Piecing together archival maps and photographs, with guidance from historians, The New York Times constructed a 3-D model of the Greenwood neighborhood as it was before the destruction. “If they had been allowed to carry on that legacy,” she said, “there’s no telling where we could be now.”įor decades, what happened in Greenwood was willfully buried in history. The Greenwood Avenue shoe shop of her grandfather and his brother was destroyed.

“What if we had been allowed to maintain our family business?” asked Brenda Nails-Alford, who is in her early 60s. Much bigger is a sobering kind of inheritance: the incalculable and enduring loss of what could have been, and the generational wealth that might have shaped and secured the fortunes of Black children and grandchildren. The destruction of property is only one piece of the financial devastation that the massacre wrought. Greenwood Avenue, for years a thriving hub, was destroyed by racial violence in less than 24 hours.

For two decades, the report has been one of the most comprehensive accounts to reveal the horrific details of the massacre - among the worst racial terror attacks in the nation’s history - as well as the government’s culpability. The financial toll of the massacre is evident in the $1.8 million in property loss claims - $27 million in today’s dollars - detailed in a 2001 state commission report. One factor that drove the violence: resentment toward the Black prosperity found in block after block of Greenwood. They were casualties of a furious and heavily armed white mob of looters and arsonists. Hundreds of Greenwood residents were brutally killed, their homes and businesses wiped out. But what took years to build was erased in less than 24 hours by racial violence - sending the dead into mass graves and forever altering family trees. Greenwood was so promising, so vibrant that it became home to what was known as America’s Black Wall Street. Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Cultureīrick and wood-frame homes dotted the landscape, along with blocks lined with grocery stores, hotels, nightclubs, billiard halls, theaters, doctor’s offices and churches.

Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, Okla., was the pulse of the Black business community.

3d city race