North Greenwood Avenue prior to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Source: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, gift of the families of Anita Williams Christopher and David Owen Williams.
The Forgotten Women of Black Wall Street
The neighborhood attacked in the Tulsa Race Massacre was known as a Black intellectual and financial mecca. Women were a little-known part of its success.
Here’s what’s known famously about Greenwood, the early 20th century Black community of Tulsa, and infamously about its destruction: Black businessmen helped build Greenwood into a financial Black mecca that produced an abundance of successful entrepreneurs, some of whom turned into millionaires.
A young Black man, Dick Rowland, accused of accosting a white woman in an elevator, became the impetus for one of the worst race riots in U.S. history. That riot began with a mob of white men from Tulsa and beyond who flocked to the courthouse to lynch Rowland, which led to the assemblage of a counter-mob of Black men who took up arms to defend him.