ON THIS DAY: 100 years ago, 300 people died in one of the biggest attacks of racial violence and domestic terrorism in American history. The 1921 Black Wall Street Massacre destroyed over 35 blocks of a predominantly black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Three survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre made dramatic appeals to lawmakers for reparations and acknowledgment ahead of its 100th anniversary.TULSA, Okla. -- On a recent Sunday, Ernestine Alpha Gibbs returned to Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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. “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.”After the fires in Greenwood were extinguished, the bodies buried in unmarked mass graves, and the survivors scattered, insurance companies denied most Black victims’ loss claims totaling an estimated $1.8 million.
Interstate 244 dissects the neighborhood like a Berlin wall. But it is easy for visitors to miss the engraved metal markers at their feet, indicating the location of a business destroyed in the massacre and whether it had ever reopened.“I’ve read every book, every document, every court record that you can possibly think of that tells the story of what happened in 1921,” Amusan told the tour group in mid-April. “But none of them did real justice. This is sacred land, but it’s also a crime scene.
A $30 million history center and museum, 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 critics have said the museum falls far short of delivering justice or paying reparations to living survivors and their descendants.
Now, a few living massacre survivors —106-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle, 107-year-old Viola Fletcher, and 100-year-old Hughes Van Ellis — along with other victims’ descendants are suing for reparations. The defendants include the local chamber of commerce, the city development authority and the county sheriff’s department.
Republican Mayor G.T. Bynum, who is white , does not support paying reparations to massacre survivors and victims’ descendants. Bynum said such a use of taxpayers’ money would be unfair to Tulsans today. But for Ernestine and her family, the real pride is not in survival. It is in surmounting disaster, and in carrying on a legacy of Black entrepreneurial spirit that their ancestors exemplified before and after the massacre.
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