John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about a book that is important in Oklahoma history and American history.
He writes:
When I first read Victor Luckerson’s Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street, I was stunned by his beautiful prose. Watching Luckerson on CSPAN Book T.V., I was reminded of his eloquence. And I was even more impressed by the timeliness of the story of the communities and families who built and rebuilt Greenwood after the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, and who then had to repeatedly fight to keep their community from being erased.
This April 2, 2024, when hearing a lawsuit on reparations, the Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Yvonne Kauger said to the litigants, “When I went to high school, … Greenwood was never mentioned,” so “I think regardless of what happens, you’re all to be commended for making sure that that will never happen again. It will be in the history books.” We all must also commend Luckerson’s contribution to that essential story, and help pass it down to younger generations.
As Marcia Chatelain’s New York Times review of Built from the Fire explained, “The seemingly unfettered opportunity in the new state of Oklahoma drew unabashed capitalists, confidence men, industrious wives and loyal mothers to what had formerly been known as Indian Territory…” The story of diverse Black people who built Greenwood, the “Eden of the West” is just as complex.
Similarly, Suzette Malveaux’s Washington Post review started with the lie that prompted the Massacre by claiming:
Dick Rowland, a Black teenager, had sexually assaulted a white woman in an elevator. A show of force by Greenwood men to prevent Rowland from being lynched escalated into an all-out attack on Black Tulsans by white vigilantes, who in some cases had been handed arms by the police. As Luckerson recounts, “More than 1,200 houses were leveled, nearly every business was burned to the ground and an unknown number of people — estimates reach as high as 300 — were killed.”
As one white person recalled, white officers quickly deputized the crowd; he was told, “Get a gun and get busy, and try to get a n—–.”
But Malveaux also stresses the way that:
Luckerson shines a light on uncomfortable fissures between Oklahoma’s Black freedmen and Black migrants from the South; Native American enslavers and Black enslaved people; and the American Red Cross’s White “angels of mercy” and Tulsa’s mobsters. And he doesn’t shy away from telling the full story of Greenwood’s great leaders.
For instance, one of the fathers of Greenwood’s economic and cultural strength was J.H. Goodwin, a former railroad brakeman, who leveraged his position with the railroad (which was rare for a Black man at the time) and who was able to work with all types of people, but who passed down psychological burdens, as well as resilience to his family. His family invested in journalism, said one of their readers, so “you can have free speech and have privilege to act as a man without being molested.”
Goodwin’s stories, and those of other families in the book, include experiences gained and brought back from Fiske University, Chicago, Washington D.C., and elsewhere. The family became best known for the Oklahoma Eagle newspaper, which shared diverse perspectives and kept up the fight for justice. They also played leadership roles in desegregating Tulsa schools. And like so many Black Tulsans, in doing so, they drew on both “Booker T. Washington’s model of economic power and W.E.B. DuBois’s model of political power.”
Goodwin’s most influential recent descendent, Sen. Regina Goodwin, kicked off her political career in 2015 with the words, “Some women get lost in the fire and some … are built from the fire.”
Luckerson explained that “residents of Greenwood bore the burden of living in two Americas at once, the idealized version imagined in the minds of white slaveholders in 1776, and the more brutal reality that black Tulsans and their ancestors bore witness to.” He balances tales of graft by both Black and much worse White entrepreneurs. Although W.E.B. DuBois correctly described the resulting community as “impudent and noisy,” those same businessmen “opposed economic injustice just as fiercely as they fought segregation.”
Immediately after the massacre, Tulsa officials used zoning ordinances to keep Black residents from rebuilding. The insurance claims of Black residents were rejected. New segregation laws were passed, and bankers used “red lining” to deny new loans to Blacks. Moreover, criminal courts failed to find whites guilty of assault, arson and murder. However, Luckerson also chronicled skillful but often unsuccessful legal battles by attorneys like B.C. Franklin.
Over the next decade, Black resilience got the business community back on track. The gains were first undermined by the Great Depression, and then recovered as WWII approached. The Roosevelt administration implemented successful economic stimulus programs, as well discriminatory and counter-productive efforts. The same occurred during the war when Greenwood leaders had some successes in creating economic opportunities with the help of the federal government, while other wartime and post-war investments were too discriminatory to be constructive. Efforts to rebuild Greenwood’s neighborhoods sometimes prompted violence like a KKK cross burning and the dynamiting of a Black family’s home.
Luckerson then describes the 1950s and 1960s when legal battles and grassroots organizing created successes, as well as mixed feelings. For instance, Greenwood’s local political efforts resulted in funding Black schools like Booker T. Washington high school. (Don Ross, a teenager who would become an influential state legislator, was a leader in the fight for educational opportunities.) Thurgood Marshall’s anti-segregation efforts contributed to his historic Brown v Board of Education victory. But some Greenwood residents mourned the loss of Booker T. Washington, saying it “ripped the heart out of a community that had once had the pride to succeed in all parts of life.”
There was unanimity, however, in rejecting the way that highway construction and Urban Renewal once again devastated Greenwood.
Luckerson then brings the narrative through tragedy to sometimes promising political efforts and the often successful, but sometimes divisive efforts to build a dynamic 21st century Greenwood. One of the leaders was Tiffany Crutcher, whose unarmed brother, Terence, was shot to death in the middle of the street by police officer. Moreover, Rep. Bob Ross and Rep. Regina Goodwin worked skillfully within the legislative system to fund studies of the 1921 Massacre and reparations. Sadly, white political leaders, who had sounded so supportive of such efforts, largely failed to follow through.
Fortunately, the HBO film, The Watchmen, brought the Massacre to the attention of millions of Americans. And the George Kaiser Family Foundation established the Greenwood Cultural Foundation. Luckerson also provides an objective account of the fight over today’s reparations lawsuit.
The Greenwood revival also led to President Joe Biden’s commemoration of the Massacre. Speaking in Greenwood, he didn’t use the word “reparations,” but he “discussed the devastating effect of urban renewal on Greenwood. ‘A highway was built right through the heart of the community … cutting off black families and businesses from jobs and opportunity.’” The President then “announced plans to increase federal contracts for minority-owned businesses and try to curb racist housing appraisals.”
Luckerson concludes with the words of B.C. Franklin, “Right is slow and tardy while wrong is aggressive.” He then adds, “For more than a century, Greenwood has been grappling with wrong in all its combative forms. Wickedness flamed white-hot in 1921, but the embers continued to burn long after.” This stretched “from relief aid being withheld during the Great Depression … [to] Urban Planning brochures featuring smiling black faces and words laden with double meaning – blight, renewal, progress.” He later makes one prediction, “Whether or not Tulsa does right by the people of Greenwood and North Tulsa, they will continue to do what they’ve always done: build.”
Given the pressure by State Superintendent Ryan Walters to censor books that he believes would wrongly make White kids feel uneasy, I understand why teachers would feel afraid to teach Lukerson’s book. But we owe it to students to make his masterpiece available to all.
Diane Ravitch's blog 