Remembering Black Wall Street

Close your eyes, proverbially if you have to.

You’ve spent long years getting your Masters degree, Doctoral degree and moved in a Black neighborhood of equally educated neighbors. The schools your children attend have Black teachers and administrators. The movie theater, hospitals, doctor’s offices, and hotels are all Black-owned. You thrive and exist in the utopia that is generally relegated to dinner table rhetoric and ‘what if’ scenarios. Your dollar is cycled throughout the community, feeding the entrepreneurial spirit alive in the eyes of its owners, passed down to their kids who dream of their businesses.

This ‘dream’ was historical fact in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921.

Nineteen Twenty One.

The blossoms of bigotry and segregation had created a self-sustained, multi-block community of Black talent that renowned scholar W.E.B. DuBois coined as ‘Black Wall Street’.

Within moments, however, it and its residents, some 10,000 were attacked, lynched, and burned by an angry white mob apparently escalated over a dispute of an alleged assault of a white girl by a Black boy. Although an entire town was up in ablaze, nearly 80 years later, its story is still left out of the history books and justice unserved.

Wess Young and Dr. Olivia Hooker
Wess Young and Dr. Olivia Hooker, survivors of the
Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Source: Marcia Wade & BE)

Black Enterprise has a great article detailing a new documentary called Before They Die chronicling the history of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, its survivors, the tireless efforts of America’s greatest Black legal minds for more than four years, and the financial backing of America’s most powerful corporations to get this film to light.

Although the adage seems to get old, reading that article, viewing the trailer over at the movie website, and trying to wrap my brain around the magnitude of sorrow, fear, and anger these family members have seen moved me to purchase the DVD for myself to support their cause.

I ask, before they die, to do the same. Recognize the blessing we live today from their tireless efforts and sacrifices.

Remember Black Wall Street.

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