Twenty-five years before Don Shaw was born in Greenwood, a white mob invaded the Tulsa neighborhood and killed more than 300 people. Much of the tight-knit community was burned to the ground, including his grandfather’s pharmacy.
But when Shaw was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, few people wanted to talk about the massacre – perhaps in part because much of the damage was no longer visible.
He remembers walking the streets of Greenwood in his youth and seeing Black-owned businesses up and down its blocks: a hotel, dry cleaner, soul food restaurants, churches, a ballroom, dentists, pharmacies, hardware store, photo studio, the 750-seat Dreamland Theatre. It was an oasis of Black economic self-sufficiency, inside an Oklahoma city flush with oil industry wealth where the Klu Klux Klan once publicly operated.
“There was a lot of parties,” recalled 76-year-old Shaw, who has lived in Greenwood in whole life. “Dances and stuff like that, concerts, lots of stuff going on.”
But the area that has become known across the US as “Black Wall Street” didn’t last. In the early 1970s, Oklahoma planners plowed a new eight-lane interstate highway called I-244 right through the heart of Greenwood. The Dreamland Theatre – along with hundreds of homes and businesses – was bulldozed and covered in concrete. Greenwood’s commercial area shrank from dozens of blocks to just one.
TulsaView along Greenwood Avenue, Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early twentieth century. Photo by Greenwood Cultural Center/Getty Images A recent view of the Historic Greenwood District. Photo by Vanessa Charlot for The Guardian
After that, the neighborhood began emptying out. That was when the parties stopped.
“The atmosphere changed,” Shaw said. “The feeling of destruction set in.”
The Biden administration now says it wants to repair that history. Earlier this year, it announced $185m in grants to groups across the country aiming to unravel the long legacy of Black, brown and low-income areas being the sacrifice zones for urban freeways.
Tulsa could be a national model of what that actually looks like. A grant worth $1.6m was awarded to the city’s North Peoria Church of Christ so it can study the feasibility of removing the section of I-244 slicing through Greenwood. Its application provided “a compelling depiction of how a historic Black neighborhood in Tulsa suffered the punishing effects of urban renewal”, noted the US Department of Transportation.
Two maps of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, one in 1953 and another in 2008 with a highway highlighted in red running through it.
In that application, Black leaders also proposed an innovative solution for what comes next: a land trust held by the community that could prevent the valuable new real estate from being scooped up by gentrifying developers, while compensating families who were displaced by the freeway.
“Greenwood doesn’t have to be a place where people just come to remember the past,” said Oklahoma state representative Regina Goodwin, who helped apply for the grant. Her great grandfather was a newspaper owner who survived the 1921 massacre and later established the Oklahoma Eagle, which still operates in Greenwood. She wants to help write her neighborhood’s next act.
“If done right, removing the freeway could revitalize the community,” she said. “It can be a place of moving forward and advancing for generations to come. That would be a terrific tribute to our ancestors.”
The events of 31 May and 1 June 1921 – when Ku Klux Klan leaders, the Tulsa police department, the Oklahoma national guard and armed white locals turned Greenwood into a smoldering war zone – represent some of the worst racist violence ever committed in the US. But there is a common misperception that Greenwood never recovered.
“It actually came back bigger and better than ever,” said Hannibal B Johnson, a Tulsa-based attorney and author of the book Black Wall Street 100.
By December 1921, more than half of the homes that were destroyed had been rebuilt, despite city leaders rewriting zoning and fire codes to prevent the Black neighborhood from surviving. (Some Greenwood locals worked on their homes at night to avoid policemen.) When I-244 came decades later, resistance to the freeway was undermined by a lack of Black representation in city government.
“This was a largely powerless community,” Johnson said.
The physical damage to the neighborhood was irreversible.
A shopping parade on Greenwood Avenue in the 1930s or 40s. Among the visible businesses are the offices of the Oklahoma Eagle newspaper. Photograph: Greenwood Cultural Center/Getty Images
During a recent stroll through Greenwood, Terry Baccus, who gives tours of the area, stopped to point out a haunting reminder of the human losses. On the side of the freeway, a large photograph shows Baltimore Barbershop owner David Gardner peering out his window as I-244 was being constructed. “The next day the building was gone, and nobody has seen Mr Gardner since,” said Baccus.
The freeway forced more than 1,000 people to relocate, while shuttering or displacing dozens of businesses. As Greenwood’s economic opportunities shrank, residents lost jobs. There was less capital available to repair homes and sidewalks. Houses were abandoned and then stripped for copper wires and lead pipes. “The decline was rapid,” Johnson said.
The current effort to reverse that decline in some ways began a decade ago. That was when a Georgetown University student named Cody Brandt wrote his undergraduate thesis about how Tulsa could benefit economically from removing the freeway. He later discussed the idea with Rep. Goodwin, who saw it as a way to rebuild Greenwood.
“We brought in folks from across the nation that showed us that it was absolutely possible,” Goodwin later explained to the Tulsa World. She and Brandt applied for a “Reconnecting Communities” grant from the Biden administration along with the North Peoria Church of Christ, beating out a competing proposal from the Oklahoma transport department, which wanted to keep the freeway but make it more aesthetically pleasing.
Terry Baccus stands for a portrait at Black Wall Street in the historic Greenwood district of Tulsa. Photograph: Craig F. Walker/Boston Globe/Getty Images
They’ll be studying the actual logistics of taking out I-244 from Greenwood. One model they’ll consider is Rochester, New York, which shut down part of a sunken six-lane freeway circling downtown and filled it with mud from Lake Ontario. It’s now a road lined with trees and new apartment buildings.
Doing something similar in Tulsa would open up about 30 acres of new land. Advocates of the plan want to restore Greenwood’s historic street plan. This could “provide the opportunity for the construction of thousands of new residential units and over hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial space for new businesses”, according to a group called Congress for the New Urbanism in a report about US freeway removal projects.
Goodwin wants the area zoned in ways that prioritize new affordable housing and small local businesses. She hopes that with cars actually entering the neighborhood, rather than blasting over it on a freeway, there will be more visitors with money to spend. Families that own local small businesses “could thrive and be self-sustaining” All that new economic activity could bring $10m a year to the city, county and state through property and sales taxes, she and other advocates estimate.
Not everyone shares their optimism. Freeman Culver is all for revitalizing the area. But as president of the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce, he has concerns about who actually benefits. A recent development boom in and adjacent to Greenwood has resulted in $42 million in city tax incentives and loans mostly going to white-owned businesses. “Gentrification has already begun,” Culver said. “If we’re not careful, the new growth will consume the history that’s here.”
The Rev Warren Blakney of the North Peoria Church of Christ has given thought to that as well. He’s pushing for any land reclaimed by freeway removal to be put into a community land trust, which can buy up newly available properties and sell to people who share the goals of keeping this historic Black community alive.
One thing that trust might do is offer opportunities for families originally displaced by I-244 to obtain new homes in the area, and “that could allow for rent to own and other types of construction not typically undertaken in private for-profit development”, explains the Congress for New Urbanism. In this future Greenwood, Blakney said: “Some of the foundational pieces of systemic racism are beginning to fall down.”
Blakney feels a personal moral urgency to make it happen. One of the last living survivors of the 1921 massacre was a member in his church. She died years ago, but at one point she confided in Blakney about the experience. “She talked to me as her pastor about what they went through, businesses which she saw burning, folks hiding, children running, parents killed before their eyes – she lived through all that,” Blakney said. “So I’m working for her, for her children, for her grandchildren.”
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