Black journalist chronicles a century of trauma, resistance

REVIEW: BUILT FROM THE FIRE: THE EPIC STORY OF TULSA’S GREENWOOD DISTRICT, AMERICA’S BLACK WALL STREET by Victor Luckerson

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1931 destroyed the lives of an untold number of Black citizens, nearly all of their homes and businesses, along with the hard-earned wealth of the area known as Black Wall Street. Wave after wave of real estate speculators and gentrifiers have been eager to scavenge the carcass — but Greenwood has refused to disappear. Its citizens fought back: not only on the night of the massacre with military experience earned during World War I, but also in the Black press. 

Combining historic newspaper reports, legislation, and scholarship with his own interviews, journalist Victor Luckerson traces the long-term impacts of the massacre and the political and intellectual responses, including those of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Al Sharpton, and Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Luckerson threads the needle from the white mob that razed Greenwood, the white land-grabbers soliciting homeowners on the ashes of Black Wall Street, the lack of equitable support from the GI Bill after World War II, the top-down urban renewal efforts of the 1970s, to today’s gentrification that threatens — once again — Greenwood as a living community. Each time, that community members have rallied to defend what is theirs from those who would steal it, con them, or wipe it off the map. 

And Luckerson brings the receipts, with maps and photos from 1931 to the present. He indicts the Oklahoma National Guard, the Tulsa Police Department, insurance companies, the Tulsa Urban Renewal Authority, and President Joe Biden, “the first sitting president to walk the streets of Greenwood” but who did not use “the word reparations” in his speech.

He brings to life O.W. and Emma Gurley, Greenwood’s first entrepreneurs; J.H. Goodwin, who fled Mississippi and built several businesses; Loula Cotton Williams, whose sweet shop evolved into the landmark Dreamland Theatre and who lost her mental and physical health along with her movie house in the riot; Dr. A.C. Jackson, Greenwood’s only doctor, who was shot in cold blood by white racists; and Mabel Bonner Little, who founded the city’s first beauty parlor and who, in 1971, was arrested during a sit-in for the independent Carver Freedom School.

Luckerson also profiles the Black journalists who went before him and who were central to Greenwood’s rebirth. Theodore Baughman founded the Oklahoma Eagle literally from the ashes of the Tulsa Star. E.L. “Ed” Goodwin, Sr. parlayed his business and gambling profits to take over the paper for political reasons but fell in love with crusading journalism, publishing a crucial investigative series in 1941 that forced Douglas Aircraft Company to end its racist hiring practices. His sons took over the paper: Robert K. Goodwin, followed by Ed, Jr. and James O. Goodwin, the current publisher, still covering Greenwood’s local news and concerns.

Luckerson, whose own work on the Rosewood Massacre appeared in Time in 2020, highlights the disdain with which an unbylined Time Magazine reporter in 1942 framed members of the Negro Newpaper Publishers Association: “full of fried chicken and Pepsi-Cola….still wrought up about the issue of their press and their race.” The piece’s condescending tone was no surprise. Black journalists rarely saw their concerns taken seriously by white government leaders or their white media peers, who helped shape national public opinion…. ‘If we hadn’t had Black newspapers, somebody to raise a little hell about what’s taken place, we would have probably still been in slavery,’ Ed [Goodwin, Sr.] argued later.”

He also details the pioneering work of Mary Jones Parrish, a survivor who collected her neighbors’ stories in Events of the Tulsa Disaster. Luckerson writes that Parrish’s reporting “placed her in the tradition of other pioneering Black female journalists, including Ida B. Wells, who exposed the scourge of lynching, and Mary Church Terrell, who criticized the convict-lease system in the Deep South.” The white press ignored the book, which “would become a crucial primary source in later decades as the massacre became more widely remembered and analyzed.”

Greenwood, like many other Black American enclaves, struggled economically. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, The Tulsa Urban Renewal Authority saw fit to run an expressway through the neighborhood, including the Eagle’s building. Determined to stay put amid what James Baldwin called “Negro removal,” the Eagle bought a building across the street, only to be displaced again for a baseball field. In 1970, Mable Bonner Little, the owner of Greenwood’s first beauty parlor, pointed to the impact the 1931 massacre had in creating the very “slum” conditions city officials were so eager to raze: “You destroyed everything we had. I was here in it, and the people are suffering now more than they did then.” The Eagle says it is the last original Greenwood business in the ”downtown footprint.”

Today’s residents continue their resistance. State Rep. Regina Goodwin holds the line on legislation (mirroring Georgia’s) against teaching “divisive” (code for Black) topics. Luckerson writes that, when then-President Donald Trump had scheduled a 2020 rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth — one month after the murder of George Floyd — residents decided to cover the Black Wall Street Memorial to prevent its use as a campaign prop. Tyrance Billingsley, “one of the young men who physically cast the tarp over the cool Black marble of the memorial [said]: ‘It felt kind of invigorating, taking a stand against the president of the United States like that…and protecting my local history.’” Greenwood forced Trump’s hand and the rally was moved.

In his chronicle of Greenwood’s survivors and descendants, and of the pioneering journalists who bore witness to the massacre’s multigenerational impacts, Luckerson brings a new urgency to current discussions about racial equity, Black wealth, and the crucial role that local journalism plays in holding the powerful accountable.

Hardback $30, Penguin Random House. Also available in e-book and audiobook formats.