Dreams of Black Wall Street

Ashes And The Fight For Greenwood (1x11)

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Over the last nearly 100 years, there has been speculation about whether or not the Tulsa Race Massacre was a planned attempt to launch an attack on Tulsa's Greenwood district. While there is no direct evidence of this, experts point to why this claim may or may not have any validity. Additionally, following the Tulsa Race Massacre there were concerted efforts to push African American property owners off of the land that they owned, on which mostly ashes sat. On June 2, 1921 - a day after the attack on Greenwood ended, representatives from the local Real Estate Exchange in Tulsa (which later became today's Realtors' Association, made a proposal to the Public Welfare Board: relocate Greenwood's black residents and turn parts of the burned district of what some referred to as "Little Africa" into a "wholesale industrial site." On Tuesday June 7th, the Tulsa City Commission took steps to guarantee that Greenwood would not be rebuilt. At the directive of the Real Estate Exchange, the body voted 4-0 to extend the city's fire code to all of the burned district south of the Sunset Hill brick plant and Haskell Street, making it nearly rebuilding "The Negro Wall Street" impossibly expensive for blacks in Tulsa. These efforts ultimately failed due - in part - to a group of African American attorney B.C. Franklin who went to the Oklahoma Supreme Court to argue against a law that would allow African Americans in Greenwood to be stripped of their land.