Greenwood Rising and Falling Again

The Tulsa Race Massacre of nineteen twenty-one destroyed thirty-five blocks of Greenwood. The community rebuilt. Within a decade, businesses had reopened, churches were operating, and the professional class that had been displaced was re-establishing itself on the same ground. The rebuilding was not celebrated in white Tulsa. It was largely ignored, which was, under the circumstances, the best outcome available.

By the nineteen forties and fifties, a second Greenwood had grown up in the ruins of the first. It was smaller, the massacre had displaced tens of thousands of people permanently, but it was functioning.

Then came urban renewal.

In the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, the construction of Interstate Two Forty-Four cut directly through the rebuilt Greenwood neighborhood. The highway's planners were not unaware of what they were routing through. Urban renewal authorities exercised eminent domain on hundreds of properties. The displacement of thousands of residents was accomplished not through mob violence but through government infrastructure decisions, carried out in accordance with federal and state law, under the banner of progress.

The pattern is documented in cities across the United States. Black neighborhoods in Atlanta, Memphis, Baltimore, and dozens of other cities lost communities to highway construction and urban renewal clearance during the nineteen fifties, sixties, and seventies. In Greenwood's case, the irony is structural: the community had already survived one destruction. The second came with the government's signature on it.

The Greenwood Rising History Center, which opened in twenty twenty-one, addresses both destructions. The first is the massacre the city suppressed for fifty years. The second is the urban renewal that the city authorized and funded forty years later. Together they document one of the most complete examples in American history of what it cost to build a Black community in a place that did not want it to last.