The Coverup: the Black Wall Street Massacre
and the rageful cycle of racial suppression
Friends,
👋🏽 Welcome to Witty Wealth, a newsletter that makes stocks entertaining.
The push for racial equality is dominating our hearts and minds. This week’s Witty is about Black Wall Street, a thriving Oklahoman black neighborhood from 1901-1921, destroyed by white supremacy. The racial massacre was one and most devastating in American history — as well as one of the least known.
We cover Black Wall Street’s growth, destruction, and the rageful cycle of racial suppression that allows it to happen all over again. Settlers of Catan analogies are peppered in.
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Settlers of...Oklahoma
Starting on desert
It’s the year 1900 in isolated Tulsa, Oklahoma. The civil war is over but equality is still a battle.
In a board game analogy, if this were Settlers of Catan, black people and native americans were forced to start off on a lone desert resource with no ports.
Many arrive in Oklahoma after being forcefully relocated from their homes during the Trail of Tears. They are granted unfertile desert land that is viewed as worthless by the government. The area they now live in has some of the harshest and most unjust segregation laws in the country.
This led black people to create their own towns, or settlements. In Tulsa, that meant the northern part of the city, in a neighborhood called Greenwood.
Fortunate rolls
In 1901, things began to look up. Oil was discovered in Oklahoma and Tulsa became the area's most vital boomtown. This created instant wealth for area landowners. While this set was majority white people, it included the black people and native americans noted above.
Black developers J.B.Stratford and O.W. Gurley architected Greenwood. They believed “black people had a better chance of economic progress if they pooled their resources, worked together and supported each other's businesses.” The dream for Greenwood was to make it self-sufficient and shield residents from racial hostilities. In Catan terms, this means owning all the different resources so minimal reliance is needed on outside parties.
The idea worked. As entrepreneurs poured in, Greenwood became known for its types of black owned small businesses.
Hannibal Johnson, a Tulsa Historian, described it as, “things like pharmacies, dry cleaners, haberdasheries, barber shops, beauty shops, movie theaters, pool halls. Professional services like doctors, lawyers, dentists. Just the kinds of small businesses that make a place vibrant and engaging for folks.”
The Ringer’s Victor Luckerson adds, “Greenwood Avenue had been lined with hotels, restaurants, furriers, and even an early taxi service using a Ford Model T. Nearly 200 businesses populated the 35-square-block district in all, as did some homes as stately as the ones owned by upper-class whites in the city.”
This kept the money in the community. A dollar in would circulate 19 times in the black owned shops before leaving the neighborhood.
Greenwood became one of the most commercially successful, majority black communities in America. This prosperity led black leader Booker T. Washington to name the district “Black Wall Street.”
In a way, Greenwood was the Wakanda of its time.
Building cities
Over the next twenty years, Greenwood thrived, even as the world around it crumbled. According to Investopedia, the migration of oilmen to Tulsa created a spike in demand for domestic help from white employers. Black residents were able to attain higher-paying labor jobs as maids, chauffeurs, gardeners, janitors, shoe shiners, and porters.
This new money got reinvested into Greenwood. Increasing segregation laws and an active KKK chapter in Tulsa further incentivized black residents to do business with each other.
Downfall
Longest road
Black success, white envy
According to Mechelle Brown, director of programs at the Greenwood Cultural Center, a white neighbor proclaimed, “How dare these negroes have a grand piano in their house, and I don't have a piano in my house.”
As Greenwood’s population grew, its physical boundaries collided with the boundaries of Tulsa’s white portion. As American minorities have seen time and again, only one dispute was needed for the white man to unleash their rage.
On May 30, 1921, the tension boiled over. Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old black shoe shiner, was using an elevator that operated by Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white attendant. Historic accounts say Rowland tripped leaving the elevator, grabbing Page's arm. She screamed, he ran, and a nearby clerk went to authorities. Rowland was then arrested.
The local newspaper added fuel to the fire. The next day, an article ran that claimed Rowland assaulted Page. This became a call to action for white Tulsan’s, who descended with their guns on the courthouse jail. They wanted Rowland to be lynched.
(Image source)
The black community believed Rowland would never do such a thing and several dozen came to Rowlands rescue.
A black man asked a white man why he was brandishing a gun. A tussle occurred and the gun fired. The white man was shot. The proverbial match was lit.
What ensued was one of the most radical, yet representative, incidents of racial violence in this country.
Whites had the largest army
Hundreds of armed whites descended on Black Wall Street. Bullets were whizzing, businesses were looted, and buildings were set ablaze. Black people fought back, but they were outnumbered and out armed.
This time, like the many times after it, the government rigged the game to keep robbing black folks.
Tulsa officials and the Oklahoma governor called in the National Guard to stop what they called a ‘Negro uprising.’
The attack on Greenwood was equivalent to warfare. Homeowners were killed in their front yards. A machine gun was mounted onto a truck, like a Halo Warthog, fired into black residents and churches. Planes circled overhead, dropping what was claimed to be bombs filled with turpentine, coal oil, or dynamite.
(Image source)
Buck Colbert Franklin, a local lawyer and survivor, beautifully described the horrid scene. “Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air...The side-walks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught from the top.”
The levels of these attacks make me want to puke. Just like the police brutality we see dominating our social media today. An Oklahoma State Commission reported in 2001 that Tulsa was likely the first city in the United States to be bombed from the air.
Bombed. Their. Own. Citizens.
(Image source)
There was no mercy. Today, police attack services that help protestors, like first aid. Back then, help like the fire department or Red Cross were held back.
“I paused and waited for an opportune time to escape. ‘Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?’ I asked myself. ‘Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?’” - Buck Colbert Franklin
“They shut down the phone systems, the railway...They wouldn’t let the Red Cross in. There was complicity between the city government and the mob. It was mob rule for two days, and the result was the complete devastation of the community.” - Paul Gardullo, museum curator
When the smoke settled after 2 days of destruction, 300 black people died. 6000 more were held by authorities for up to 8 days. 9000 were left homeless. 40 square Greenwood blocks, 1200+ homes, and 150 businesses were turned into rubble.
A brief revival
Greenwood was partially rebuilt over the next twenty years, and for a brief period, was able to thrive again. But it was never the same. Newly passed fire ordinances blocked the rebuilding of much of Greenwood. Additionally, looser segregation laws forced white businesses to accept black folks money. The money no longer stayed as much in the community. By the end of the 1970s, little remained of the original district.
The cover up
Just like we see today, after these events, the aggressors move on with their lives while the victims try to put theirs back together.
Not a single aggressor was held responsible for these crimes.
Adding insult to injury, every insurance claim from the Greenwood neighborhood, totaling $2.7M (~$39M today), was denied.
Then, the cover up went behind the public eye. Records of the event went missing from city hall. The massacre is rarely mentioned in history books and wasn’t taught in Tulsa Public Schools until 2012. In 1921, a city judge ordered the complete restitution and rehabilitation of the destroyed Black Wall Street, but that never happened.
“For 50 years, the story was actively suppressed in Tulsa, and it was deliberately kept out of the White newspapers. The people who brought it up were threatened with their jobs; they were threatened with their lives,” - Dr. Scott Ellsworth, University of Michigan professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, lead scholar for the Tulsa Race Riot Commission
The rageful cycle
Sadly, this same cycle repeats over and over again to suppress black americans. It looks something like this:
Breaking the cycle
It was 99 years ago last week that this massacre happened. America can’t get past its racist tendencies. We still fight the same battles.
Thecycle has also brought wide economic disparities along racial lines. According to the Census Bureau, median black household income is ~$41k, whereas median white household income is ~$70k. The poverty rate for black Americans is almost 2.5 times that of whites.
Most Witty readers are in white collar business roles. In corporate america, even after decades of diversity initiatives, there are too few black professionals. While black people make up ~13% of the US population, they are marginally represented in senior white collar positions. According to CNN, Black professionals held just 3.3% of all executive or senior leadership roles in 2018.
Tying this to meme stocks, I found only 2 CEOs in the Robinhood top 100 are black.
What can we do about it?
Most simply, breaking the cycle will take more than protests. It will take continued action. Actions that you control.
I don’t mean hollowed action either, like Mark Zuckerberg is doing. A day after he announced $10 million in donations to “groups working on social justice,” he told civil rights groups he would not be taking down violence promoting posts from President Donald Trump.
Ralph Clark, CEO of Shotspotter, a minor league meme stock, is a rare black CEO. On Zuck’s actions, he proclaims, “$5 or $10 million is interesting, but give me three VPs.”
In general, this means extending ourselves to make opportunities for black people.
Discussions about race can be uncomfortable. But now is a better time than ever to correct injustice in the world.
I hope we can all learn that if we don’t individually take action, injustice will persist for at least another 100 years. Just like it has since the Black Wall Street massacre.
Thanks for reading along,
Really enjoyed this one Anuj! Learned alot, thanks :)
Yeah, you need to self-reflect and understand how pandering and condescending you end your piece. Black people are not some homogenous blob that needs your handouts. There’s a big discussion about social and racial justice to be and it isn’t as simple as quota based affirmative action. It probably has more to do with equitable taxation and central banking policies that don’t exaggerate wealth inequality, but that’s an entirely different discussion. I would just delete your attempt to moralize and judge because it comes off as misguided.