to say that there is an effort going on in the city to try at least to acknowledge OK, what happened, who's responsible, etc. A really good question, Bill.

Bill Mann: The Katrina allegory is interesting to me because what you're talking about is a trajectory. I think that a lot of people around the US when they think of Tulsa, it's a little bit of a blank slate. It's not a city that has a huge footprint nationwide. I really firmly believe that had the race massacre had not happened, that the trajectory for Tulsa would have been entirely different.

Gary Lee: Surely, it would have been different. Now I have to say that the Tulsa that we have now is a thriving community. It's one of these growth cities, I don't know how locals feel about it when we go to California. Not too long ago I was in Portland in Oregon and somebody asked me where I was from and I told him I was from Tulsa and he said, oh, you're from back east. I was like oh, don't tell They don't want to hear that. It is, and it is true that in spite of the fact that there has been growth and you feel it when you drive around the city and talk to people that until there is really some reckoning or acknowledgment of complexity and all that. You really haven't had that fully until you have that, Tulsa is not, I feel going to be able to achieve the potential that it still has.

Dylan Lewis: As always, people on the program may own stocks discussed on the show and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. I'm Dylan Lewis. We'll see you tomorrow.