This story originally aired on “Marketplace Morning Report” on May 19. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report each weekday at 5:51 and 7:51 a.m. on KGOU.
In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, conversations in some government and corporate spaces turned to the stark and persistent racial wealth gap in America.
One hundred and sixty years after Emancipation, and more than six decades after the end of legal segregation, the median Black household still has only 15% as much wealth as the median white household, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances — $44,900 versus $285,000.
The history of Tulsa, Oklahoma, exemplifies how Black prosperity has been built up and torn down over a century of racial violence and discrimination.
Today, Tulsa’s original Black neighborhood — known as Greenwood — has a small cluster of shops and empty storefronts, a history museum, some vacant land and parking lots. It’s sandwiched between railroad tracks and a freeway overpass.
It’s a far cry from 100 years ago, when Greenwood was known as America’s “Black Wall Street.”
Don Thompson — a local photojournalist who has documented Greenwood during his lifetime in the photo collection, “Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name” — showed me around the neighborhood.
“There was a shoe shine parlor right here at this corner,” he said, pointing to a storefront at the intersection of North Greenwood Avenue and East Archer Street, in the heart of what’s known as Deep Greenwood. “A billiard hall, where the parking lot is located, a barber shop, a hotel...”
Thompson said that in the early 1900s, boosted by Oklahoma’s oil boom — some of it found on land owned by Black Oklahomans and Black members of Oklahoma’s Native American tribes — Greenwood was packed with Black-owned stores, workshops, oilfield suppliers, hotels, theaters, lawyers’ and doctors’ offices.
“There were over 600 businesses, extending 35 blocks north from here,” Thompson said. “You can see where they have put little plaques on the concrete: This is Nails Brothers Shoes, destroyed in the 1921 massacre,” he read, pointing to a series of metal plaques along the sidewalk, marking where stores, offices and other businesses were once located.
The plaques, along with murals and historical markers in the area, memorialize the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, when an armed white mob — supported and provided with arms by city and state officials — invaded Greenwood to loot and burn, and killed hundreds.
Karlos Hill is a professor of African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and has documented this history in his book, “The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History.”
“A 40-block area destroyed,” Hill said. “Homes, businesses, churches, schools, hospitals, clinics — all of that in flames. 11,000 people made homeless. Millions of dollars in destruction that was never repaired and never repaid.”
“White business owners who experienced destruction and vandalism received restitution at the time,” he added. “No Black business, no Black person who lost a home or a loved one, received any.”
Until the Massacre of 1921, said Hill, for Black Americans who traveled to Greenwood to do business, take a vacation, and see performers like Count Basie play at local theaters, Tulsa’s Black Wall Street was “a promised land, where Black people can build business, own property, exist in American society in an economically advantageous position. Greenwood suggested that Black communities across the country could have this level of success and prosperity.”
But that prosperity, and the intergenerational wealth it could have built, are now gone.
There are a number of reasons: the Massacre; redlining by banks and insurance companies; housing segregation.
Today, only half as many Black Tulsans own homes as white Tulsans, according to a report on the racial wealth gap in Tulsa from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. Back in 1920, the Black homeownership rate was equal to that of whites.
Black unemployment and poverty are much higher, while life expectancy is five years lower, according to reports from Human Rights Watch and the City of Tulsa.
Kristi Williams is a descendant of Massacre survivors and believes the government has an obligation to redress racial violence of the past with compensation today.
“We do need economic reparations,” said Williams. “That’s the only way we’re going to close the gap. People will say, ‘Well, what is reparations?’ Reparations is cash. Reparations is land.”
Williams and other advocates are lobbying for millions in public funds for Black Tulsans.
“We requested $25 million for housing for descendants,” Williams said. “What we need is rooftops — that would help us get grocery stores back, and other things that we need to have a viable community.”
The housing reparations proposal was introduced in Tulsa City Council last year. At town meetings, some critics said that using taxpayer money to compensate descendants isn’t fair to today’s Tulsa residents, who had nothing to do with the Massacre 100 years ago.
Legal efforts to obtain compensation for survivors have been rejected by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
And the local plan for compensation — if it ever passes — will likely face similar challenges in state court and the Republican-controlled legislature.
