Black Wall Street: An Untold Story

That awkward moment when you forget to finish a blog post, but it's published, and all your readers will see is this link and picture with no explanation...

Let me make up for that by finishing what I was originally going to write, which was a lesson on Black Wall Street--a place many of you are probably unfamiliar with. Growing up, my family participated in annual Black History plays and productions at the local center for the arts, and when I was in sixth or seventh grade, our theme was Black Wall Street. Now, of course, we took creative license with some of the story, though the outcome of both the play and the real Black Wall Street was the same: a prosperous community with several Black entrepreneurs was burned to the ground due to racial tension.

Greenwood, Oklahoma was established in 1906, and later nicknamed "Little Africa"and "Black Wall Street" by the early 1920s, as there were "over 11,000 residents and hundreds of prosperous businesses, all owned and operated by black Tulsans and patronized by both whites and blacks." (OBWS Online Article; see link below) In fact, many of the businesses--funeral homes, theaters, hotels, churches, grocery stores, etc--were more successful than their white counterparts in the area. The trouble began when a young Black man entered an elevator in a building to use the restroom with a young white woman working as the elevator operator. This young woman, seventeen-year-old Sarah Page, ended up accusing the young Black man, nineteen year old Dick Rowland, of sexual assault; and though we don't know for sure what happened, half the town believed the claims while the other half believed Rowland's side of the story, which stated that he simply grabbed her arm to keep from falling as he tripped leaving the elevator. Charges were never pressed, but the occurrence was enough to incite a race riot horrific enough to destroy Black Wall Street, and cause fearful families to flee the destruction and violence to avoid harm's way.

I always wondered why they kept this one from the history books, as it's definitely one of my favorite history lessons from my childhood (second only to learning about how they mummified the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt because what kid wouldn't love to learn about that?). As an adult, I can't help but wonder if--well, scratch that. I don't wonder: I know it's because of the sides that were taken. With the race riots in Greenwood, the Whites sided with Sarah Page and the Blacks with Dick Rowland, and we as a country don't to care much for sharing parts of history where it was very clearly Black vs White because it's uncomfortable, opting instead for simply denying or dismissing in hopes that it will avoid future conflicts based on a centuries-old (or, in this case, a mere decades-old) occurrence. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. As I mentioned in maybe a previous blog or two, disregarding history doesn't mean it never happened, and it certainly doesn't prevent similar issues from making a comeback--in fact, it does just the opposite. It encourages these conflicts to repeat like that one song on the radio you can't stand that plays on the radio twice every hour. Look at our world today, and try to tell me that our "hide the ugly parts of history we don't want to share" strategy hasn't failed.

Come on...

Try.

Again.

Try harder!

Alright, that's enough trying. I'm getting dizzy.

To learn more about the story of Black Wall Street, visit the link below. This is also my source for the blog post above.

http://www.officialblackwallstreet.com/black-wall-street-story/