"In the early 20th century, Greenwood was known as the Black Wall Street, home to a prosperous community of African American landowners. Fueled in part by racist resentment of this financial success, white mobs set 35 city blocks aflame and killed 300 people in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
Nearly a century later, Greenwood is experiencing a “reawakening,” poet Quraysh Ali Lansana told Artnet News.
An Oklahoma native, he is helping organize an exhibition about the historic Black Wall Street neighborhood, its destruction, and its rebirth for Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum of Art with Tri-City Collective, the Tulsa-, Oklahoma City-, and Chicago-based collective he cofounded.
“It’s important that the nation remember and commemorate what happened here,” Lansana said. “It was the most thriving Black community in the world for a time. Here in Tulsa, Black folks actually owned the land, owned their homes, owned their businesses, they owned their property—it’s important to highlight the Black excellence and entrepreneurship that thrived here in the face of Jim Crow.”
Read the entire article at artnet news.
