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♪♪
- In the 1920s there was a strong Black community
here in Tulsa called Greenwood.
These people were the core of Black entrepreneurship.
People call it the Black Wall Street.
- Greenwood was like putting Harlem, Bourbon Street,
and Chocolate City all in one place.
- But white Tulsans talked about Greenwood
as Little Africa or Nigger Land.
- Tulsa was a powder keg
needing only something
to set the community alight.
♪♪
- Between 100 and 300 people, most of them Black,
were killed.
- Today, we call it a mass murder.
They were hastily trying to get rid of the bodies
by dumping them in mass graves
around the city.
- We have Tulsans of an undermined number
who were murdered.
It should not have taken 99 years.
- Anybody who thinks that this crime scene
is not gonna speak
doesn't have the ears to hear.
The ancestors are awake
and the earth is shaking.
[radio tuning]
♪♪
- Ah, yeah! So rough, so tough.
For all you people listening to KBOB 89.9,
located right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
This is where we tell our stories our way.
We can be talking about these graves,
you know, here in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
excavation of these graves, what it means to us.
I guess I'm gonna start with you, Kristi.
- Uh-oh. - Uh-oh.
[laughter]
Kristi. Kristi Williams.
- I came to Tulsa when I was in the sixth grade.
So, that's been, whoo!
I don't know how many years.
My mother is from Oklahoma.
There was a strong Black community in Tulsa
called Greenwood.
These people were the core of Black entrepreneurship
and they would help you get your business started.
I mean, Greenwood was booming.
People call it the Black Wall Street.
And when you read the editorials,
and they would also post events that were happening.
And I imagine they were having a great time!
♪♪
[sighs]
What I love about Greenwood is what it was.
And I love what it could be.
But Tulsa has a truth problem.
Hiding the truth,
and people who will not challenge
what is perceived to be truth.
- What's keeping Tulsa from being
a great shining city on a hill
is dealing with the legacy
of the so-called Tulsa race riot of 1921.
White Tulsans murdered Black folks
and were hastily trying to get rid of the bodies
by dumping them in mass graves around the city.
Awful things were done to get rid of bodies.
In the late 1990s when Senator Maxine Horner
and my father, State Representative Don Ross
created the commission to study
the Tulsa race riot of 1921,
which brought historians, consultants
from around the world who tried to figure out
what happened in 1921.
I had many conversations with riot survivors.
- Oh!
- It was one of the proudest moments that
I can remember of my father.
When I wrote their first articles,
uh, "South Tulsa Tales from the Crypt",
I got a lot of attention.
But nothing was done until 2018
when the story became a "Washington Post" story
thanks to a reporter who came to Tulsa
to do a story about gentrification of Greenwood.
No mayor, Republican or Democrat,
never thought about or even touched the story
of the mass graves.
- You hear about, you know, history being erased
in, you know, these authoritarian regimes
or something like that.
You can't imagine that it would happen
right here in your own hometown
in the middle of the United States.
And yet, it had.
♪♪
My name is G.T. Bynum. I'm the mayor of Tulsa.
I grew up here in Tulsa.
My family has been here since the 1870s.
My great-great grandfather was the second mayor of Tulsa.
I heard about the massacre in 2001 or 2002, maybe.
And I was 24 years old at this point.
You know, every high school student in Oklahoma
has to go through an Oklahoma history course.
It never came up.
My dad had been president of the Tulsa Historical Society.
It never came up.
Hearing about that, it was shocking to me
because I love Tulsa.
I couldn't believe that Tulsa would be the kind of city
where something like that could happen.
We have Tulsans of an undetermined number
who were murdered in this event.
And so, we have a responsibility, I think,
as a city to try and find out
where their remains are and what happened to them.
- You know, our ancestors literally make up
who and what we are.
We are the physical manifestation of
our collective ancestors and their memories.
How can I tap into his or her brilliance,
their genius,
so that I can really be the best that I can be?
- I think it's at Tulsa's best interest
to help heal the wounds,
to go look for our dead
and put them at a proper rest.
Pay for the damages and for the lives
that were lost in 1921.
- The city deputized a lot of white men
during the massacre
who robbed, murdered a lot of people.
They're accountable.
- The story here is a story about people.
It's about the human spirit.
The massacre is a chapter in a much larger, richer,
more robust narrative.
- Most people you're going to interview,
you need to ask this question.
Where are you people from?
And if they say well, we're from Oklahoma
or Tulsa or Greenwood...
well, when did they get here?
- Scene Grayson Take 1, Common Marker, Mid Slate.
- My father, who's Creek Indian,
was from Oklahoma.
My family is a mixture of Indian, Black, and white.
And... here I am.
- The story of Oklahoma really began with
the five civilized tribes in the 1830s and 1840s.
♪♪
- The Chickasaws, the Creeks,
the Cherokee, Choctaw,
and the Seminoles,
called the five civilized tribes.
They were originally from the South,
from Alabama, Georgia, parts of Florida,
Tennessee, Mississippi and the South Carolina area
where these tribes owned plantations.
- Civilized really is a veiled reference
to taking on, accepting Eurocentric ways.
One of those ways was a practice of chattel slavery
to boost oneself economically.
- At the Cherokee museum today are slave Bills of Sale,
including one by then Principal Chief John Ross.
- I don't ever talk about it very much
because I think it's a very shameful part
of, um, of Cherokee history,
and so I've purposely avoided involving myself
in that whole issue.
♪ Java man he made a life ♪
♪ But the mammy ain't his wife ♪
♪ Choppin' cotton don't be slow ♪
♪ Better finish out yo' row. ♪
- Slavery in the five civilized tribes varied.
What's really important to remember is that
these people were enslaved.
So, by definition, it wasn't a good experience
because if you're a slave,
then you don't have your individual liberty,
which arguably matters more than anything else.
- Enslaving Black people,
it was part of the economy of those tribes.
When the Americans now wanted that land
for their own plantations,
they took the plantations of the Indians.
This was done in a legal way...
by passing legislation,
The Indian Removal Act,
the forced migration of the five civilized tribes
from the Southeastern United States
into Indian territory,
which is what is today Oklahoma.
- They said, well, we're swapping you
this land for the lands west of the Mississippi
in Indian territory.
You have no choice but to go.
We know it as The Trail of Tears.
♪♪
The slaves that the tribes didn't sell off,
they brought them on The Trail of Tears.
So, just like an oxen or a bull
that was pulling a wagon,
the Black folks was in the same situation.
They didn't have a choice.
♪♪
- The five civilized tribes officially aligned themselves
with the Confederacy during the Civil War
because slaves were still needed to improve
the economic fortunes of these tribes.
The Confederacy lost, by the way.
And so, after the Civil War,
the Federal government negotiated with these tribes
on treaties generally referred to
as the Treaties of 1866.
♪♪
- In Article II of The Creek Treaty of 1866,
it says that you won't have slaves anymore.
That's a wrap.
It's not gonna happen no more.
Those slaves that you have, they're now your Tribal members.
They're now your citizens.
Black people who had been with the Indians,
now 10, 15 generations,
either enslaved or married among them
or their children.
They were called the Freedmen.
The United States government forced the Tribes
to divide up this land with the Freedmen.
- The slaves who belonged to the Cherokees
could come right back to the territory
and settle on Indian land.
And when allotment came,
they gave us an equal right with them in land drawings.
The United States government forced them to do this,
I have been told.
♪♪
- Okay, so, on this map,
this is the Creek Nation.
This little yellow spot up here
is Township Tulsa.
The green area are the allotments of the Freedmen.
Everybody got 160 acres if you were full-blood Creek,
if you were full Black from Africa.
If you were female you got 160 acres.
The Freedmen allotments totaled 1,192,240 acres.
One million one hundred--
I really want people to understand that.
That's a lot of land for a small geographical area.
It's a lot of land to own.
The most important part of the story
of Black people here in Oklahoma
is the Black land ownership.
- As a descendent of a Creek Freedmen,
I believe land is power,
land is wealth,
land is really the-the core of Black entrepreneurship.
- You had two types of Blacks in Oklahoma.
You had those Freedmen.
Then you had state Blacks.
State Blacks came to Oklahoma looking
for the promised land.
♪♪
- There was a movement called Boosterism
and this began in 1889
using bulletins and encouraging Black folks
to migrate from the deep South
to what is now Oklahoma.
The leader of that movement was a fellow called E.P. McCabe.
He recruited Black people to come on the theory
that it represented an escape from the oppressive deep South,
an opportunity to prosper economically.
- The time will soon come when we will be able
to dictate the policy of this territory, or state.
And when that time comes,
we will have a Negro state governed by Negroes.
We do not wish to antagonize the whites.
They are necessary in the development
of a new country.
But they owe my race homes,
and my race owes to itself
a governmental control of those homes.
- Land meant rebirth.
It meant renewal. Land meant survival.
There were 40 other Black townships around Oklahoma.
The whole state.
Not just Tulsa.
- It was the promised land for a lot of people
coming out of slavery
wanting to escape lynchings
and wanting just to raise their families
in a loving community.
- Freedman had all of this land with mineral rights
that ultimately made them very wealthy.
- We put ourselves in Oklahoma, 1906.
A city called Tulsa.
♪♪
Tulsa boomed after the discovery of oil.
Tulsa became the oil capital of the world.
♪♪
The oil drew people really from all over,
seeking fame and fortune.
The population just mushroomed.
♪♪
- Back then, people were moving to the city every day,
whether it's a sharecropper
leaving some rural Oklahoma county,
looking for a job in the oilfields.
Whether it's a young entrepreneur
who thinks that they can strike the next one.
People called it the Magic City
because it just came out of nowhere.
♪♪
- Back when I was growing up,
they said the 1921 race riot
and then they changed it to massacre.
And I wanted people to know my mother
was a survivor of that.
A lot of people say,
oh, we didn't know anything about it.
I always knew about it
because my mother told me about it.
♪♪
- Tulsa has seen a lot of growth in recent years.
Some might even say it's showing signs of becoming
a destination city.
- Tulsa is a beautiful little city
that wants to be a big city.
♪♪
It's just a little country town
that had big skyscrapers.
The weather is beautiful.
The cost of living is wonderful.
People from various different walks of life.
And I strongly believe at one time
that we're going to be the best city
that this world can offer.
Make a left at the light.
Here we are in the historic Greenwood community,
AKA the Black Wall Street of America,
AKA the Negro Wall Street of America,
AKA my home.
Every day that I've got money in my pocket,
I go down on Greenwood.
I go get me a haircut.
They give me the latest scoop,
find out what's going on.
What's up on Greenwood now?
Yeah, the Tee's Barbershop is a legacy of my family.
My father got his hair cut here.
My son got his first haircut right here.
Well, how long has a barbershop been on Greenwood?
- The first barbershop that I'm-- I worked for
was called Mim's Barbershop
and it was in the 1100 block of North Greenwood.
That was in 1963.
They talking about Greenwood
and all you can see now is one block.
But it was businesses all the way down
from-from Lansing back to Martin Luther King Drive today.
♪♪
- 1921.
Greenwood was much larger than just that one block
that you guys see today.
Greenwood's much larger to the south,
to the east,
to the west, and to the north.
But the only thing we have left
is just a sliver of its former self.
- Every time somebody comes back every other 20 years,
there's less and less of Greenwood.
People come here all the time and say, is this it?
This is Greenwood?
This is what they've been talking about? Right?
Everybody wants a community
where they can grow and prosper
and that dollar can turn over
So, why wouldn't Black folks want that for themselves?
- I've been ownin' Blow Out Hair Studio
for 13 years now.
Greenwood is special.
Once you come down here, you feel the energy.
I would hate to leave Greenwood.
I will fight tooth and nails before I leave,
to be honest with you.
- Farmers Insurance is my first business.
However, I have a studio,
Greenwood Fitness & Recreational Studio.
You know, we have a debt to our ancestors here.
You know, we have to bring back what was once there.
[espresso machine whirring]
And anyone that wants to do business here
should also be engaged in that same idea,
that same mentality, same thought process.
- When I got to Tulsa in 1984,
I was asked to do a regular guest editorial column
in the Oklahoma Eagle,
which is the Black newspaper.
One of my assignments was to do a historical treatment
of the Greenwood District.
I've had this sort of obligation of service.
And if I'm going to live in this community,
I want the community to be the best it can be.
We can't do that unless we engage
in the work of racial reconciliation.
And we can't do that
unless we acknowledge our history.
♪♪
A Black man, the name of O.W. Gurley
came to Oklahoma from Arkansas.
He bought land.
He sold land to other African Americas;
established his first business in 1906.
Businesses just proliferated
and they became prosperous,
creating and living
in this insular economic community
called the Greenwood District.
The Greenwood District was Black Main Street.
Mom and pop type operations, small businesses,
hotels, restaurants, grocery stores,
theaters, nightclubs.
- You have the offices of African American lawyers.
There are more than 12 physicians and surgeons
that have their offices in Greenwood.
- Greenwood had about 10,000 people.
They were in search for a way
to be masters of their own fate.
Today, most of the people connect to Greenwood
and think Black Wall Street
and, yes, that existed here.
You did have people that were pioneers
and big business tycoons living in sprawling mansions.
♪♪
And even most people who were domestic workers
or owning small shops,
living day to day,
everyone has an opportunity and their skin color
doesn't limit their capacity here.
That's what makes Greenwood really special,
that you have this safe haven,
that oasis that existed here.
- This is a special edition of the events
of the Tulsa Disaster.
Mary Jones Parrish is very important
because she was hired within a week or two
of the massacre to collect stories of people--
of survivors, including herself.
♪♪
- On leavin' the Frisco Station,
goin' north to Archer Street,
one could see nothin' but Negro business places.
Goin' east on Archer for two or more blocks,
there you would behold Greenwood Avenue,
the Negroes Wall Street.
- Mary Parrish was a remarkable woman.
Originally from Mississippi,
she had set up a secretarial school
right on Greenwood Avenue to teach young women
all of these different skills
so they could get work as secretaries
to some of Greenwood's Black doctors and lawyers.
- This section of Tulsa was a city within a city.
Every face seemed to wear a happy smile.
♪♪
- We're sitting in the Mackey house.
That's Lucy.
The Mackeys are really emblematic
of the kind of middle-class Black person
who lived in the Greenwood community
during its peak.
But I think if we only fixate on the things
that are glamorous and more flattering
and we forget that the Greenwood District
is a part of the city called Tulsa.
You have a Black segregated community
that's not getting its fair share of tax dollars
for infrastructure like roads,
like sewer systems, and things like that.
♪♪
- There was so much money in Tulsa these days,
but here's the reality.
Money plays a complicated role
in the intermingling between the races.
- Affluence, wealth, prosperity
created this tie-in between Black Tulsans,
white Tulsans,
but it's all about perspective.
White Tulsans talked about Greenwood
as Little Africa or Negro Land.
- White Tulsans could control what justice looks like...
could control the narrative,
could control whatever they want.
[children playing]
- I would say that I had a very neutral attitude
about Blacks.
We had, uh, Black maids work for our household,
but I knew that there was separation of seating--
restaurants, motels.
♪♪
- Through the years, I met all sorts of people,
including white people whose family was in Tulsa
during the people of the massacre.
You were telling me that you were born,
uh, in 1915. - Uh-huh.
Down on 9th and Denver is where my parents
bought a little house down there when they got married.
- Did you, as a child, ever have occasion
to visit the African American community in Tulsa?
- I-I think that I would have been, uh,
probably just going to and from the homes
where our maids lived.
- My mother always had the colored help.
She just- she got along well with people and--
- When you say help, you mean domestic,
as domestic help?
- Yes, domestic help. Um-hmm.
- My challenge, my charge really is to help people
come to grips with their past,
which is not to say that every person in America's evil
or every white person is evil.
It's to acknowledge a series of systems
that exist here that advantage some people
and disadvantage other people.
- We were taught by innuendo
to dislike or to actually hate.
I think the thing that bothered me the most
was not being able to ask questions
and have a discussion or hear about it
as just a kid growing up, a white kid.
- The only reason that Black Wall Street existed
was because of necessity.
These people were not able to participate
in the regular economy run by the dominant culture
because of segregation.
- The vast majority of people
who lived in Greenwood were not wealthy.
♪♪
But they had regular jobs in the white community
and they had a regular paycheck
in the white community.
You've got a lot of well-to-do white Tulsans
who are going to hire servants, cooks,
domestic workers.
They would collect their paycheck at the end of the week
and they would spend it back in Greenwood.
You know, in Tulsa, like in other southern cities,
African Americans can't go into a department store
and try on clothes.
But they can shop in their own neighborhoods.
So, what happens is the merchants in Greenwood
had this captive population
and the money just flows and flows and flows.
- And it was successful because they were supported
by people who looked like them,
would purchase from them, do business with them.
- So, there's people that are living all different lives
and different social standings
but everyone here is making a living
whatever way they- they decide to.
And they're not feeling the pressures
and the violence from the outside world.
- I did not grow up here,
and I'd recognized the importance that it had,
not just for this community,
but for the country and also the world.
And I wish that Greenwood would be a wonderful community
that would radiate the likeness of the Lord.
- 1920 Greenwood was booming.
♪♪
It was a strong community.
- A.C. Jackson was a prominent Black surgeon.
The Mayo Clinic said that Dr. A.C. Jackson
was the most able Negro surgeon in America.
Simon Berry was a businessman.
His first business was a jitney service.
A.J. Smitherman was the editor and publisher
of the Tulsa Star.
His paper included editorials and articles
really talking about social justice.
- When you think about Stradford,
you think about what elegance and grace looks like.
- By the beginning of 1917,
I had amassed quite a fortune.
I owned fifteen rental houses,
a sixteen room brick apartment building.
The rental value was $350 a month.
The income from other sources were triple.
I had a splendid bank account
and was living on the sunny side of the street.
I decided to realize my fondest hope,
and that was to erect a large hotel in Tulsa
exclusively for my people.
- J.B. Stradford built the Stradford Hotel.
- It's 54 rooms and crystal chandeliers.
- It was acknowledged
in the United States of America.
It was the crown jewel of Greenwood.
- Loulah and John Williams,
they were really active in the community.
Here they had a rooming house
and a garage and a confectionary.
Williams Dreamland Theatre was a grand structure,
really one of the jewels in the Greenwood community
at the time.
- Imagine putting Harlem, Bourbon Street,
and Chocolate City all in one place.
A train stopping on a Friday night
coming to Greenwood
with excess of 500 people
to listen to all the greats.
♪♪
- There are speakeasys, there are pool halls,
there's a lot of action going on.
In Greenwood you had hell on one side
and the holy ghost on the other.
- The church life in those days were very strong
and the church was a source,
not just for God, but also for community.
[piano playing blues music]
♪♪
- Well-to-do families,
Black families in Tulsa would have pianos.
They would have their daughters take piano lessons.
You might hear a blues song,
but you might also hear a Mozart sonata.
[piano playing classical music]
It's part of the blood of the city.
This is a part of the heartbeat of the town.
- And the sky was the limit.
There was nothing that you could not do.
- When thinking about Tulsa
in the early part of the 20th century,
it's important to remember
where the Greenwood community is.
It abuts downtown, separated by the Frisco tracks.
If you live in a society in which white supremacy
is the prevailing paradigm,
but you live in a community in which you can look across
the dividing line, the Frisco tracks,
and see Black folks driving nice cars
and wearing fur coats and living in nice homes,
then it causes cognitive dissonance,
garden variety jealousy.
That land was desired by corporate interest
in Tulsa. We know that.
The idea was to remove the Black folks from the land,
move them farther north,
and use the land for what was considered
to be higher and better purposes.
- Tulsa appears now to be in danger of losing its prestige
as the whitest town in Oklahoma.
Does Tulsa wish a double invasion
of criminal Negro preachers,
Negro shysters,
crap shooters, gamblers, bootlegs, prostitutes,
and smart alecks in general?
♪♪
- We took Oklahoma history in the ninth grade.
And in our-- in our textbook,
there was probably a page, or a page and a half
about the race massacre.
We did not cover that in class.
I read it because I was really interested in history
and it was a real revelation.
It brought home just how pervasive racism was
in the United States and in the social system.
- Historians often refer to the early part
of the 20th century in America
as the low point of race relations in America.
- African Americans are under attack
in all different quarters in all parts of the Union.
This is an era where the nature of lynchings
are getting more and more barbaric.
- Lynching is a form of domestic terrorism
that targeted primarily African Americans.
In events to which people brought their children,
lynching was widespread in the United States.
That there would be such a film like "Birth of a Nation"
produced at the time...
neither shocks nor surprises me.
♪♪
- "Birth of a Nation",
a landmark film that came out in 1915.
Black people were- were portrayed
in a very demeaning manner.
...the Ku Klux Klan as heroes.
♪♪
- "The Birth of a Nation" attests to the purity
and chastity of white women
and Black men mixing with white women
is a distinct taboo,
which often did result
in the death of the Black men.
- The film became, uh, you know,
pretty much of a national phenomenon.
President Woodrow Wilson endorsed it.
It showed all over the country.
It showed in Tulsa in the convention hall.
It certainly validated these ideas.
- How do you survive if you're a Black person
in America during this era?
And part of the answer came through African American
veterans of World War I who'd fought in combat units
in France where they were treated
with respect and with honor.
And they came back to the United States
and they found none.
- We have Black veterans in Greenwood.
They fought for their country,
they fought for their freedom.
So, when they come home, they expect to be respected.
But what they come home to is, again, more Jim Crow laws,
more prejudice, and more restrictions
on their freedom that they fought for.
- After World War I,
in uniform being lynched by white mobs.
It's pretty stunning and remarkable.
The idea is we're going to show you what your place is.
We don't care whether you've fought for the country.
When you're here, you play by our rules.
- The Ku Klux Klan is kind of the bogeyman.
I think, especially as white people,
we load up all the bad stuff and we attribute it
to this vague group over here
that we call the Ku Klux Klan.
Even the people who considered themselves friends
of the Black people
didn't really consider them equals in a social way.
I mean, they- they didn't want them--
they didn't want them killed, they didn't want them cheated,
they didn't want their houses burned down
but they didn't want to sit next to 'em
in the restaurant either.
In those times,
Tulsa was like a lot of other places.
You had African Americans who were just sort of tired
of being sent to the back of the bus,
literally and figuratively.
They were ready to stand up for their--
for their right.
There had to have been tension building up.
- The Tulsa Tribune published a series
of inflammatory articles...
...that really fomented
hostility in the white community
against the Black community.
♪♪
Tulsa was a powder keg,
a tinderbox needing only something
to set the community alight.
- Many years ago, I was at a cemetery.
I was taking pictures of the tombstones.
And I heard this strange noise.
Tsshh.
I looked around; it was nothing there.
Then I heard a "tsshh" to the right.
Then I heard that same sound surrounding me.
Tsshh.
I ran out of there.
That's when I saw a flock of redbirds
come out of the trees.
I thought that was unusual.
Normally you see one or two redbirds,
but I never saw a flock of them
flying together like that.
And I told a good friend of mine and she said,
you saw redbirds in a cemetery?
Oh, baby, that's nothin' but an omen, she said.
That was the spirit of the dead telling you
to go tell somebody that they are not at peace.
- The ancestors are speaking to us.
The ancestors are throwing clues at us.
We have a responsibility and an obligation
to find the truth.
- The mass graves investigation
started out in 1997, actually,
with Don Ross, Kavin Ross' father.
- When he was first told about the massacre,
my father, he thought it was just a lie,
that it didn't happen.
It was not in the history books.
But then in high school,
he heard first-hand from survivors
who were schoolteachers at the time
and that was something that stuck with him
until he got to the point
where he could do something about it.
- White political leaders tried to bury the truth
along with all those Black victims of the riot.
And they pretty much succeeded for 76 years
until 1997,
when the state legislature appointed a commission
of 11 people to finally uncover the truth
about the horrific riot of 1921.
- Don Ross went to the governor and the legislature and said,
we've never had an official study
of this little-known event.
- That was inspired by the Oklahoma City bombing.
Uh, when they said it was the largest urban disaster
in America, wrong.
Uh, more people were killed than any such disaster,
wrong.
- I was asked to be the historian for the commission.
During that period, I was thinking
maybe we could use this to figure out
how many people died and where they were buried.
- I'm ready. - Kavin, you good?
- Go ahead. - Hi, I'm Eddie Faye Gates,
chair of the Survivors Committee
of the Oklahoma Legislative Commission to study
the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
- I was a videographer for the race riot commission report.
I was on it to accompany Eddie Faye Gates,
who was the commissioner at the time.
Her job was to record the testimonies
of the riot survivors.
♪♪
- We have located fifty-one actual living riot survivors,
ages 78 to 104.
No research takes the place of eyewitness testimony,
and that is why this day is so significant.
Mrs. Simms.
Go on and tell it.
- You will never forget that riot.
That's something that will be always in your remembrance.
- This has been the age-old story here in Tulsa.
I never knew what happened to my great uncle,
never saw my great aunt again.
You hear those stories over the ages.
Folks were coming in with oral history,
where bodies could be buried.
- We interviewed over three hundred Tulsans
to identify what we thought were three very likely spots
in town where massacre victims were buried in unmarked graves.
- Clyde Eddy took some of the same steps today
he first took 78 years ago,
days after the Tulsa Race Riot.
He was ten at the time, drawn by the curious sight
of men digging a trench
with large boxes stacked nearby.
- Clyde Eddy talked about at the age of ten,
when he was at the Oaklawn Cemetery,
he saw these giant boxes.
He and his cousin would go to one of these crates.
- We opened the first box,
and there were, um-- excuse me.
There were three bodies of Black people.
The stench was terrible.
- There were other boxes.
Lift up the lid, and that saw that there
was Black folks inside of that one.
Black people in a box, dead.
That's something that would be etched in your mind forever,
and so for him to tell a story with such conviction.
I said, let's dig 'em up now.
- So many people have said there were no bodies there.
But you know, all the Black folk
in the community, we believe they're there.
Those stories were passed on to us.
- Inch by inch, crews are digging into
the history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Tulsa's mayor, G.T. Bynum, initiated the investigation
to try and find if there are any victims
buried in mass graves.
- There was a systematic cover up of the event.
It should not have taken 99 years.
- We have to pay attention,
we have to pick up the charred baton
that has been left in our hands,
and figure out where the screams are coming from.
♪♪
- Monday, May 30, 1921.
It happened to be Memorial Day.
- May 30th could have happened at any point in time
because Tulsa was already a powder keg.
We do know that the deathly KKK members
that are part of the police force,
proudly marching down the street on Memorial Day.
People describe it as a massacre,
I've been calling it a war.
- There's systemic causes for what happened here in 1921,
but you fixate on this trigger incident
that involved a Black boy and a white girl on an elevator.
The teenage boy is a boy named Dick Rowland.
He's at work on Memorial Day,
shining shoes in Downtown Tulsa.
- Dick Rowland was nineteen years old
in the spring of 1921.
He worked in a white-owned
and white-patronized shine parlor
on Main Street in Downtown Tulsa.
- His nickname is "Diamond Dick"
so he's known to be this flashy young guy.
[laughing]
He is just another person in the community
that everyone knows,
but he's-he's never been seen as a troublemaker.
- There's not a restroom facility
in the shine parlor,
so the white owner has arranged for them
to walk down Main Street to the Drexel Building.
On the fourth floor there was, quote, "a colored restroom".
Something happens when he enters the elevator.
Elevators are-are manually operated by a wheel,
it takes a great amount of skill to get the floor
of the elevator and the actual floor to line up.
That particular elevator was very difficult to center,
so the belief is,
that as Dick walked onto the elevator,
he tripped and just, by reflex,
threw his hands out to cushion the fall,
that he grabbed Sarah by the shoulder,
ripped her dress, she screams,
and he realizes this is a dangerous moment for him,
and he runs out of the elevator
and takes off.
But there was a white clerk at the Renberg's Clothing Store
who heard the scream,
saw Dick run out of the building,
and in his mind he puts two and two together,
and says, "This is an interracial rape attempt."
The Tulsa Police are summoned,
but they don't put out an all-points bulletin
for Dick Rowland,
they don't go searching for him.
They're not particularly worried about this event.
However, the Tulsa Tribune,
Tulsa's white daily afternoon newspaper,
decides to portray this incident
in a completely different light.
- The "Tribune" published an account
of the elevator incident entitled,
"Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In an Elevator".
The "Tribune" essentially claimed that Dick Rowland
tried to rape Sarah Page in broad daylight
in a public building in Downtown Tulsa.
The article went out of its way
to make Sarah Page look virtuous,
and, as a corollary, to make Dick Rowland look villainous,
playing on that white female,
Black male taboo.
- So the next morning, Tuesday, May 31st,
the Tulsa Police decide,
"We're gonna pick up Dick Rowland".
So they go to where he lives with his mother in Greenwood,
arrest him,
take him to the courthouse, and like,
as with other prisoners, put him up on the--
in the fourth floor jail.
The first edition of the "Tulsa Tribune"
hits the streets around 3:00, 3:30.
Within thirty minutes there's lynch talks
on the streets of Tulsa.
Lynch talk soon turns into a lynch mob.
Meanwhile, Black people are trying to figure out
what's going on, what to do,
how to organize.
On the stage of the Dreamland Theatre,
an African-American World War I Vet
jumps up on the stage and says, "Shut this place down.
"We ain't gonna let this happen here."
"It" being a lynching.
There was a feeling amongst Black vets
that if trouble comes my way, I ain't dodgin' it.
In Tulsa there had not been an African-American lynched,
and there were Black men and women who were prepared
to make sure that didn't happen.
Around 10:30 at night or a little before then,
a rumor gets greenlit
that whites are storming the jail.
Seventy-five African-American men,
all armed, drive to the courthouse.
They march up to the courthouse,
they go up to the sheriff,
who's waiting for them on the steps,
and they say, "We are here to help to protect the prisoner
"if you need our help."
Sheriff McCullough says, "Get the hell out of here,
"I don't want you."
[crowd yelling]
As they are leaving, an elderly white man
goes up to a tall Black vet,
and says, "Where you goin' with that gun?"
And the vet says, "I'm gonna use it if I need to."
The white man says, "Like hell you are."
Tries to get the gun, there's a struggle,
a shot goes off.
[gun shot]
The worst incident of racial violence
in American history begins.
- As the evening starts to fall, May 31st,
by seven o'clock there are already hundreds of people
circling around the courthouse.
By nine, ten is where things really start to reach
this sort of, uh boiling point, and shots are fired.
At the same time all this is happening downtown.
You have people that are still waiting
to go to their prom at Booker T. Washington.
You have people that are still going to movies
in the Dreamland and the [indistinct] Theater.
You have people that are still moving about their lives
that aren't aware of what's happening.
- We went down to a late show, movie.
Somebody came in and shouted, "Nigger fight! Nigger fight!"
We went out the door and just got there
when a Negro ran out of the alley.
The minute his head showed outside,
somebody shot him.
And, uh, this man was shot and rolled out
in the middle of the street with a revolver in his hand.
And this crowd around him wouldn't let anybody touch him,
pick him up, wouldn't let an ambulance take him.
But he was the first man that was shot in the riot.
- Nobody cares about Dick Rowland anymore.
The white mob is now out to get any Black person
in their sights.
- The teeming white mob spilled over the Frisco tracks
into the Greenwood community...
- ...carrying rifles, pistols,
matches, and cans of gasoline.
♪♪
- In the words of one of the massacre survivors,
"All hell broke loose."
Looting...
shooting...
burning, destroying everything in sight.
- People are taking shelter in their homes
or packing up their stuff and fleeing,
whatever they can.
- My Mother said, "Here they come,
"here they come."
And they came in the house with torches
and they set the house on fire.
Oh, it was like a nightmare. Everything was in flames.
- On the evening of May 31st,
my little girl had not retired
but was watching the people from the window.
She said, "Mother, I see men with guns."
Then I ran to the window and looked out.
There I saw many people gathered in little squads,
talking excitedly.
There was a great shadow in the sky,
and upon second look we discerned that this cloud
was caused by fast-approaching airplanes.
It then dawned upon us that the enemy
had organized in the night and was invading our district
the same as the Germans invaded France.
I took my little girl, Florence Mary,
by the hand and fled out the West door on Greenwood,
running amidst showers of bullets.
- I was so afraid,
because bullets were coming down around us.
All of the planes were up in the air,
shooting down, and I could hear those bullets falling.
There were a lot of people running,
dodging the bullets, and just afraid.
- They're shooting people on sight,
even if you're complying with their demands.
That's what happened to Dr. A.C. Jackson.
- A.C. Jackson was a prominent Black surgeon,
he was accosted at his home,
he exited his house in compliance
with the demands of the mobsters,
hands held high.
But he was actually gunned down by a young white man
and he ultimately bled to death.
Black men put up a vigorous, robust defense.
They were outgunned, and outnumbered,
and overmatched.
The violence lasted sixteen hours,
a unit of the National Guard sent in from Oklahoma City.
♪♪
When the dust settled, at least 1,250 homes
in the Black community were destroyed.
Between 100 and 300 people, most of them Black,
were killed.
♪♪
- So twenty years ago,
we had a mayor here that said, "Hey.
"We're gonna go into Oaklawn and were gonna excavate,
"because we have an idea of where some bodies might be."
- We brought in ground penetrating radar;
they showed that there were anomalies in these areas.
- I was twenty years younger, standing out in Oaklawn.
We were all out there,
but we were about to do this, right?
They called it off abruptly
because there was a white family
that did not want that area to be disturbed.
They suggested that there was a, perhaps,
a white body that was buried underground
and that that body would have been disturbed
as you're looking for race massacre dead.
- Our effort got caught up in politics.
- A bunch of lawmakers,
they pretty much didn't really care.
It made the state look bad.
- I am thoroughly convinced
that the state of Oklahoma was not culpable.
- We were shut down by the City of Tulsa,
and at that point, I, you know,
I thought the ballgame was over.
- For some people it's like,
"Why are you guys desecrating the grave?"
- Right. - We're not desecrating graves,
we're finding out the truth. - And those answers--
ancestors had never had a proper burial.
- Absolutely.
- I was on the City Council at the time.
Years later, a local journalist--
- My name's Lee Roy Chapman, and this is "Public Secrets".
- He did a video series about Tulsa's hidden secrets.
[squeaking]
And one of them, I was watching...
- Um, Oaklawn Cemetery has been rumored
for nearly a hundred years to be the, uh,
location of a mass grave,
uh, attributed to the Tulsa Race Riot.
- What's my immediate reaction?
There is no way that could possibly be true.
The mass grave in Oaklawn cemetery,
where my great grandparents are buried,
and that no one would have ever bothered to look.
This is a historic day for Tulsa and for our country
as we begin a test excavation in Oaklawn Cemetery.
- There's nothing abstract, there's nothing theoretical.
This is not a research project.
This is an investigation.
- Scientists are set to finally break ground
in the effort to find victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
- Nearly 100 years later, the families to victims
of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
could get answers and closure.
- It should have been done well before now,
but it wasn't.
That is a baton that's been handed to us,
and it is-- it is not an easy race.
The initial excavation will be focused on a location
within Oaklawn Cemetery that we felt had a high likelihood
for encountering a mass grave.
We focused on an anomaly,
uh, that had been detected.
That anomaly to us was an indication
that it was possibly a mass grave.
As we were excavating down, we very quickly realized
that we had materials that didn't really belong there.
- The search turned up many old artifacts,
but after reaching three and a half meters in depth,
the excavation was called off on Wednesday.
- We do not have indications of a mass grave, um,
in this portion of Oaklawn Cemetery.
There is a-a heavy weight of responsibility
that comes with trying to assist in this effort.
There is that sense of optimism
that comes from the fact that the investigation
has been reopened.
But you-you also are worried because it has--
there's a perpetual feeling
that the other shoe is gonna fall,
and this expectation of disappointment.
But it's extremely important to remember why we're there
and who we're trying to find.
- Sometimes stuff just makes you want to just give up,
but other times those are those times like,
no, you keep going,
'cause the ancestors are not gonna let you give up,
they're gonna keep pushing you.
When you say you quit, they say, "No, you don't",
it puts you right back up and do it all over again.
- That's why it's cold today.
The ancestors are like,
"You're gonna feel the chill of my bones today, man."
- Ooohh. - Yes.
- Ooohh.
- That's what-that's what they want us to feel.
They want everybody to feel what that feels like.
- There's all kinds of good things
that you find in South Tulsa.
You'll find computer stores, you'll find bookstores,
you'll find twenty-four hour pharmacy,
you'll find health food stores.
None of those things can be found in North Tulsa.
North Tulsa's a food desert, and that's got to change.
- One of the things that people don't generally know
is that the Greenwood community actually came back
after it was destroyed.
- It was rebuilt because the rural community, uh,
rural lands were still owned mostly by Black folk.
But by the 1960s,
these towns started to disappear.
- There is this idea that Greenwood was destroyed in 1921,
and that's the end of the story.
But there's 100 years after that that we need to talk about.
- Tulsa is just a tale of two cities.
North Tulsa's a predominantly African-American community.
And South Tulsa you have predominantly white community.
This city of Tulsa is the most segregated city,
geographically, economically,
socially, and all of the above.
- Growing up in North Tulsa,
I started to notice buildings looked different,
institutions looked different.
Wow, there's a whole 'nother world
I wasn't even aware of.
We've already experienced dislocation,
urban removal,
eminent domain,
all of those things.
Those people who lived in Greenwood saw its demise twice.
[explosion rumbling]
- The people who have lived in an urban center for many years
certainly do have rights.
However, they do not have the right to frustrate
the creative efforts of very diligent people
who are trying to bring back
vitality, and wholeness, and beauty into the city.
- I grew up at 1415 North Greenwood.
We owned the house on Greenwood.
When I grew up, I had a church in front of me,
right literally behind me was the school that I went to,
to my right was the Black hospital
that I was born in, that was Morton Hospital,
and then we had Jack's Memory Chapel
right there, so the whole cycle of life
was right within a block and a half of me where I lived.
That's the community I grew up in.
As happened in every city across this nation
in the sixties, seventies,
there was something called urban,
what they call renewal, what I call urban removal.
Yeah, I love that.
Yeah, when they want to talk about Black folks,
right, instead of saying, "Black folks live over here.
"That's the urban area." Right?
"That's urban music."
Just call things as they are.
- To whites, the words urban renewal
have a promising, hopeful sound.
But to Blacks, they mean move out.
In a block like this, as many as a thousand men,
women, and children have been forced out
in the name of some progress yet to come.
- So urban renewal was coming through telling you all,
"Those houses that you're living in here,
"we have a better use" as they say,
"a greater use for this land."
And they tell you,
"We're gonna renew your community,
"and this is gonna be better then you left it."
They moved us out of our houses for the "greater good".
We were dislocated from our home.
And when I tell you there's still a big space
at 1415 North Greenwood,
nothing was ever built there, but they told us we had to go.
And then you saw the decline of Greenwood
as you saw folks moved out of their homes.
- The reason and the causes of this economic downturn
was the construction of the Crosstown Expressway
that cut through the heart of Greenwood.
In fact, they took the heart out.
Urban renewal and this major highway construction
really took out the-- most of the entrepreneurial,
uh, businesses that were there.
- Just this area's changed a lot with the, uh--
uh, Crosstown coming through.
Hasn't a lot of the business moved out?
- That's correct.
- What happened in Tulsa
happened all over the United States.
Highways were located right through the heart
of communities of color.
- I started photographing back in 1969
here at North Tulsa, the Greenwood area.
And what I saw in the Greenwood area was that
there were a lot of businesses that were closing up.
One of those photographs that I took on Greenwood,
he was a tall gentle, and erect proud Black man,
I call it Baltimore Barbershop that I took in 1970.
He went to the window and started
looking out the window, and what he saw was
bulldozers tearing down buildings in front of him.
And I asked him what he thought about that,
and he said, "Well, I think I'm gonna be next."
So I took his photograph
and, uh, the next day I came back,
sure enough, his business was gone
and so was he.
Most of the businesses in that area were boarded up,
and all that remained was a [indistinct]
of Black Wall Street.
It was no longer Black Wall Street,
it was a ghost town.
♪♪
- Oh man, I tell ya...
- We owned a skating rink there.
During the riot it got burned down,
our home got burned down.
We lost all of this-- our property, our home.
- Every church, our schoolhouses was blown up.
People were killed, and you go in
and see the people mangled.
And then some people you never heard of anymore of,
you don't know where they-- whether they were killed,
whether they'd just left town.
- On the morning of June 1st, after the massacres,
the National Guard and some police
and maybe some civilians began rounding up
all of the African-American population in Greenwood
that they-that they could.
There were between five and seven thousand people detained.
And the reason given for that was that
it was for their own protection,
that they were gonna be put some place safe.
Everybody who was still in custody
was moved to the fairgrounds east of Greenwood.
They set up cots in a kitchen,
they dug latrines.
The people who stayed there were expected to work.
The women would prepare the meals,
the men were sent out to work cleaning up Greenwood.
- Folks in these internment camps
had to have a green card.
- I don't know how they got these little cards
printed so fast,
but everybody had a little I.D. card,
school children and all, told what you did,
and you had to have that little I.D.
wherever you went.
- And to get out of these internment centers,
they needed to be countersigned by a white person.
Essentially, a white person would vouch for them
and get them out of these internment centers.
The theory at-- by the authorities
was that this was done to protect people
from physical harm in a context of
this chaotic situation.
There wasn't a lot of justification that was needed
because who has power and who doesn't?
- The people who had homes to go to went to those homes.
Some people left town.
The Red Cross was operating out of
Booker T. Washington High School,
and the Red Cross would buy them a train ticket
if they wanted to leave town.
- I found that the high school building
was still standing.
I saw a big white streamer with a red cross on it.
I felt pangs of joy, for this meant to me
that I was getting in close touch with friends again.
I breathed a prayer of thanks.
- The Red Cross began obtaining these tents
that people could live in.
- Many Black families spent days, weeks, months
living in tent cities on the charred earth.
- Everything they had was gone, and they were expected
to immediately just go about their lives
like nothing had happened.
Y-You have to think the trauma was-was terrible.
- When we reaching the house, I saw my piano
and all my elegant furniture piled in the street.
My safe had been broken open, all my money stolen,
all my silverware, cut glass,
all my family clothing,
and everything of value had been removed,
even my family Bible.
Our car was stolen
and most of my large rugs were taken.
I lost seventeen houses that paid me an average
of over $425 per month.
♪♪
- Riot is a term of art, really.
These events throughout the nation
during this period were called "Race Riots".
And it's significant in part because insurance polices,
for example, during that period
often had exclusionary clauses.
And so if your damage was occasioned by riot
or civil unrest,
the insurance company didn't have to pay.
One of the things we know is that
a number of people in the mob
that destroyed the Greenwood community
were deputized by local law enforcement officers;
much of that was done by a wink and a nod.
Those people knew that they were not going to be
impeded by law enforcement.
The massacre was referred to, in some documents,
as a Negro uprising, which suggests that
the Black community's to blame.
- In the immediate aftermath there was a grand jury,
and it indicted, I think it's 88 people.
Some of whom were white, most of whom were Black.
- First was the indictment of J.B. Stradford
who owned a hotel and was a lawyer.
A.J. Smitherman was the editor and publisher of
"The Tulsa Star",
which is the leading Black newspaper.
He, along with a number of other Black men
was indicted for inciting a riot.
- Let the blame for this Negro uprising
lie right where it belongs: on those armed Negroes
and their followers who started this trouble
and who instigated it.
And any persons who seeks to put half the blame
on the white people are wrong.
- It is one of the big ironies of-of all of this
that the two people who are most often seen
at the center of it are two people
that we know very, very little about.
Sarah Page left the day after the massacre.
She left town and never came back
as far as we know.
Dick Rowland, it appears, remained in jail
through the summer and then was released.
In September, the county attorney said
he'd received a letter from Sarah Page
asking not to press charges.
People had really lost interest in it.
- No white person's ever held accountable
for the some 100 to 300 deaths that we believe occurred, uh,
during the massacre.
- I've never spoken to a white Tulsan
who would admit to be a member of the mob
during the riot.
And one reason is simply this:
there's no statute of limitations on murder.
These homicides have now entered the historic realm,
they can no longer be prosecuted,
there's no one left to prosecute.
- The massacre destroyed the superstructure,
but miraculously the basement survived.
This is a picture of the basement.
So this picture was taken August 1921,
and the massacre happened May 31st through June 1st.
People came and hid in our basement
during the massacre.
You see ashes above every window piece
except the back window.
So this is the space where that window frame
that we saw that had no ash on top of it,
it's still right there.
If you can imagine people being in this room
not knowing if the fire would somehow come through
or come from above,
but they managed to survive in this space.
When I learn about bodies being dumped in mass graves
and not ever receiving a proper burial,
that touched me as a pastor on a visceral level.
♪♪
As a pastor, when you bury somebody
it's more than just giving a eulogy.
When we do what we call the committal,
which is that ashes to ashes, that dust to dust
over their bodies,
that is our way of spiritually releasing them
to go wherever they're going.
And to deny that to the people that were dumped or killed
during the race massacre is evil!
It shows you that at that time period
people didn't even care about the souls of Black folks,
let alone their bodies.
I believe there is no expiration date on morality,
and if it was wrong in 1921
and that it has not been repaired for today,
then we ought to do something about it.
- One of the most basic, I think, responsibilities
that a city has to the residents who live there
is if you're murdered, we'll do everything we can
to try to find out what happened to you,
to find your remains for your family,
and to render justice for you and your family.
- It makes me feel, um,
kind of like Charlie Brown said, "good grief."
Because it's good that we unveiled the story,
but it's grief to us as we unveil it.
Tell it right.
They took those planes from that oil field
and they planned an aerial attack,
and that's what makes it different
from all the other race riots in America.
Tell it right.
They bombed us, they bombed us.
♪♪
- There's something very spiritual
about this work.
And anybody who thinks that this sacred ground
that we find ourselves on,
this crime scene that we find ourselves on
is not gonna speak, doesn't have the ears to hear.
♪♪
- Kavin Ross talks about the redbirds.
He says that they are the spirits of our ancestors.
Monday morning, I went out to my garden,
and as I stepped on my back porch,
I saw a whole bunch of redbirds, and they were looking at me.
And I ran in here to get my phone,
"Kavin, I gotta tell you the story of what happened
"with the redbirds."
He said, "Girly, come"-- he says girly.
"Girly, come get your butt down here to the cemetery."
Well, I knew something huge is gonna happen from that,
and it did.
♪♪
- I'm here to report an update.
I can confirm that we have identified, um,
a large hole that had been excavated
and into which several individuals,
um, have been placed.
This constitutes a mass grave.
- Tonight scientists believe they have found
evidence of a mass grave in Oklahoma.
- More than a year after work had started
at Oaklawn Cemetery, the team found human remains.
- Today is a significant moment in the history of our city
in trying to do right by the victims of this event.
- When I heard that they found twelve bodies,
I said, "Finally! Finally!"
It's no longer folklore, it's no longer a rumor,
it's true.
And that's going just to be
the beginning of justice.
- People in this community who've been saying
that bodies were dumped in mass graves,
their stories have now been vindicated.
Gets us one step closer to giving their families
the opportunities to have the truth be known
and actually give them a proper burial.
- This is all part of a-a mission
to get back what was lost.
We've lost a lot of history, we've lost a lot of testimony,
we've lost a lot of known heritage
that could have been passed down
because it wasn't safe to talk about for so long.
- Nobody said nothing until now.
We're just now talking about it.
- Growing up, old folks have talked,
and they actually kind of hid a lot of stuff from us.
- Staying quiet was one of those ways
of protecting yourself.
It's kind of in the back of your mind,
wondering could this happen again?
What can I do to prevent this from happening again
for my children?
- That is another part of trauma,
the silence that it creates.
And while people were murdered
and we need to acknowledge that and we need to find them,
we also need to talk about how they lived.
We need to talk about what they built,
we need to talk about what's left behind
and tell that story,
because that story lasts for a hundred years,
the massacre was two days.
- Hut, hut. Come on, boy.
Hut, hut, hut.
Hut.
People say, "Why don't you leave here?"
Because the memory of something
that I will never see anywhere else is still here.
And these pages contain all of the photographs
of my ancestors who lived on Greenwood.
The memory, we're connected to our memories.
Olivia Hooker, who was a survivor,
was a really beautiful soul.
- At that night of the massacre, Olivia Hooker,
who was a six-year-old girl, saw her own home ripped apart.
White folks came into her house,
destroyed her piano with a hatchet,
and when they left, she went over there
and they struck the keyboard, and there was still sound
coming out of that piano.
That's who Greenwood is.
You might destroy the outside of me,
you might shoot me, you might burn me,
you're not gonna destroy my soul.
We still got a song to sing.
♪♪
- We have these cycles of Greenwood being built,
destroyed, rebuilt.
If you look at it all together
in a 100 year journey...
it's a consistent story of resilience.
- We are so close to getting over this madness.
In time, we can go on to be a great city
that we are destined to be.
- There's a resilience that our people have.
The people here in Tulsa have kept the story alive.
We know with our people, it's never the end.
♪♪
- My dreams of what Greenwood should look like,
it should look like us.
- My hope for Greenwood is that she can become
back what she used to be.
- I wish Greenwood would be healed.
A lot of stuff was buried deep.
- My dream is to have a replicate
of what we had in 1921
with all the Black businesses,
everybody supporting each other.
- We are the youngest business owners on Greenwood.
I would like to see young people, you know,
rebuilding Black Wall Street.
- Let there be some type of closure
and some type of life back here that we're enjoying.
- We need to reclaim what was ours
from the beginning.
Our people built Black Wall Street
by hard work and dedication,
we did it one time, we can do it again.
- Greenwood can be that again,
we can be all that we wanna be.