Tulsans commemorate the 100th anniversary of two-day assault by armed white men on the prosperous Black community of Greenwood, also known as Black Wall Street
This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.A woman points at a picture of devastation from the Tulsa Race Massacre in a prayer room dedicated to the massacre at the First Baptist Tulsa church during centennial commemorations, Sunday, May 30, 2021, in Tulsa, Okla. The church made the room to provide a place to explore the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and to prayerfully oppose racism.
“And that was huge – a great opportunity and you’re thinking this is going to last for generations to come. I can leave my children this land, and they can leave their children this land,” recounts Williams, whose ancestor went from enslaved labourer to judge of the Muscogee Creek tribal Supreme Court after slavery.
While U.S. officials quickly broke Gen. William T. Sherman’s famous Special Field Order No. 15 providing 40 acres for each formerly enslaved family after the Civil War, U.S. treaties compelled five slave-owning tribes – the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Muscogee Creek and Seminoles – to share tribal land and other resources and rights with freed Black people who had been enslaved.
Meeting the Black tribal Freedmen in the thriving Black city of Boley in 1905, Booker T. Washington wrote admiringly of a community “which shall demonstrate the 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.”
The oil wealth, besides helping put the bustle and boom in Tulsa’s Black-owned Greenwood business district, gave rise to fortunes for a few Freedpeople that made headlines around the United States. That included 11-year-old Sarah Rector, a Muscogee Creek girl hailed as “the richest coloured girl in the world” by newspapers of the time. Her oil fortune drew attention from Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois, who intervened to check that Rector’s white guardian wasn’t pillaging her money.
Williams, Grayson and other Black Indian Freedmen descendants today drive past the spots in Tulsa that family history says used to belong to them: 51st Street. The grounds of Oral Roberts University. Mingo Park.
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