O.W. Gurley, J.B. Stradford, and the Men Who Built Black Wall Street

The neighborhood that white Tulsans destroyed in May of nineteen twenty-one was not built by accident. It was built by design, by specific men with specific plans, over roughly two decades.

Otis Wesley Gurley arrived in Tulsa around nineteen oh five with a teaching certificate and forty dollars. He bought forty acres of land north of the Frisco railroad tracks that divided the city by race, and he began selling lots exclusively to Black buyers. He understood that if Black Tulsans were going to be confined to a narrow corridor by custom and by law, that corridor should belong to them as completely as possible. He opened a rooming house. He helped found what became Vernon AME Church. He laid out the streets. Greenwood Avenue, the commercial spine of the district, was named for a Black community in Mississippi, a deliberate signal of who this place was for.

John the Baptist Stradford arrived in Tulsa in eighteen ninety-nine and built the Stradford Hotel on Greenwood Avenue. It was the largest Black-owned hotel in the United States at the time, with more than fifty rooms. Stradford believed, in a formulation he repeated publicly, that the best way for Black Americans to resist oppression was collective ownership of property. He practiced what he preached. When the massacre came in nineteen twenty-one, Stradford's hotel was burned to the ground. He was arrested on a charge of inciting a riot. He fled to Chicago before trial, was never extradited, and died there in nineteen thirty-five without ever returning to Tulsa. He was exonerated posthumously by the state of Oklahoma in nineteen ninety-six.

Andrew Jackson Smitherman edited the Tulsa Star, the newspaper of record for Greenwood. In the days before the massacre, he published editorials warning that if a lynching was attempted, Black Tulsans would resist. When the violence came, he armed himself and went to the courthouse with others who had come to prevent Dick Rowland from being taken from his cell. He escaped the massacre, fled to Massachusetts, and later rebuilt a newspaper career in Buffalo, New York. He was never prosecuted. He lived until nineteen sixty-one.

These three men built what the Tulsa Tribune of nineteen twenty-one refused to name as a community. The record of what they built is more complete than the record of why it was destroyed.