Black Wall Street

Recently, in our national discussion of race and racial tensions the history of Black Wall Street has come up time and again especially within the black community principally as an argument to counter the claim that black people are lazy and that the economic troubles within the black community are it’s own fault. That was not always the case and Black Wall Street is an excellent example of this which is why it keeps coming up in conversation.

What was Black Wall Street

Black Wall Street was the nickname for the Greenwood Avenue  neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma that was comprised principally of black homes and businesses. It was the only place in the city where black people could do business or be welcome in hotels, restaurants or banks. This neighborhood had a professional class and several institutions. It was unique at the time in the 1910s-1920s because it was a place of opportunity for black people and it was beginning to become an economic powerhouse. The differences between Greenwood Avenue and the surrounding neighborhoods were beginning to show as the amount of wealth and services catering exclusively to the black customer exploded. From hospitals to libraries and schools, Black Wall Street was developing into a black economic success story, just 1 generation away from slavery. The violence started in 1921 when 19 year old Dick Rowland was accused of assaulting a white woman, 17 year old Sarah Page. The Tulsa Tribune published the story and word quickly got around town that a white mob was going to exact justice. The night of May 31, the mob did just that burned 600 business to the ground is the largest and most violent race riot in American history.

Why Black Wall Street is Relevant

In our modern world where a black man is President of the United States and there is a black woman worth 1 Billion dollars  a story of something like Black Wall Street seems rather irrelevant does it not? Why on earth do we need a neighborhood of 600 businesses when Drake and Nicki Minaj and other wealthy people of color exist? A simple economic fact: the more people making more money leads to generational gains to wealth which can be invested over and over again to create real and lasting wealth. Despite everything, African-American hold less than 1% of the wealth in this country and black households are worth about $10,000 less than white households on average. If a neighborhood like Black Wall Street had continued imagine the economic output that it would have been able to accomplish? Imagine what other neighborhoods it could have invested in and how much wealth and economic activity it could have created including black owned corporations? Sadly, we will never know.

Integration was An Economic Decision

Economically speaking, integration (the end of segregation) was as much an economic decision as it was a political one. Although pressure had mounted from outside the access to employees (at a cheap rate) and the access to money that was staying within the black community made a compelling case for integration. The issue of money was at the forefront of the minds of that mob when they set the first building on fire in Oklahoma. Ultimately, Black Wall Street was a threat. I don’t say that lightly but most of the time in American history when black people come together and begin to create the institutions, the businesses, and the other parts of a functioning society, it rarely ends well and this race riot is a poster child for that history. The success of the Greenwood Ave neighborhood has never been replicated. The riot made thousands homeless and gutted a community and a city forever. Burning 35 square blocks is no small feat. Although economic integration wouldn’t come for many more years, the message to the black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma was clear: a successful black neighborhood was neither desired nor required.

The Bottom Line

Can Black Wall Street ever be recreated? Probably not, in our global economy its beacon of economic hope is no longer practical but the lessons in racial tensions in this country are very real. To some degree what people say and the reality of economics are two different things. People ask and expect black people to improve themselves but when that began to occur at a very early stage, there was a race riot of angry white people. I think at some level that has infected the consciousness of the black community and it is a thought that has never been shaken. It is a deeper trauma than anyone wants to truly realize or admit. If this had happened in any other country words like, “systematic corruption” and “genocide” would have been used. It begins to paint a picture of how life would continue to be for black people well into the future. Segregation might have ended but in our modern days we have a kind of segregation via incarceration; that is something worth doing something about.

This film is upcoming on the subject: