Day 5 Black History/US History. How a massacre added to the wealth gap.

Day 5: Black History/US History month

Today, Black wealth is about $13,000/household on average, but for White households it is more than $170,000. This is the highest the gap has been since 1968; but it was not like this in a community in Oklahoma in the beginning of the 1900s.?

After the Civil War, General T. Sherman issued Special Field Order #15. This order was to give previously enslaved Black people 40 acres of land from those that enslaved them - this order was largely ignored.??The exception were the tribes of?the?Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Muscogee Creek, and Seminoles — Oklahoma was still a territory at the time and tribes that?held enslaved people and were strictly held to the order under a treaty and gave the people they enslaved 40 acres each; Please remember that White enslavers were never forced to comply, nor held to Special Field Order #15.??The Black tribal Freedmen held millions of acres along with tribal members.??This “allotment” of land was “incalculable” and was said that these “Allotments really gave them an upward mobility that other Black people did not have in most of the United States.” This area would be called the community of Greenwood and would become known as “The Black Wall Street”.?

This population of previously enslaved Black people, in what would become Tulsa Oklahoma, were able to flourish in the short period of reconstruction. They were able to build houses, start farms and businesses.??At one point, there were over 200 businesses in the community of Greenwood. Booker T. Washington described the community of Boley as a place “which shall demonstrate that right of the negro, not merely as an individual, but as a race, to have a worthy and permanent place in the civilization that the American people are creating.”.??It was the first time that Black Americans could dream of having land that could be passed down through the generations – generational wealth. Even some of the land given to Black Tribal Freedmen was rocky and unfarmable, but before Oklahoma became a state, this area just outside of Tulsa, became one of the world’s biggest oil producing areas.

Black Wall Street was so successful that Blacks leaving the South came to that area because it “Attracted Black African Americans from the South, built them up as a Black mecca”. By owning land, Black Americans were able to leverage loans and continued to build businesses. Black Wall Street had flourished like never before; This would not last.?

In May of 1921, things changed forever. A young Black man was accused of sexually assaulting a 17yr old White girl.??This set off a backlash from the White community.??Now in 1923 in Rosewood Florida, a similar massacre would occur for what was a similar scenario. The community of Greenwood was burned and bulldozed to the ground.??More than 300 Black Americans lost their lives, more than 190 business destroyed, 714 people injured, and 1256 homes destroyed.?

History of this event was initially described as a race riot. The implication that Black and White people had been feuding and that this led to an outburst of violence.??However, many decades later, the New York Times and other nationally circulated newspapers would write: “Now a few decades later, the Black Wall Street seemed to have revived itself. As told by one historian “If freed Black people had gotten reparations after the Civil War, Darity said, assaults like?the Tulsa Race Massacre?show they would have needed years of U.S. troop deployments to protect them — given the angry resentment of white people at seeing money in Black hands.” It is now described as a massacre.?

Now after the race massacre, the community started to rebuild itself.??Some reported that Black Wall Street came back bigger than before.??But as one reporter pointed out, the 1921 race riots in Tulsa were one of the most devastating outbreaks of white violence against African Americans during Jim Crow.?But the Wall Street Journal also pointed out that “Although the massacre destroyed the neighborhood, it wasn’t the death knell for Greenwood. Even as the Red Cross was erecting tents for them, survivors began planning to rebuild. After struggling through the Great Depression, by 1940 the?Black homeownership rate?in the Tulsa metro area had outstripped that of white residents,” with a rate of 49 percent for Black Tulsans versus 45 percent for white Tulsans. By 1942, there were 242 Black-owned businesses operating in Greenwood, more than existed in 1921.?

However, As Moreno observes, “The violence that really destroyed Black Wall Street wasn’t physical, but structural.” Moreno pointedly adds, “What the city could not steal in 1921, it systematically paved over 50 years later.” Of course, urban renewal did not operate in isolation; it was part of a group of policies, including?redlining, which heavily discouraged lending in supposedly “risky” —typically BIPOC—neighborhoods. As Moreno writes in?Next City, redlining policies began to?be implemented in the 1930s, and these made it difficult to secure loans to purchase and renovate property, thereby lowering real estate values in Greenwood. This, in turn, led to Greenwood’s land being undervalued, “which then led to the area being targeted for demolition as a ‘blighted’ area of town when it came time to decide where to build highways explicitly designed for white Tulsans’ convenient commute to and from its newly built suburbs.” It was interstate 224 that ran right through Greenwood to “bury what white mob violence in 1921 could not.” Vernon AME Church is 170 feet away from the onramp as is known as “the sole surviving building from the massacre.”

It has taken more than 50 years to record and report this history the way it truly happened. Generational wealth has been looked upon as a financial difference in income and saved wealth, but the Tulsa Race Massacre points out the intentional steps to halt Black progress and wealth.??It began with a massacre and ended with policies, practices, laws, and construction that ended Black Wall Street. Tulsa is not unique it its practice, but if we are to understand the true effects of racism, this is an example of community violence, institutional and structural racism that leads to the wealth disparity that we see today.??27 million dollars, in today’s dollars, was lost during the massacre and Special Field Order #15 was never enforced among White enslavers as it had been for Native American enslavers; this was not an accident.

Quote:?"We lost everything in that riot.?There was so much grief in our family.?Everywhere we looked in our Greenwood District, there was nothing but ashes, ashes, ashes!”