Rebuild ‘Black Wall Street’ as a National Atonement

On Monday, it will be exactly 100 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. In an orgy of violence, White Tulsans — aided by elements of the city government — killed dozens or possibly hundreds of their Black neighbors, injured many more, and left 10,000 homeless. Though this was just the largest of many similar outbreaks of anti-Black violence in the late 1910s and early 1920s, it carries a special place in memory, because in addition to the human carnage, it destroyed the country’s most thriving concentration of Black-owned businesses — Tulsa’s Greenwood District, known to many as Black Wall Street.

Black Wall Street came to exist in large part because of the entrepreneurial efforts of O.W. Gurley, a son of freed slaves who established a number of successful retail businesses. Gurley then used his ventures’ earnings to finance many other Black-owned businesses in the Greenwood area. It was a model of how American capitalism ought to work — until it was destroyed. That destruction is emblematic of how the American dream of independent success and self-betterment has too often been dashed on the rocks of racism.