Rowland was arrested and jailed in the Tulsa County Courthouse. She screamed, and he ran away, according to the commission report. Rowland tripped and grabbed onto the arm of Ms. It all began on May 30 with two teenagers in an elevator in the Drexel building in downtown Tulsa and morphed into a sexual assault accusation.Īccounts vary about what happened between Dick Rowland, 19, a young Black shoe shiner, and Sarah Page, 17, a white elevator operator. Composite created with photographs from the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, McFarlin Library at The University of Tulsa While a vast majority of the neighborhood rented, many residents owned their homes.Ī composite image shows Greenwood ablaze during the massacre. About 40 percent of the community’s residents were professionals or skilled craftspeople, like doctors, pharmacists, carpenters and hairdressers, according to a Times analysis of the 1920 census. In Greenwood, residents held more than 200 different types of jobs. Others made a living working as maids, waiters, chauffeurs, shoe shiners and cooks for Tulsa’s new oil class. Many African-Americans migrated to Tulsa after the Civil War, carrying dreams of new chapters and the kind of freedom found in owning businesses. Survivor accounts that were relayed to relatives recall neighbors getting “gussied up” to gather in Greenwood, with Thursdays being big because of “Maids’ Night Out.” Black domestics, many of them live-in workers who cleaned the homes of white residents across town, were off that day. In the evenings, residents had their choice of entertainment. There was also a small juke joint called Zulu Lounge owned by Isaac Evitt, who worked by day on a farm, but after dark, flung open the doors of Zulu. This marquee block was the pulse of the Black business community. Perhaps no other collection of businesses tells the story of Greenwood and Black entrepreneurship better than the 100 block of Greenwood Avenue, rising near the southern tip of the neighborhood. The Times also analyzed census data, city directories, newspaper articles, and survivor tapes and testimonies from that time to show the types of people who made up the neighborhood and contributed to its vibrancy. Piecing together archival maps and photographs, with guidance from historians, The New York Times constructed a 3-D model of the Greenwood neighborhood as it was before the destruction. “If they had been allowed to carry on that legacy,” she said, “there’s no telling where we could be now.”įor decades, what happened in Greenwood was willfully buried in history. The Greenwood Avenue shoe shop of her grandfather and his brother was destroyed. “What if we had been allowed to maintain our family business?” asked Brenda Nails-Alford, who is in her early 60s. Much bigger is a sobering kind of inheritance: the incalculable and enduring loss of what could have been, and the generational wealth that might have shaped and secured the fortunes of Black children and grandchildren. The destruction of property is only one piece of the financial devastation that the massacre wrought. Greenwood Avenue, for years a thriving hub, was destroyed by racial violence in less than 24 hours. For two decades, the report has been one of the most comprehensive accounts to reveal the horrific details of the massacre - among the worst racial terror attacks in the nation’s history - as well as the government’s culpability. The financial toll of the massacre is evident in the $1.8 million in property loss claims - $27 million in today’s dollars - detailed in a 2001 state commission report. One factor that drove the violence: resentment toward the Black prosperity found in block after block of Greenwood. They were casualties of a furious and heavily armed white mob of looters and arsonists. Hundreds of Greenwood residents were brutally killed, their homes and businesses wiped out. But what took years to build was erased in less than 24 hours by racial violence - sending the dead into mass graves and forever altering family trees. Greenwood was so promising, so vibrant that it became home to what was known as America’s Black Wall Street. Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Cultureīrick and wood-frame homes dotted the landscape, along with blocks lined with grocery stores, hotels, nightclubs, billiard halls, theaters, doctor’s offices and churches. Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, Okla., was the pulse of the Black business community.
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