![]() A Harvard Business School case study published in 2020 framed the problem. Turns out, they were just one Google query away from an upsetting history lesson. ![]() And a promising 2018 initiative called Tulsa Remote, which aimed to entice a diverse cohort of work-from-anywhere digital trailblazers to move to Tulsa for $10,000 and the promise of a built-in community, had trouble retaining Black applicants. ![]() The city remains beset by poverty, crime, and a history of lethal police violence against Black residents. If pondering the opportunity cost feels like an exercise in racial time travel, the legacy of Greenwood continues to make itself known in real-world ways. What hangs in the air is the Big Question: Where would the country be if we had never “forgotten” what happened in North Tulsa on May 31, 1921? Exhumations have begun in earnest, under the watchful eye of a still-wounded community. The 100th anniversary has arrived, and Tulsa is still burying its dead, a process that began in 2020 after a yearlong search revealed unmarked mass graves likely filled with the bodies of victims. Media outlets have been visiting Greenwood for months, and a pair of extraordinary documentary films timed to the anniversary-one directed by Peabody and Emmy Award–winning director Stanley Nelson ( Freedom Riders) and Peabody and duPont-Columbia Award winner Marco Williams ( Two Towns of Jasper) and another underwritten by LeBron James and Maverick Carter and directed and produced by Fortune alum Salima Koroma-offer unflinching examinations of the historical elements that made Greenwood both possible and a threat to white hegemony, then and now. ![]() In addition to state and congressional hearings like the one Fletcher attended, scholarly research about reparations is getting new attention, and another “forgotten” massacre that wiped out a prosperous town in Rosewood, Fla., in 1923 has become a blueprint for victim compensation. Now, the once dreaded R-word is everywhere. On the 80th anniversary of the attack, and despite years of lobbying by survivors and advocates, Oklahoma passed legislation that agreed to some investment in Greenwood, including an official memorial-medals were even issued to the then 188 survivors-but it did not include meaningful reparations. Like the wealth and promise that died for Fletcher in the early hours of May 31, this history had largely been erased. And yet, for all its horror, few Americans had heard of it until recently virtually nobody who is currently old enough to vote learned about it in school. White locals even repurposed crop dusters to drop homemade turpentine bombs on Black bankers, grocers, barbershops, teachers, tailors, the beloved theater, and the local newspaper office. Gurley, a wealthy Black landowner, bought 40 acres of property in Tulsa to be sold to “coloreds only.” He provided loans for new business ventures to African Americans, launching what quickly became a successful experiment in Black prosperity.ĭuring the two-day massacre, every home was burned, businesses were destroyed, and historians estimate that up to 300 people were brutally murdered by the mob, who had been coached by local police. Washington-since updated to “Black Wall Street”-was both unique and a beacon, an intentional response to the ugly restraints of Jim Crow racism that prevented Black folk from participating in the thriving economy created by the region’s oil boom of the 1910s. Greenwood, dubbed “the Negro Wall Street of America” in 1913 by educator and author Booker T.
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