AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Listen later1/5/2023 ![]() But, she says, there are other ways to begin to atone for last century's damage: She knows a lot of Tulsans, most of them white, won't countenance reparations checks. The city has put monuments and plaques and statues to tell the story of Greenwood's former affluence, she says, but there has been no recognition of what these families lost. "It's not going back into the community or the descendants," Tyson says bluntly. Tori Tyson owns Blowout Hair Salon in North Tulsa. She says she doesn't know where all the new development money in Greenwood is going-but she has firm ideas about where it isn't. After the massacre, her family had a beauty salon on what remained of Black Wall Street for decades. Tori Tyson's grandparents worked and had businesses on Greenwood Avenue during its heyday - including a burger restaurant that was burned down in the riots. Many are descendants of families who were burned out in 1921. Not far away, a workman mows criss-cross patterns into the startlingly green grass of ONEOK Field, home of the Tulsa Drillers, a minor league baseball team that feeds talent to the Los Angeles Dodgers.īut who is the newly rebuilt Greenwood actually for? A lot of Black Tulsans are skeptical about all the new development. The metal skeleton of Greenwood Rising, a multi-million dollar, multi-story museum, is being erected on the opposite side of the street. After years of being studded with empty lots, the neighborhood is seeing plenty of development: GreenArch, a mixed-use building stands at the official entrance of the neighborhood, at the corner of Greenwood and Archer. The new museum, Greenwood Rising, is in the background.īut now, with the centennial of the massacre looming, Greenwood has begun to boom again. The formal new Greenwood and original Greenwood meet at Archer and Greenwood. Others found it too painful to reveal all that they'd lost. Some Black Greenwood residents didn't talk about the atrocity because immediately after it occurred, local officials warned there would be unpleasant - maybe even deadly - consequences for families that talked. White Tulsa was embarrassed: The massacre was a serious blot on many civic-minded Tulsans' interest in being seen as a sleek metropolis, not a lawless frontier town. If you visit the city's local library to look at contemporary accounts of those two days, you'll find big holes in Tulsa's papers where stories about the carnage had been clipped out. For decades, the massacre wasn't taught in the state's public schools. Until recently, that history was simply ignored. ![]() Randle was five years old when she left her family's Greenwood home with her parents and siblings. ![]() "We were told they just dumped the dead bodies in the river," Lessie Benningfield Randle recalled at a recent Congressional hearing about the massacre. Live Updates: Protests For Racial Justice Excavation Begins For Possible Mass Grave From 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre And while the loved ones of the victims fled, members of the white mob quickly and stealthily disposed of the bodies. Although the exact figure remains uncertain, the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission estimated that upwards of 300 people, most of them Black, were killed in those two days. Some 8,000 people became homeless because of the violence. No help came from Tulsa's police department, and armed white men prevented firefighters from battling the blaze. ![]() The predominantly wooden structures burned to the ground. They shot resisters, and some accounts of the violence claim airplanes were used to drop homemade incendiary devices onto several buildings to accelerate the arson. Someone - no one knows who - fired a shot, and that started everything: The mob invaded Greenwood, looting and torching Greenwood's businesses and homes. They were inflamed by a false report of a Black teen sexually assaulting a white teen, and furious that Greenwood's Black veterans had taken up arms to prevent the boy from being lynched. Live Updates: Protests For Racial Justice Oklahoma Lawsuit Seeks Reparations In Connection To 1921 Tulsa Massacreīut all that prosperity vanished on the night of May 31, when a mob of white men - including some in law enforcement-rampaged through the neighborhood. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |