The massacre of Tulsa's Black Wall Street and how wealth is tied to trauma

Journalist and educator Mary E. Jones Parrish's account of the massacre targeting the Black residents of the Greenwood area of Tulsa, Oklahoma, captured the horror and the implications to wealth. After fleeing in "a hail of bullets" and escaping to safety, she and her 6- or 7-year-old daughter returned days later in a Red Cross truck that drove through a white area of the city.

"Dear reader, can you imagine the humiliation of coming in like that, with many doors thrown open watching you pass, some with pity and others with a smile?" Parrish wrote in her book, "The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921," about the aftermath and the sight of a temporary shelter set up for newly unhoused neighbors.

"There were to be seen people who formerly had owned beautiful homes and buildings, and people who had always worked and made a comfortable, honest living, all standing in a row waiting to be handed a change of clothing and feeling grateful to be able to get a sandwich and a glass of water," Parrish wrote.

More than a century later, the racial trauma connected to money endures in Tulsa and throughout America. A white supremacist mob killed hundreds of people while robbing them of the means of building wealth. In the dismantling of a 35-block neighborhood, rioters deputized by local law enforcement leveled 1,200 homes, looted 300 others and ruined 191 businesses. 

The clashes on the night of May 31 followed by the attack and decimation of Greenwood the next day occurred over two days out of an entire history of a country marked by money and race. The silence and secrecy in the wake of the atrocities reflect an amnesia among some Americans about the brutality and subtleties surrounding the intersection of race and wealth. 

On the 102nd anniversary of the massacre and with a court case pending that seeks as-yet unpaid reparations for survivors, it shows why many Americans' have a troubled relationship with money stemming from the country's racial history and wealth disparities today, as well as the special circumstances of Oklahoma that planted the seeds of prosperity in Greenwood. It also displays how national plagues spoiled those crops for decades afterwards.

In the mob's invasion of Greenwood, generational wealth got "systematically thwarted" and "was taken away, it was stolen," said Jim Casselberry, the CEO of Known, a finance and asset management firm investing in what the firm calls the "economy powered by the Global Majority (A.K.A. BIPOC, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) — the fastest-growing and most undercapitalized demographic on the planet."

"Tulsa," Casselberry said, "is an illustration of things that have happened in this country, that continue to happen in this country, and that, in the aftermath, people don't know about it. Stories have been hidden about it."

For planners, an understanding of clients' generational trauma and associations with wealth often informs how to serve investors, said Natalie Haggard, a senior wealth advisor based in the Tulsa office of Mariner Wealth Advisors.

That trauma "needs to be considered in the conversation of how that person relates to wealth and how that person accumulates wealth and how that person moves through the world at all," Haggard said. "My job is to listen, to hear both what they're saying and what they're not saying about their experience with money, their experience with trauma, in order to serve them well."   

American National Red Cross/Library of Congress

The scale of wealth lost
Victims and their families as well as Jones Parrish and later historians have shed greater light on the massacre and its context, which stretches back to the forced relocation of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations in the 1820s and 1830s. Enslaved African Americans moved to Oklahoma with the wealthiest members of the tribes. 

Following the Civil War and a land allotment process to tribe members and freedpeople, two dozen Black towns sprang up around Indian Territory with the majority "in the Creek Nation, the nation most inclusive of and friendly to people of African descent," the University of Pittsburgh professor Alaina Roberts wrote in her 2021 book, "I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land." 

The Black-owned businesses in a section of the oil boomtown of Tulsa got the name "Black Wall Street" due to "the financial success of the rooming houses, movie theater, grocery stores, auto repair shop and dentists' offices that lined its avenues," Roberts wrote.

"It was these very accomplishments that had long provoked the envy of the whites in the community," the book said. "These white settlers retaliated using the pretext of an African American man's purported assault of a white woman — a common excuse for violence — to massacre over a hundred Black women and men."

Available resources on what caused the incident include the work of a 2001 state commission, writers and historians like Jones Parrish, Scott Ellsworth, Hannibal Johnson, Tim Madigan and James Hirsch, and on-screen productions such as documentaries that aired on the 100th anniversary on The History Channel, CNN and PBS, as well as the HBO series "Watchmen" and "Lovecraft County." From the earliest chronicles of the violence in Greenwood, wealth has formed a key theme in the narrative alongside the much more discussed one — race.

"The Negro in Oklahoma has shared in the sudden prosperity that has come to many of his white brothers, and there are some colored men there who are wealthy," civil rights activist Walter White wrote in his investigation of the massacre for the NAACP in 1921. "This fact has caused a bitter resentment on the part of the lower order of whites, who feel that these colored men, members of an 'inferior race,' are exceedingly presumptuous in achieving greater economic prosperity than they who are members of a divinely superior race."

Direct economic losses added up to between $2.2 million and $3.2 million in 1921 dollars, or a range of $32.6 million to $47.4 million today, according to an academic working paper that found "consistent evidence" that declines in home ownership and occupational status were associated with the massacre. Residents filed insurance claims adding up to $1.8 million ($27 million today) that never got paid because of "riot clauses" in the policies — other than a white store owner compensated for guns stolen by the mob, a Brookings Institution study noted in 2021.

In addition to the "horror beyond all calculation" of the deaths in the massacre, another "important and often neglected dimension to this history is the devastating effects of destroyed communal wealth," authors Andre Perry, Anthony Barr and Carl Romer wrote. 

"Even as the massacre itself becomes better known, much of the remaining story of Greenwood is still left untold," the Brookings authors wrote. "In particular, little attention is given to subsequent events in Tulsa, including the rebuilding of Greenwood by its Black residents, followed by its second destruction — this time at the hands of white city planners during the 'urban renewal' period of the 1960s to 1980s. In both periods of destruction, important Black capital that undergirded the community was lost, as were opportunities for wealth-building for Tulsa's Black residents."

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Additional studies have found alternate means of measuring the wealth impact of the massacre. It and 37 other massacres, lynchings and violent incidents targeting African Americans "account for more than 1,100 missing patents," along with a contraction of valuable inventions "in response to major riots and segregation laws," according to a 2014 study from the Journal of Economic Growth by Michigan State University economist Lisa Cook.

The researchers who wrote a 2018 report in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology on the "eradication of accumulated wealth" paid specific tribute to Jones Parrish's work as "one of the earliest and most detailed accounts of the enormous loss sustained during the event." 

Contemporary median Tulsa home values for the 1,200 demolished in the attack, plus a calculation of other assets such as cash and personal and commercial property, adds up to as much as $150 million to $200 million in damages in current money, according to the study, which pointed out that Tulsa was far from the only scene of racist violence in its day.

"These massacres of African American communities not only led to the loss of innocent lives, but they also destroyed the economic prospects for future generations," authors Chris Messer, Thomas Shriver and Alison Adams wrote. "In the many cities such as Tulsa where riots and massacres occurred, white citizens and officials effectively wiped out the accumulation of wealth."

Alvin C. Krupnick Company/Library of Congress

Money and trauma
The opening of Tulsa's Greenwood Rising museum in 2021 and monuments like the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park represent some greater official acknowledgement of the massacre. The park opened in 2010 with its name honoring an award-winning historian of African American history who grew up in Tulsa. The sheer amount of lost life and wealth and lack of compensation make the notion of healing a loathsome concept to many people, though. 

"When you are harmed and hurt, reconciliation is not a word you can hear. It's a cuss word. It's a stain on your heart," said Vanessa Adams-Harris, the director of outreach and alliance at the The John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation, which manages the park.

Writers have captured that economic trauma in works about the massacre or books that gesture toward it. The memory of a burnt-out piano in the middle of the street in a surreal part of Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison, who was born in Oklahoma City eight years before the massacre, serves as a reminder of the wealth stolen when the mob ransacked people's homes. In a 2012 work of historical fiction called "Midnight Tear: The Tulsa Oklahoma Greenwood District — A Story of Forbidden Affluence" by Jeffrey Pouncey, a doctor from the area shares a "modified version of the theory of thermodynamics" explaining white supremacist violence.

"'Heat always rises — those on top in society always feel the heat and pressure when we Negroes succeed and do well,'" the character said. "'Unfortunately, when they feel the heat and pressure, they lash out verbally and physically. They must stay on top socially, educationally, politically and economically — at all cost.'"

Tobias Salinger

Jones Parrish's book contains individual victims' stories of what they lost in the massacre, such as an assistant county physician named R.T. Bridgewater.

"It seems that several things have been said and done to discredit and to kill the influence of the men who have large holdings in this burned district," he wrote.

Such connections with the past can reverberate on the descendants of victims of the massacre. In a discussion on last year's anniversary held by the New York City Bar Association, Seth Bryant, a managing partner at Bryant Rabbino, discussed how the targeting of a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, by a mass shooter triggered the memory of his great-grandfather, newspaper editor and owner A. J. Smitherman.

"It's kind of trippy in a way because my great-grandfather and his wife and five children fled from horrific violence," Bryant said. "He settled in a community that's in the ZIP code 14208, where this person committed this abominable act a few weeks ago. And so here we are, 101 years later, still fighting against racial violence, still fighting for the rule of law and a search for justice."

Calls for reparations to survivors and their families have grown over the past several decades. Advocates point out similarities to other groups that have received compensation for atrocities, and they often cite the impact of the construction of a freeway through the center of Greenwood as a further means of undercutting the area's wealth decades after the massacre.

Some select groups that have suffered in times of war or the outbreak of violence have received compensation, according to a Harvard Business School study on reparations. Some of the victims of white mob violence in Rosewood, Florida, two years after the Tulsa massacre, Japanese Americans interned by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration during World War II, the families of Jewish people exterminated by Nazis in the Holocaust and Black South Africans who were victims of apartheid segregation have gotten restitution.  

Residents had rebuilt Greenwood in the '30s and '40s to the point that it was home to "unquestionably the greatest assembly of Negro shops and stores to be found anywhere in America," according to a business directory from the time quoted in the Harvard report. 

The community "never recovered to its prior size or magnitude" after the construction of Interstate 244 cut through the neighborhood, the report said. 

With the condemnation of property starting in the 1950s and the city's construction over the next 20 years of seven expressways in a ring around the downtown under financing primarily from the federal government, the highways "bound the remaining population in Greenwood's core and created dead space under the overpasses and near the exits," a 2020 Human Rights Watch report stated.

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In that sense, Tulsa resembled many American cities in which interstate highways displaced Black and other minority residents and enabled white flight to suburban areas that often had racial covenants banning African Americans. In that same period, the "redlining" of nonwhite neighborhoods cut off the areas' residents from government-insured mortgages. And the housing and educational benefits of the GI Bill largely excluded many Black veterans.  

Efforts to obtain reparations for Tulsa victims through court cases or legislation have failed, though.

Led by a nonprofit organization called the Justice for Greenwood Foundation and its founder, Damario Solomon-Simmons, the three known living survivors of the massacre filed a lawsuit in 2020 against the city government and other agencies that "seeks to remedy the ongoing nuisance" caused by the destruction. Last August, an Oklahoma judge removed six descendants of victims and a local church as plaintiffs and dismissed two agencies as defendants. In May 2022, the same judge's ruling against an earlier motion to dismiss fueled hopes about the case's potential.

"It is completely to eradicate the destruction that was done to an entire community," Solomon-Simmons said at the bar association event last year. "That includes money in a victim's compensation fund; that includes land trusts; and that includes removing highway 244 that was put into Greenwood many, many years later to continue the work of the destruction of the massacre; that includes mental health training; that includes abatement of taxes. Why should our people pay taxes to the very government that destroyed them and never rebuilt them? It includes scholarships for families and descendants of those who have been impacted. It includes a declaration from the court that says, 'Yes, this actually happened. You're responsible for it, and you need to fix it.' That's valuable to us."

Alvin C. Krupnick Company/Library of Congress

The special circumstances of Oklahoma
In addition to the lawsuit seeking reparations, Solomon-Simmons and Justice for Greenwood have accused the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of denying Black Creeks their citizenship rights. The case cites the U.S. government's post-Civil War treaties with the Creeks and the other four tribes, which had predominantly fought for the Confederacy. Toward the end of the 19th century, the Dawes Commission divided tribal territories into individual land allotments. Formerly enslaved freedpeople from each nation obtained allotments under the program.

Historian Angie Debo's books, "And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes," and "The Road to Disappearance: A History of the Creek Indians," tell the complex story of relations between Native people and African Americans in Oklahoma. 

Railroad lines first reached Tulsa, which is a Creek name, in the 1880s, and its emergence as "an important shipping point for cattle" was "still another type of foreign settlement within the Creek domain," Debo wrote in the history of the tribe. The discovery of oil around the turn of the century fueled the growth of Tulsa from 1,930 residents in 1900 to 18,132 a decade later and 35,000 after World War I.

The tribal nations largely opposed the allotment of the land, although some members became very wealthy from oil. In a Senate hearing about allotment after the Civil War, the Creeks cited "their own memory of their losses in Alabama" prior to their removal as the reason they didn't want the land divided into individual tracts, Debo wrote. Black freedpeople who were officials in the Creek government, law enforcement officers and had other prominent jobs participated in the hearing as part of the delegation as well.

"As a Supreme Court justice, several members of the Council, a lighthorseman, etc, who had once been slaves, testified to their full participation in the government, their growing herds of livestock, and their unrestricted use of all the rich land they wanted, even a Reconstruction senator could find no cause of complaint against the 'rebel Indians,'" Debo wrote. "It was plainly apparent that the Negroes had opportunities here for untrammeled development existing in no other part of the United States."

Not every tribal member receiving land in the process made a fortune, though. Debo's book chronicled how white land speculators wrested some tracts from Native people and enrolled African Americans for a fraction of their worth — a memory recalled by tribal members today.

"We like to treat people like we want to be treated," said Danny McCarter, a retail interpreter at the Cherokee National History Museum roughly an hour's drive outside of Tulsa in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. "The Golden Rule has really always been part of our deal. So we're pretty easily manipulated. It's like in the Southeast. We didn't understand that. Why would somebody do that to you?"

Others capitalized on their holdings. Money poured "into the hands of people who a few years ago were as poor as the proverbial small rodent in the sanctuary," according to a 1914 article in the NAACP's publication, The Crisis, entitled "The Negro and Oil" and excerpted at the Greenwood Rising museum in Tulsa.

"Indians, white men and Black men are being made into millionaires almost overnight in Oklahoma these days, and Uncle Sam is acting as the treasurer in this fascinating game of getting rich without doing a stroke of work," the article read.

The land allotment process and subsequent migrations of other African Americans who flocked to Black towns springing up around Indian Territory contrasted with other parts of the country, where there were broken promises of tracts for freedpeople in the wake of the Civil War.

"Oklahoma had the largest number of all-Black towns and communities and cities in the United States at that time, in part because of the land allotments that were given by the government," Nia Clark, the host of the "Dreams of Black Wall Street" podcast, said at the New York City Bar Association event last year. "Black people didn't get 40 acres and a mule. But a lot of people in Oklahoma got land, and what they were able to do with that land throughout the state was fascinating."

Businessmen O.W. Gurley and J.B. Stradford purchased land north of Downtown Tulsa and sold pieces to other Black Tulsans, which led to the creation of the Greenwood District, according to the Harvard Business School study. Stradford, who escaped Tulsa after the mob destroyed his famed Stradford Hotel, is the great-grandfather of Ariel Investments founder John Rogers.

"Since city laws forbade Blacks from shopping in areas other than Greenwood, Black-owned businesses flourished," the Harvard Business School study said. "Although Greenwood had no formal financial institutions, author and educator Booker T. Washington dubbed the area 'the Negro Wall Street of America' while visiting in 1913."

The decimation of Greenwood in the massacre robbed the area of wealth, as well as "the Oklahoma Black memory of self-sufficiency, economic success and racial coalition," Roberts wrote in "I've Been Here All the While." 

"The massacre was not taught in Oklahoma schools, nor was the awe-inspiring reality of Black Wall Street," Roberts wrote. "This was not the first nor the last act of racial violence by whites against Black women and men living in the space of the former Indian Territory. But as the largest destruction of Black wealth in the region (and, according to economic historians, in the country) and the deadliest in American history, the Tulsa Race Massacre represents the end of the largest representation of what Blacks were able to build economically and socially within Native spaces and under tribal jurisdiction within their extended Reconstruction."

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Silence about the massacre
Historians and many Tulsa residents say that people around the city avoided discussing the massacre for decades, which led to confusion about the identity of the attackers and added to the unresolved nature of the trauma.

Addressing the unpunished perpetrators has "been a continual conversation in the city," but the passage of time and the fact that "the story was covered up for so long" adds to the difficulty, according to Mikeale Campbell, a lifelong Tulsa resident who's now the program manager for diversity and inclusion at natural gas pipeline and processing firm Williams.

"Those things aren't talked about," Campbell said. "It's hard to make any clear lines to have proof, so there's speculation and then nothing else."

The massacre and the succeeding decades reflect the "brutal history in this country" of "an endless wealth suck" out of Black neighborhoods, said Dan Houston, a partner at an economic analysis and strategic planning consultancy called Civic Economics who's based in Tulsa and grew up there in the '70s. Houston admitted he found himself "getting a little defensive" as Tulsa began to draw the most attention for the "particularly bad moment" in its history that was nevertheless part of a national context of violence and segregation.

"You meet German immigrants in Brazil and no one wants to tell you what Granddad did," Houston said. "Whatever grandad did, we don't want to ask. And Tulsans don't want to ask."

A newer resident, tech professional Jenniffer Nevarez, moved to the city three years ago from Florida through the Tulsa Remote Program, which has provided about 2,300 members with grants of $10,000 and space for virtual work in an effort to draw more people to the city. One time when she was parking her car in a garage across the street from her apartment, Nevarez said a man who didn't work for the facility demanded to see her credentials to verify she had the right permit to leave her car there. 

The confrontation felt "very territorial" and made Nevarez feel "out of place" and think "maybe I should not be here," she said.

"I'm sitting here in this historic place, and as I learn more and more about it, I think, 'Why isn't this talked about more?'" she said. "The more you learn about what happened, the more palpable it feels."

Ann Browning lived in Tulsa for around 40 years, mostly in the tony Maple Ridge neighborhood where oil-rich families had built mansions. The property deed to her family's home mentioned a freedperson who once owned the land, according to Browning.

"I have never understood what caused the race riots," she said. "It was not talked about. We knew about it because our neighbors had sheltered their help in their basement."

The act of working in other people's homes often evoked the trauma of the massacre, too, Solomon-Simmons said on the panel.

"There were survivors who were talking about going into white homes as repairmen or maids or butlers or delivery drivers 30, 40, 50 years after the massacre and seeing things that were taken from their homes," Solomon-Simmons said.

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Lessons for the future
Many Tulsans are trying to set a new course for the city and the country through the examination of history and the repurposing of landmarks. For example, Greenwood Art Project artists William Cordova and Rick Lowe turned the "Steps to Nowhere," which were stairs leading to an empty patch of grass formerly occupied by a home destroyed in the massacre, into an outdoor gallery. At least one descendant of a perpetrator of the massacre who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, W. Tate Brady, called for renewed reflection on the 100th anniversary.

"Is it fair, I ask myself, that on the one hand some of us should draw upon a legacy of affluence and opportunity, and be recipients of those blessings and gifts which provide the roots and wings tantamount to happiness and success  — and yet not also bear in some way the shadows of that legacy, which include injustice and violence done to others?" Jeffrey Myers, a Presbyterian pastor, wrote in The Oklahoman newspaper.

Tobias Salinger

The Skyline Mansion, which is Brady's former home, represents part of the transformation. In 2019, rapper Steph Simon and former Arkansas Razorbacks and Dallas Cowboys running back Felix Jones opened the mansion as an events center and arts space. Simon and other artists collaborated on a 2021 album, documentary and podcast called "Fire in Little Africa," which is a reference to white Tulsans' name for Greenwood and a caption written on a photograph of the massacre that's part of the American Red Cross collection at the Library of Congress.

Houston, the economic analyst, praised the Skyline Mansion as the reclamation of "an open sore in the neighborhood." The massacre, plus succeeding decades of racial discrimination in housing, education and other areas demand some form of restitution, according to Houston.

"We owe a lot of people for a lot. Slowly bleeding people of their opportunities in life is in some ways worse than showing up with firebombs," Houston said. "A lot of people feel like, 'Oh there's a museum now, so we're done.' … That's a fairly universal American sentiment."

Haggard, a financial advisor who's a member of the Chickasaw Nation, has been trying to be "more introspective" about her family's history and the resources necessary to build wealth, she said. She doesn't know if her great grandfather, who, according to family legend, got the last name of Smith given by default to many Native people, received a land allotment. He spent his childhood in an orphanage, but he later would "pass wealth on to several generations" of Haggard's family through construction, bricklaying and real estate ventures, Haggard said.

"One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot just in general is the privileges that I have had in my life that have gotten me to sit where I sit, and how those privileges may not have been available to other people," she said. 

Human beings created the wealth disparities of today, which means that people can eliminate them as well, according to Casselberry of Known. Investing resources in a community boosts homeownership rates and brings other benefits, he noted.

"If you think about what happens if you're able to reinvigorate a community — what happens when you do that: You put more people on the tax rolls, more services and businesses develop, employment rates go up, people buy products and services. The overall economy is then thriving," Casselberry said. "People have lost sight of that, if you lift someone up who is left behind, it doesn't hurt you. The reality is, it helps you."