Black Wall Street Tulsa - 1830 to 1921
There were plenty of places to eat including late night sandwich shops and barbecue joints to Doc's Beanery and Hamburger Kelly's place. Lilly Johnson's Liberty Cafe, recalled Mabel Little, who owned a beauty shop in Greenwood at the time of the riot, served home-cooked meals at all hours, while at the nearby Little Cafe, "people lined up waiting for their specialty -- chicken or smothered steak with rice and brown gravy." A Coca-Cola, a sarsaparilla, or a soda could be bought at Rolly and Ada Huff's confectionery on Archer between Detroit and Cincinnati. Although both the nation and Oklahoma were nominally dry, there were also places where a man or a woman could purchase a shot of bootleg whiskey or a milky-colored glass of Choctaw beer.10
For a community of its size, the Greenwood business district could boast of a number of impressive commercial structures. John and Loula Williams, who owned the three-story Williams Building at the northwest corner of Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street, also operated the seven-hundred-fifty seat Dreamland Theater, that offered live musical and theatrical revues as well as silent movies accompanied by a piano player. Across the street from the Dreamland sat the white-owned Dixie Theater with seating for one-thousand, which made it the second largest theater in town. In nearby buildings were the offices of nearly all of Tulsa's black lawyers, realtors, and other professionals. Most impressively, there were fifteen African American physicians in Tulsa at the time of the riot, including Dr. A.C. Jackson, who had been described by one of the Mayo brothers as the "most able Negro surgeon in America".11
The overall intellectual life of Greenwood was, for a community of its size, quite striking. There was not one black newspaper but two - the Tulsa Star and the Oklahoma Sun. African Americans were discouraged from utilizing the new Carnegie library downtown, but a smaller, all-black branch library had been opened on Archer Street. Nationally recognized African American leaders, such as W.E.B. DuBois, had lectured in Tulsa before the riot. Moreover, Greenwood was also home to a local business league, various fraternal orders, a Y.M.C.A. branch, and a number of women's clubs, the last of which were often led by the more than thirty teachers who taught in the city's separate -- and, as far as facilities were concerned, decidedly unequal -- African American public schools.
The political issues of the day also attracted considerable interest. The Tulsa Star, in particular, not only provided extensive coverage of national, state, and local political campaigns and election results, but also devoted significant column space for recording the activities of the local all-black Democratic and Republican clubs. Moreover, the Star also paid attention to a number of quasi-political movements as well, including Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, different back-to-Africa movements, and various nationalist organizations. One such group, the African Blood Brotherhood, later claimed to have had a chapter in Greenwood prior to the riot.12
When it came to religious activity, however, there was no question at all where Tulsa's African American community stood. Church membership in Tulsa ran high. On a per capita basis, there were more churches in black Tulsa than there were in the city's white community as well as a number of Bible study groups, Christian youth organizations, and chapters of national religious societies. All told, there were more than a dozen African American churches in Tulsa at the time of the riot, including First Baptist, Vernon A.M.E., Brown's Chapel, Morning Star, Bethel Seventh Day Adventist, and Paradise Baptist, as well as Church of God, Nazarene, and Church of God in Christ congregations. Most impressive from an architectural standpoint, perhaps, was the beautiful, brand new home of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, which was dedicated on April 10, 1921 -- less than eight weeks before the riot.13
The new Mount Zion Baptist Church building (constructed of brick and mortar) also was a tangible symbol, of the fact that African Americans had also shared, to some degree, in Tulsa's great economic boom. While modest in comparison with the fortunes being amassed by the city's white millionaires, Greenwood was home to some highly successful business entrepreneurs. O.W. Gurley, a black real estate developer and the owner of the Gurley Hotel, reportedly suffered some $65,000 in losses during the riot. Even more impressive was the business resume of J.B. Stradford, whose assets were said to be nearly twice as large. Stradford, a highly successful owner of rental property, had borrowed $20,000 in order to construct his own hotel. Opened on June 1, 1918, the Stradford Hotel, a modern fifty-four room structure, instantly became not only one of the true jewels of Greenwood Avenue, but was also one of the largest black-owned businesses in Oklahoma.14
One of the Mann Grocery stores of the Greenwood district (Courtesy Greenwood Cultural Center).
Most of the black-owned businesses in Tulsa were, of course, much more modest affairs. Scattered about the district were numerous small stores, from two-seater barber shops to family-run grocery stores, that helped to make pre-riot Greenwood, on a per capita basis, one of the most business-laden African American communities in the country. Grit, hard work, and determination were the main reasons for this success, as were the entrepreneurial skills that were imported to Tulsa from smaller communities across Oklahoma.
There were other reasons as well. Tulsa's booming economy was a major factor, as was the fact that, on the whole, Greenwood was not only the place where black Tulsans chose to shop, but was also practically the only place that they could. Hemmed in by the city's residential segregation ordinance, African Americans were generally barred from patronizing white-owned stores downtown -- or ran the risk of insult, or worse, if they tried. While many black Tulsans made a conscious decision to patronize African American merchants, the fact of the matter was that they had few others places to go.15
There was no dearth of African American consumers. Despite the growing fame of its commercial district, the vast majority of Greenwood's adults were neither businessmen nor businesswomen, but worked long hours, under trying conditions, for white employers. Largely barred from employment in both the oil industry and from most of Tulsa's manufacturing facilities, these men and women toiled at difficult, often dirty, and generally menial jobs -- the kinds that most whites considered beneath them--as janitors and ditch-diggers, dishwashers and maids, porters and day laborers, domestics and service workers. Unsung and largely forgotten, it was, nevertheless, their paychecks that built Greenwood, and their hard work that helped to build Tulsa.16
Equally forgotten perhaps, are the housing conditions that these men and women returned to at the end of the day. Although Greenwood contained some beautiful, modern homes -- particularly those of the doctors, business owners, and educators who lived in the fashionable 500 block of North Detroit Avenue along the shoulder of Standpipe Hill -- most African Americans in pre-riot Tulsa lived in far more meager circumstances. According to a study conducted by the American Association of Social Workers of living conditions in black Tulsa shortly before the riot, some "95 percent of the Negro residents in the black belt lived in poorly constructed frame houses, without conveniences, and on streets which were unpaved and on which the drainage was all surface".17
Black Wall Street Tulsa - 1830 to 1921 Continued....
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