{"id":2441,"date":"2021-06-28T16:36:58","date_gmt":"2021-06-28T16:36:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/?p=2441"},"modified":"2021-06-28T16:36:58","modified_gmt":"2021-06-28T16:36:58","slug":"black-wall-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/black-wall-street\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Wall Street"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Black Wall Street:\u00a0 The Forgotten Women<\/h1>\n
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The neighborhood attacked\u00a0in\u00a0the Tulsa Race Massacre was known as a Black intellectual and financial mecca. Women were a little-known part of\u00a0its success.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By Brentin Mock<\/a><\/p>\n

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Brentin Mock is a writer and editor for CityLab in Pittsburgh, focused on issues of racial equity, economic inequities, and environment\/climate justice.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Here\u2019s what\u2019s known famously about Greenwood,\u00a0the early 20th century Black community of Tulsa, and infamously about its destruction: Black businessmen helped build Greenwood into a financial Black mecca that produced an abundance of successful entrepreneurs, some of whom turned into millionaires.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0young Black man, Dick Rowland, accused of accosting a white woman in an elevator, became the impetus for one of the worst race riots in U.S. history. That riot began with a\u00a0mob of white men from Tulsa and beyond who flocked to the courthouse to lynch Rowland, which led to the assemblage of a\u00a0counter-mob of Black men who took up arms to defend him.<\/p>\n

These are the beginning chapters of\u00a0what would become known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, which took place 100 years ago this week. From May 31 to June 1, 1921, white people \u2014 many of them law enforcement \u2014 shot up, bombed\u00a0and burned down the dozens of Black-owned businesses and hundreds of Black homes that made up Greenwood, killing nearly 300 Black residents and injuring and displacing thousands more.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a story told almost exclusively about, and through,\u00a0men.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0<\/strong>we only know many of the lurid details about that massive tragedy\u00a0because of a Black woman named Mary E. Jones Parrish, who ran a typing school on North Greenwood Street. Her book<\/a>, Events of the Tulsa Disaster<\/em>, published in 1922, tells her own story along with\u00a0eyewitness accounts from dozens of other Black Greenwood survivors.\u00a0There\u2019s been little known about the Black women of Greenwood who, like Parrish, helped create\u00a0the neighborhood\u2019s national reputation as a haven of Black intellectual and financial prowess,\u00a0known popularly as \u201cThe Negro\u2019s Wall Street.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emerging scholarship on Greenwood is changing that, showing that Black women were as critical to building Greenwood as they were to helping Black people survive the massacre, and rebuild the neighborhood\u00a0<\/strong>afterward.<\/p>\n

\u201cWomen tend to play a supporting role in the narrative,\u201d writes Victor Luckerson, an independent journalist, in his blog\/newsletter Run it Back<\/a>.\u00a0\u201cBut who were<\/em> they? History has been designed to omit large portions of the Black experience, and the issue is compounded for Black women.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"relates<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Mary E. Jones Parrish<\/div>\n
Source: Published in Events of the Tulsa Disaster<\/em><\/div>\n

Luckerson has been living in Tulsa for more than a year now conducting research and interviews for his forthcoming book Built From the Fire<\/em>, which he says will provide a more expansive historical narrative beyond just the massacre. However, he credits Parrish\u2019s book as \u201cthe most essential primary text\u201d about what happened during that disaster, even as few others have afforded her this throughout history. In fact, the city of Tulsa worked actively for decades to ensure that the Greenwood disaster story would stay buried in the ashes.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike many other women in Greenwood, she\u2019s become a footnote in a story she herself helped establish,\u201d writes Luckerson. \u201cThe opportunity to collect the voices of the women of early Greenwood is now lost forever, but modern tools make it much easier to scrape the fragments of the past and at least attempt to paint a fuller picture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Professor Brandy Thomas\u00a0Wells, who teaches history at Oklahoma State University, has been working with her students to do exactly that. On May 31, they will launch\u00a0the \u201cWomen of Black Wall Street\u201d website, which features the stories of Black women in Greenwood along with maps of where their businesses and homes were. The website is the culmination of a year-long research project she conducted with her\u00a0students where they learned how to use digital methods and GIS technology to tell a \u201cmultidimensional and intersectional\u201d Greenwood narrative\u00a0that featured more than just the Black millionaires.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were able to have a conversation about Black women\u2019s invisibility,\u201d said Wells. \u201cSometimes we turn Greenwood into a myth where it\u2019s the only place where Black people were, quote, doing well, and then it becomes the place where every Black person was doing well, and that\u2019s just not true.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A sample of the map created by Professor Brandy Wells\u2019 history class for the Women of Black Wall Street\u00a0website. The full map will show where several Black women lived and did business in the Greenwood district.<\/div>\n
Credit: Sean Thomas, Geography Ph.D. Student, Oklahoma State University<\/div>\n

The\u00a0biographies will be posted on the website over the next few weeks, but the first one up tells the story of Susie Bell<\/a>, who owned\u00a0and ran The Bell Cafe and the Busy Bee Cafe, restaurants where Black professionals and church leaders regularly convened and held events. While many women in Greenwood were known primarily through their\u00a0spouses, Bell apparently was a known quantity within her own right.<\/p>\n

\u201cBell\u2019s name never appeared alongside a man other than brother and business partner, Preston,\u201d reads the profile. \u201cIn a world where media was primarily concerned with men\u2019s dealings, it is clear that Bell stole the spotlight.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Loula Williams owned the Dreamland Theater,\u00a0a central entertainment hub before it was burned down.<\/div>\n
Source: 1921 Booker T. Washington High School Yearbook<\/div>\n

Other prominent Black women of Greenwood include Mme. Geo W. Hunt who owned the Creole Beauty Parlor, which reportedly served Black and white customers; Mabel Little, who also owned a beauty parlor and whose post-massacre\u00a0rebuilt home is one of the few still\u00a0standing\u00a0today<\/a> as part of the Greenwood Cultural Center; Loula Williams, who at first co-owned the famous Dreamland Theater<\/a> with her husband John Williams, but eventually became its full owner; Emma Gurley, who with her husband O.W. Gurley basically helped build Greenwood through a cluster of businesses and properties they owned; and Dora Wells, owner of the Wells Garment Factory, who was instrumental in helping rebuild Greenwood \u2014\u00a0\u201cthe first person to erect a frame building in the much coveted district,\u201d according to Parrish\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

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Dora Wells was considered\u00a0instrumental in rebuilding Greenwood.<\/div>\n
Source: Published in\u00a0Events of the Tulsa Disaster<\/em><\/div>\n

Wells was able to marshal clothing, money\u00a0and other resources to Tulsa\u2019s Black refugee families due to her national connections as a member of the Elks and other racial uplift and church-based associations. Before the massacre, Greenwood was what we would call today a \u201cviral hit\u201d \u2014 known nationally in a pre-TV and pre-internet world due to Black Tulsans\u2019 connections to nationwide networks and organizations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s interesting to think about Black Tulsa being connected with political and social developments happening all over the country, large national organizations that were founded for Black unity, cooperation\u00a0and Black excellence,\u201d said Professor Wells \u2014 not to be confused with Dora Wells.\u00a0\u201cBy\u00a0focusing on these\u00a0organizations, we move beyond labor.\u00a0We always want to talk about people in Greenwood working and what they have in terms of economics, but they were tied in politically to Black people in other places.\u00a0And then we see Greenwood massacre as a part of a longer history of\u00a0racist violence against Black people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parrish,<\/strong> the author, was herself well-connected outside of Tulsa. In fact, she had only arrived in Tulsa from Rochester, New York, less than two years before the massacre, lured there by the opportunity to participate in the development of what was shaping up to be a Black financial mecca.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Tulsa colored people, in every sense of the word, were building a modern, up-to-date business city,\u201d she wrote in the preamble of her book.<\/p>\n

Parrish begins the Events of the Tulsa Disaster<\/em> with a polemic against mob violence, which she notes had no longer been the exclusive province of the Deep South, and a warning to white politicians that if they didn\u2019t stop it, that it would eventually visit violence\u00a0upon their own people (a prophecy that came to visible display, for instance,\u00a0100 years later during the Jan. 6 ransacking of the U.S. Capitol<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Documenting\u00a0the harsh details of her displacement from her home with her daughter during the disaster, and their search for sanctuary outside of Tulsa in the aftermath, Parrish writes that family and friends across the country\u00a0implored\u00a0her to leave permanently. She refused, telling them all that she wanted to help rebuild Greenwood. She was hired by an organization called the State Inter-Racial Commission to interview survivors for a report on what transpired. That reporting is how we know that the massacre was not instigated\u00a0by Black Greenwood, as was originally reported by the Tulsa media of the day. It\u2019s also how we know that Greenwood wasn\u2019t just a playground for the\u00a0best and brightest and wealthiest of Black America.<\/p>\n

\u201cGreenwood was a dynamic place and we have to teach a history of Greenwood that is not flattened,\u201d said Wells. \u201cGreenwood was able\u00a0to exist, in part, because it was land that white people did not want. It was downhill. Sewage ran in the streets. The city didn\u2019t pick up trash in Greenwood. They didn\u2019t have streetlights. Yes, there were some pristine parts of Greenwood. Absolutely. Celebrate that. But there were also parts of Greenwood where people really struggled to live. And for me as a Black woman,\u00a0in the United States, I will argue every day\u00a0that there\u2019s value in those lives too. It\u2019s about all of those people whose names we don\u2019t celebrate.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Black Wall Street:\u00a0 The Forgotten Women The neighborhood attacked\u00a0in\u00a0the Tulsa Race Massacre was known as a Black intellectual and financial mecca. Women were a little-known part of\u00a0its success. By Brentin Mock Brentin Mock is a writer and editor for CityLab in Pittsburgh, focused on issues of racial equity, economic inequities, and environment\/climate justice. Here\u2019s what\u2019s Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2445,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[133,1],"tags":[794,957],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2441"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2444,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441\/revisions\/2444"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}