Rebuilding Tulsa With or Without Reparations

The Historic Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has catapulted to international fame in recent years as more people have become aware of events that took place in 1921, when a white mob, motivated by economic avarice and anti-Black animus, stormed through America’s best-known Black Wall Street like troops destroying a town of enemy combatants. Retrospectives exploring the events, the causes, and the immediate sequelae abound, but the hopes and dreams that will help shape what Greenwood’s and North Tulsa’s future holds beyond the persistent evocation of the terrible events of June 1, 1921, are less broadly examined.

There may not be a clearer case for reparations to compensate Black people for white violence and theft than the destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District. Yet, reparations have remained elusive. In their absence, the descendants of survivors and victims find ways to persevere and build beyond the loss.  

Tulsa’s current residents—long-term or new—and others outside the city who recognize the urgency of preserving Greenwood’s legacy, are also working in myriad ways that will help chart the Magic City’s path forward. Artifacts from Tulsa’s timeline are being excavated, explored, and expanded through art, literature, film, and more as testimony to the past and paeans to the future.

An iconic photograph of a small boy, W.D. Williams, in the back seat of an automobile in early 20th-century Greenwood exemplifies a layered story that threads its way into the present. The boy’s parents, Loula T. and John Wesley Williams, nattily dressed, sit in the front seat of the car, the first in Greenwood. A few years after the photo was taken, that same boy, aged 16, would be fighting to repel the mob that rampaged through his home community of Greenwood during what is now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. His mother, Loula, owned two of Greenwood’s premiere businesses: Williams Confectionery and the 800-seat Dreamland Theatre. The Williamses remained in Greenwood and rebuilt their lives after the massacre, but documentation suggests that Loula suffered measurable physical and emotional harm. She died six years after the massacre at only 47 years of age.

In filmmaker Nailah Jefferson’s 2021 documentary, Descended from the Promised Land: The Legacy of Black Wall Street, Tulsa-born musician and multimedia artist ghalani recounted with awe the story of their great grandfather’s bravery. They pondered whether he would have had the guts to pick up a rifle and enter the fray, the way his “Daddo” did at 16, to defend his community from the invaders.

The artist, however, is helping to shape the legacy of this historic community in another way. Using artificial intelligence, he captured his great grandfather’s voice from 1970s-era recordings, transformed it into a sound file, and used the catalog of sounds to approximate Daddo’s voice as an older man reading the letters that his mother, Loula, sent him when he attended college at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in the 1920s. The time travel-worthy overlap of an older W.D. reading letters Loula wrote to him as a teenager, in a voice from a future the two of them could not have imagined, is surreal. 

With the original recordings top of mind, ghalani paraphrases Daddo’s thoughts about the future of Black Wall Street, saying, “At one time because of the nature of Jim Crow, the nature of the isolation, it created an environment where we had to rely on each other, and that time has passed.” 

Today, ghalani feels this acutely. “When I go to festivals and celebrations [to commemorate the massacre] … there’s this feeling that we all want to, basically, from the ashes rise … how [did] we do that?” They add: “The environment is so radically different, so the solutions have to be so radically different.” 

Greenwood first rose from the ashes in the near wake of the catastrophe, when the community invested sweat equity to rebuild. Businesses thrived on the reinvigorated commercial street and rooming houses were filled with locals as well as people who came to town to do business. Black Wall Street was in its second incarnation. When I-244 dissected the heart of Greenwood in 1975, however, what could not be destroyed by a violent mob was ended by the mundaneness of urban planning and a concrete road; Greenwood became a moribund vessel for its former glory. A third act for this storied community will need to rely on the resiliency exemplified by brave residents who stayed and rebuilt, all while masterminding a future that will be able to meet the new environment.

Like their Daddo, ghalani feels the changing times require a responsive approach, and believes the demographic shift in the community portends an evolving paradigm for Greenwood that presents challenges for finding common ground, even as the fight for reparations continues to play out. He is not certain what view the cadre of newcomers will hold about Tulsa’s history, but will not accept apathy from them as they become part of the community. “I think that [is] the way that we all move forward in terms of embodying [the spirit of Greenwood], and it should mirror that, the interdependence of that,” they say.

In his book, Built From the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street, Tulsa-based journalist and author Victor Luckerson framed the telling of Tulsa’s most infamous event within the broader story of a community built from scratch that then successfully rebuilt itself in the wake of one of the largest anti-Black racial pogroms in U.S. history. “I wanted to understand what had happened in this place sort of after the Tulsa Race Massacre … I was much more interested in the entrepreneurship and community solidarity that grew in the city both before and after the destruction,” Luckerson says. 

He understands the role that long-term, consistent interaction among community members plays in cementing the personal bonds necessary to the success of a community. During the research and writing of his book, Luckerson spent considerable time in Guy Troupe’s Black Wall Street Liquid Lounge, a space where multiple generations of Greenwood residents often gather. According to Luckerson, an elder who frequents the Lounge, Bobby Eaton Sr., has “the deepest wealth of knowledge about Greenwood history,” which he shares freely with other patrons, including younger folks who may come in to play Call of Duty. It is a so-called third place where a sense of community is fostered. 

“It’s important to build communal bonds in moments outside of crisis. … The people in this community historically, they had each other’s backs on a day-to-day basis. They were spending time together in theaters, at church, in these sort of daily intimate contexts,” Luckerson says. He is gratified to see such spaces spring up that are owned by people born and bred in Tulsa. The Liquid Lounge opened in 2020. 

The part of his book that Luckerson says resonates most with young people is the coverage of modern Tulsa and how it ties into historical events. According to Luckerson, there is great relevance and urgency for young people to understand history and find ways to influence what happens next. 

Building on a preexisting relationship, which gave her the needed credibility to approach community members for her project, filmmaker Jefferson did a deep dive with two Tulsa families who “descended from the promised land.” The Williams family is well known and is thought to be the inspiration for characters in Damon Lindelof’s 2019 HBO series, Watchmen, starring Regina King, which helped to resurrect the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre from near obscurity. But the publicity came with some distasteful aspects. The story was mined by outsiders and exploited for their purposes without consideration for the people whose families lived the experiences. Watchmen’s creators did not seek input from the Williams family, nor was the family compensated, which Jefferson says is commonplace. Jefferson believes that the Williams family “felt a kind of way” about this phenomenon—not being allowed into that success.   

In contrast, Jefferson’s film gives people the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own voices. In addition to featuring the Williams family, whose name is widely known by anyone familiar with Black Wall Street, Jefferson intentionally highlighted one other, lesser known descendant family who has a different relationship with the public spotlight, the Blockers. Fully understanding that how outsiders enter Greenwood is key to gaining the trust of its residents to invite them to open up. Jefferson’s film’s production company, Odyssey Impact, tapped into its relationship with Rev. Dr. Robert Richard Allen Turner, the former pastor of Historic Vernon AME Church, the only building on Greenwood Avenue to survive the 1921 massacre. Rev. Turner, in turn, introduced Jefferson to the Blocker family, whose foremother was Black Wall Street rooming house owner Leona Corbett. 

Jefferson feels it is important to identify people “who are the people who are really grounded in the community.” In her film, the Blockers asked the key question that has likely been on the mind of many in the community since 1921, which intrigued Jefferson: “What could have been if their family’s success had not been interrupted?” The filmmaker describes the family’s dream as being very much like that of their forebear, “To be free to exercise … to live how they want to in this world and not be burdened by things.” She goes on to name such “things” as over-incarceration. As a political act, the massacre was initially labeled a riot to place the responsibility for the catastrophe on all parties although “the Black community was victimized, they were absolutely targeted, they were absolutely massacred,” says Jefferson.

Jefferson is committed to showcasing the truth in a way that makes it harder for the facts to be misrepresented in the future. Her documentary subjects told her it was empowering to be able to talk about their families in their own words, in their own way. Jefferson believes that it is “pivotal to continue to excavate Black stories” and strongly encourages people to archive their family history, famous or not. “Keep those archives; give them to a library once it’s your time to pass on.” That is how to ensure that future historians looking back on this time will be informed of what life was like and the truth of what really happened.

Each of these three activists—Tulsa native ghalani, transplanted author Luckerson, and outsider documentarian Jefferson—imagine a future for Tulsa in which the people who live there own their own stories, and these three continue to create in ways that facilitate those stories. Even the widely known Williams family had not found an avenue to publicly share their story much before their profile in Jefferson’s film. 

The artist ghalani imagines a Black Wall Street 3.0 that reaches people in ways that transcend the entrepreneurial spirit and material success the first and second iterations are revered for. They want to be sure that those who aren’t as widely known as their family, in the past as well as today, are not forgotten or under-appreciated.

Luckerson hopes the people of today’s Greenwood and North Tulsa can be more than mere vessels for remembering the past. He wants them to participate in victories like securing a new grocery store in North Tulsa, which happened recently, harnessing resources to build a hospital that serves nearby residents, or bringing police reform efforts to fruition. The whole tapestry of Black Wall Street, with all its complexities, deserves the spotlight, even as the fight for concrete compensation in the form of reparations continues. All three makers are inspired by people whose individual stories are often overlooked, and are working to document, preserve, and promote those stories. Tulsa’s truth can never be suppressed again, and truth is the first step in any journey toward reconciliation and repair.

This story was funded by a grant from Decolonizing Wealth Project, as part of the YES! series “Realizing Reparations.” While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial independence policy here.

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