Tulsa is different from other cities that were sites of a great racial cataclysm. Richmond, Virginia, the former Confederate capital, which boasts majestic Rebel statues, is in a constant public debate about its tainted Civil War heritage. Selma, Alabama, where an attack on peaceful marchers became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement, has a commemoration every year that regularly attracts sitting presidents. But Tulsa’s massacre happened in a time that we don’t talk about, when black independence and white resentment collided in an especially violent way. It upends the history lessons that Americans pass down — that black people were passive victims from the slave ships to the “I Have a Dream” speech, that white violence was the unique dogma of church-bombing extremists. Black Wall Street scrambles the accepted timeline so much that it’s easier to forget the place ever existed.
So in Tulsa and elsewhere, it endures as a hazy myth, a vague memory that flickers in and out of the national consciousness. Until this year, there was no specified curriculum for teaching it in Oklahoma’s schools, let alone in other states. The district is not listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And there are no major movies or television series depicting the events that transpired there, despite a recent spate of projects about the black experience in both the antebellum and civil rights eras, including The Birth of a Nation and Selma.
Tulsa lawmakers and historians say the time has come for the story of Black Wall Street — the good and the bad — to get the same kind of national exposure as the Nat Turner slave rebellion or the “Bloody Sunday” Selma-to-Montgomery march. Some in Hollywood think so, too, with prominent entertainers such as John Legend and Oprah Winfrey planning to bring Greenwood’s history to television. But the effort to see Black Wall Street reimbursed, revitalized, or at the very least remembered has been a struggle since the killing ended and the smoke still darkened Tulsa’s skies.
“To turn that tragedy into triumph, we have to tell the story that’s uncomfortable for some but important for the rest of us,” says Kevin Matthews, an Oklahoma state senator and North Tulsa native. “And we have to tell it now.”