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devastation that took place 100 years ago, when nearly every structure in Greenwood, the fabled Black Wall Street, was flattened -- aside from Vernon AME.
The Tulsa Race Massacre is just one of the starkest examples of how Black wealth has been sapped, again and again, by racism and racist violence -- forcing generation after generation to start from scratch while shouldering the burdens of being Black in America.
All in the shadow of a Black paradise lost.
“Greenwood proved that if you had assets, you could accumulate wealth,” said Jim Goodwin, publisher of the Oklahoma Eagle, the local Black newspaper established in Tulsa a year after the massacre.
“It was not a matter of intelligence, that the Black man was inferior to white men. It disproved the whole idea that racial superiority was a fact of life.”
Prior to the massacre, only a couple of generations removed from slavery, unfettered Black prosperity in America was urban legend. But Tulsa’s Greenwood district was far from a myth.
Many Black residents took jobs working for families on the white side of Tulsa, and some lived in detached servant quarters on weekdays. Others were shoeshine boys, chauffeurs, doormen, bellhops or maids at high-rise hotels, banks and office towers in downtown Tulsa, where white men who amassed wealth in the oil industry were kings.
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.
According to a 2001 report of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, the Greenwood district also had 15 doctors, a chiropractor, two dentists, three lawyers, a library, two schools, a hospital, and two Black publishers printing newspapers for north Tulsans.
Tensions between Tulsa’s Black and white populations inflamed when, on May 31, 1921, the white-owned Tulsa Tribune published a sensationalized report describing an alleged assault on Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white girl working as an elevator operator, by Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoeshine.
“Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” read the Tribune’s headline. The paper’s editor, Richard Lloyd Jones, had previously run a story extolling the Ku Klux Klan for hewing to the principle of “supremacy of the white race in social, political and governmental affairs of the nation.”
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.
Their offer was rebuffed and they were sent away. But following a separate deadly clash between the lynch mob and the Greenwood men, white Tulsans took the sight of angry, armed Black men as evidence of an imminent Black uprising. There were those who said that what followed was not as spontaneous as it seemed -- that the mob intended to drive Black people out of the city entirely, or at least to drive them further away from the city’s white enclaves.
Over 18 hours, between May 31 and June 1, whites vastly outnumbering the Black militia carried out a scorched-earth campaign against Greenwood. Some witnesses claimed they saw and heard airplanes overhead firebombing and shooting at businesses, homes and people in the Black district.
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.
Although the state declared the massacre death toll to be only 36 people, most historians and experts who have studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300. Victims were buried in unmarked graves that, to this day, are being sought for proper burial.
The toll on the Black middle class and Black merchants is clear. According to massacre survivor Mary Jones Parrish’s 1922 book, R. T. Bridgewater, a Black doctor, returned to his home to find his high-end furniture piled in the street.
“My safe had been broken open, all of the money stolen,” Bridgewater said. “I lost 17 houses that paid me an average of over $425 per month.”
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.
“We’d be like the Murdochs or the Johnson family, you know, Bob Johnson who had BET,” said Raven Majia Williams, a descendant of Smitherman’s, who is writing a book about his influence on Black Democratic politics of his time.
“My great-grandfather was in a perfect
The Mt. Zion Baptist Church burns in Tulsa, Okla. during the Tulsa Race Massacre of June 1, 1921. (Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa via AP) An unidentified man standing alone amid the ruins of what is described as his home in Tulsa, Okla., in the aftermath of the June, 1, 1921, Tulsa Race Massacre. (Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa via AP)
A group of Black men are marched past the corner of 2nd and Main Streets in Tulsa, Okla., under armed guard during the Tulsa Race Massacre on June 1, 1921. (Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa via AP)
Fires burning during the Tulsa Race Massacre in Tulsa, Okla. on June 1, 1921. (Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa via AP)
position to become a media mogul,” Williams said. “Black businesses were able to exist because they could advertise in his newspaper.”
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. That’s $27.3 million in today’s currency. Over the years, the effects of the massacre took different shapes. Rebuilding in Greenwood began as soon as 1922 and continued through 1925, briefly bringing back some of Black Wall Street.
Monetary losses from Tulsa Race Massacre
Then, urban renewal in the 1950s forced many Black businesses to relocate further into north Tulsa. Next came racial desegregation that allowed Black customers to shop for goods and services beyond the Black community, financially harming the existing Black-owned business base. That was followed by economic downturns, and the construction of a noisy highway that cuts right through the middle of historic Greenwood.
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.
“H. Johnson Rooms, 314 North Greenwood, Destroyed 1921, Reopened,” reads one marker.
“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.”
No white person has ever been imprisoned for taking part in the massacre, and no Black survivor or descendant has been justly compensated for who and what they lost.
Bishop / Pastor Adlai E. Mack, Pastor
Christians’ United in the Word of God
7965-B Broadway Street Lemon Grove, California 91945
Conference Call Worship Service: SUNDAYS 10:30 AM Call: 1-701-802-5400 Access Code 1720379#
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Pastor Milton Chambers, Sr. & First Lady Alice Chambers
New Hope Friendship Missionary Baptist Church
2205 Harrison Avenue San Diego, CA 92113
619-234-5506 • Fax 619 234-8732 Email: newhopeadm@gmail.com
10 A.M. Sunday Service Live Stream on Facebook, Youtube, Sunday School Lesson Immediately following service.
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I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the LORD!” Psalms 122:1
Lively Stones Missionary Baptist Church
605 S. 45th Street San Diego, CA 92113-1905
619.263.3097 • t.obie95@yahoo.com Sunday School 9:00 a.m. Sunday Morning Worship 10:30 a.m. Wednesday Prayer 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon Wednesday Bible Study 7:00 p.m.
Rev. Dr. Eugenio Raphael
St. Paul United Methodist Church
3094 L Street San Diego, CA 92102
619.232.5683 10 A.M.Sunday Service Live Stream on Facebook - www.facebook.com/stpaulsumcsd
Food distribution Monday walk up noon-3 P.M., Wednesday drive up noon-3 P.M., Thursday walk up noon-3 P.M. Diaper Program Thursday Noon - 2 P.M.
Pastor Rodney and Christine Robinson
New Assurance Church Ministries
7024 Amherst Street San Diego, CA 92115
619.469.4916 • NABC.ORG Email: newassurancebaptistchurch@yahoo.com
10 A.M. Sunday Service Live Stream Facebook 6:30 P.M. Wednesday Live Stream Bible Study “A new Hope, A new Life, A new Way through Jesus Christ 2 Corinthians 5:17 A change is coming”
Pastor Jerry Webb
Phillips Temple CME Church
5333 Geneva Ave. San Diego, CA 92114
619.262.2505
Sunday School 8:30 a.m. Morning Worship 9:45 a.m. Tuesday Bible Study 10:00 a.m. Wednesday Bible Study 6:00 p.m.
Rev. Harvey L. Vaughn, III
Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church of San Diego
3085 K Street San Diego, CA 92102
619.232.0510 • www.bethelamesd.com
9:30 A.M. Sunday Service Live Stream on Facebook, Youtube and on bethelamesd.com
Mesa View Baptist Church
13230 Pomerado Road Poway, CA 92064
858.485.6110 • www.mesaview.org Email: mvbcadmin@mesaview.org
We are using YouTube under our website of www.mesaview.org or www.YouTube.comPastor Dr. Darrow Perkins Jr. 8:45 A.M. Sunday School Class - Via Zoom Call Contact Office for details 10 A.M. Sunday Service • 7 P.M. Wednesday Bible Study Visit our site for previous sermons: www.mesaview.org
Pastor Jared B. Moten
Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church
1728 S. 39th Street San Diego, CA 92113
619.262.6004 • Fax 619.262.6014 www.embcsd.com
Sunday School 9:30 a.m. Sunday Worship 11:00 a.m. Wednesday Prayer & Bible Study 12 p.m. & 6:00 p.m.
“A Life Changing Ministry” Romans 12:2
Pastor Dennis Hodge First Lady Deborah Hodges
The Church of Yeshua Ha Mashiach Hebrew for “Jesus the Messiah”
1819 Englewood Dr. Lemon Grove, CA 91945
619.724.6226 • www.coyhm.org
Sunday In the Know Bible Study 8:00 a.m. Sunday Worship Service 9:00 a.m. Saturday Shabbat Service 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Dr. John W. Ringgold, Sr. Pastor
Bethel Baptist Church
1962 N. Euclid Ave. San Diego, CA 92105
619.266.2411 • www.bethelbc.com bethel@bethelbc.com
Sunday Morning Prayer 6:00 & Worship 7:30 a.m. Sunday School 9:30 a.m. Morning Worship Youth & Children’s Church 11:00 a.m. Community Prayer (Hemera) Mon., Tues., Thurs., Fri., Sat. 7:30 a.m. Mon., Tues., Thurs., Fri. 7:30 p.m. Mid Week Prayer Wednesday 12:00 noon and 7:00 p.m.
Suffragan Bishop Dr. William A. Benson, Pastor & Dr. Rachelle Y. Benson, First Lady
Total Deliverance Worship Center
138 28th Street San Diego, CA 92102
www.totaldeliverance.org
Fax: 619.303.2008 Mail: 7373 University Ave. Suite 217, La Mesa, CA 91942 Sunday Early Morning Worship Service 9:00 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.
“It Takes Team Work to Make the Dream Work”
Pastor Dr. John E. Warren
Eagles Nest Christian Center
3619 College Ave. San Diego, CA 92115
619.266.2293 • jwarren@sdvoice.info www.facebook.com/EaglesNestCenter
Sunday Services: Bible Study: 9:00 a.m. • Worship: 11:00 a.m. Join Us via Zoom Meeting:
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We are a non-denominational full fellowship of believers dedicated to reach our community with the gospel and providing a place for believers to workship, learn, fellowship, serve and grow into the fullness of Christ Jesus. This ministry is to build people of Purpose, Prayer, Power, Praise and Prosperity. This mandate is being fulfilled by reaching the reality of the gospel in a simplistic fashion, and a result, learning how to apply it in everyday life. Eagles Nest Christian Center
Pastor Antonio D. Johnson
Mount Olive Baptist Church
36 South 35th Street San Diego, Ca 92113
619.239.0689 • mountolivebcsd.org Sunday First Worship 9:30 a.m. Second Worship 11:00 a.m. Wednesday Night Bible Study & Prayer 7:00 p.m. Cox Cable Channel 23 / 24
Real God, Real People, Real Results.
Minister Donald R. Warner Sr.
Church of Christ
580 69th Street, San Diego, CA 92114
619.264.1454 • warnerdt1@aol.com Sunday Bible Study 8:45 a.m. Sunday Morning Service 10:00 a.m. Sunday Bible Class 5:00 p.m. Sunday Evening Worship 6:00 p.m. Wednesday Bible Class 7:00 p.m. Friday Video Bible Class 7:00 p.m.
Calvary Baptist Church
719 Cesar E. Chavez Pkwy San Diego, CA 92113
619.233.6487 • www.calvarybcsd.org calvarybaptist1889@gmail.com
Sundays Bible Discovery Hour 9:30 a.m. Mid Morning Worship 11:00 a.m. Wednesday Noon Day Bible Study 12:00 noon Wednesday Discipleship Training 7:00 p.m.
Pastor Donnell and First Lady Sheila Townsend
Pilgrim Progressive Baptist Church
4995 A Street San Diego, CA 92102
619.264.3369
Sunday School 9:00 a.m. Morning Service 10:45 a.m. New Membership Orientation BTU 6:00 p.m. Wednesday Eve Prayer Service 6:00 p.m.
“To Serve this present age” Matt: 28:19-20
Pastor Rev. Julius R. Bennett
Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church
625 Quail Street San Diego, CA 92102
619.263.4544
Sunday School 9:30 a.m. Sunday Morning Service 11:00 a.m. Sunday Evening Service 6:00 p.m. Wednesday Prayer Meeting 6:00 p.m. Wednesday Bible Study 6:30 p.m. Wednesday Youth Bible Study 6:30 p.m.
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