Black to the Movies by Michael Stradford

And at the heart of it was J.B, who did everything in his power to support and enhance the thriving community of Greenwood.īefore the massacre, Greenwood, later remembered as Black Wall Street, bustled with 41 grocery stores, 30 restaurants, 11 boarding houses, nine billiard parlors, five hotels, and many other businesses, including laundry services, movie theatres, and a dance club. We also lost a vibrant neighborhood created by successful Black business owners and entrepreneurs not even 50 years after the end of slavery. In addition to lives, Greenwood residents-and their descendants, like me-lost what would today total an estimated $610 million in accumulated wealth.

( See how Tulsa is finally confronting the day a white mob destroyed a Black community.) The attackers burned more than one thousand homes and numerous businesses-my ancestor J.B.’s properties among them-and left nearly 10,000 people homeless, almost the entire Black population. May 31 marks the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when a white mob destroyed the thriving Black community of Greenwood, killing as many as 300 people. I didn’t understand the significance of what he was saying then, but the words “Black Wall Street” stuck with me. Stradford, and how he owned property, including a hotel, on Black Wall Street in Tulsa. He told me about my great-great-great grandfather, J.B. He said he needed to talk to me about something important: our family history. When I was in elementary school, my grandfather, Theron C.

Black to the Movies by Michael Stradford