[Decades after a chilling racist massacre, Tulsa’s Greenwood
district was bulldozed for I-244 – but a new plan aims to reverse
its punishing effects]
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A HIGHWAY DESTROYED TULSA’S THRIVING BLACK WALL STREET – NOW
THERE’S HOPE IT COULD COME BACK  
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Geoff Dembicki
July 18, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Decades after a chilling racist massacre, Tulsa’s Greenwood
district was bulldozed for I-244 – but a new plan aims to reverse
its punishing effects _

The historic Vernon African Methodist Church is pictured next to
interstate 244 in Tulsa in this 2021 picture., Sue Ogrocki, AP

 

Twenty-five years before Don Shaw was born in Greenwood, a white mob
invaded the Tulsa neighborhood and killed more than 300 people. Much
of the tight-knit community was burned to the ground, including his
grandfather’s pharmacy.

But when Shaw was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, few people wanted
to talk about the massacre – perhaps in part because much of the
damage was no longer visible.

He remembers walking the streets of Greenwood in his youth and seeing
Black-owned businesses up and down its blocks: a hotel, dry cleaner,
soul food restaurants, churches, a ballroom, dentists, pharmacies,
hardware store, photo studio, the 750-seat Dreamland Theatre. It was
an oasis of Black economic self-sufficiency, inside an Oklahoma
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industry wealth where the Klu Klux Klan once publicly operated.
But the area that has become known across the US as “Black Wall
Street” didn’t last. In the early 1970s, Oklahoma planners plowed
a new eight-lane interstate highway called I-244 right through the
heart of Greenwood. The Dreamland Theatre – along with hundreds of
homes and businesses – was bulldozed and covered in concrete.
Greenwood’s commercial area shrank from dozens of blocks to just
one.

After that, the neighborhood began emptying out. That was when the
parties stopped.

“The atmosphere changed,” Shaw said. “The feeling of destruction
set in.”

The Biden administration now says it wants to repair that history.
Earlier this year, it announced
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$185m in grants to groups across the country aiming to unravel the
long legacy [[link removed]] of Black,
brown and low-income areas being the sacrifice zones for urban
highways.

Tulsa could be a national model of what that actually looks like. A
grant worth $1.6m was awarded
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North Peoria Church of Christ so it can study the feasibility of
removing the section of I-244 slicing through Greenwood. Its
application provided “a compelling depiction of how a historic Black
neighborhood in Tulsa suffered the punishing effects of urban
renewal”, noted
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the US Department of Transportation.

In that application, Black leaders also proposed an innovative
solution for what comes next: a land trust held by the community that
could prevent the valuable new real estate from being scooped up by
gentrifying developers, while compensating families who were displaced
by the highway.

“Greenwood doesn’t have to be a place where people just come to
remember the past,” said Oklahoma state representative Regina
Goodwin, who helped apply for the grant. Her great grandfather was a
newspaper manager who survived the 1921 massacre and her grandfather
later owned the Oklahoma Eagle, which still operates in Greenwood. She
wants to help write her neighborhood’s next act.

“If done right, removing the freeway could revitalize the
community,” she said. “It can be a place of moving forward and
advancing for generations to come. That would be a terrific tribute to
our ancestors.”

The events of 31 May and 1 June 1921 – when Ku Klux Klan leaders,
the Tulsa police department, the Oklahoma national guard and armed
white locals turned Greenwood into
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a smoldering war zone – represent some of the worst racist violence
ever committed in the US. But there is a common misperception that
Greenwood never recovered.

“It actually came back bigger and better than ever,” said Hannibal
B Johnson, a Tulsa-based attorney and author of the book Black Wall
Street 100
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“It actually came back bigger and better than ever,” said Hannibal
B Johnson, a Tulsa-based attorney and author of the book Black Wall
Street 100
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By December 1921, more than half of the homes that were destroyed had
been rebuilt, despite city leaders rewriting zoning and fire codes
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to prevent the Black neighborhood from surviving. (Some Greenwood
locals worked on their homes at night to avoid policemen.) When I-244
came decades later, resistance to the highway was undermined by a lack
of Black representation in city government.
“This was a largely powerless community,” Johnson said.

The physical damage to the neighborhood was irreversible.

During a recent stroll through Greenwood, Terry Baccus, who gives
tours of the area [[link removed]],
stopped to point out a haunting reminder of the human losses. On the
side of the highway, a large photograph shows
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Baltimore Barbershop owner David Gardner peering out his window as
I-244 was being constructed. “The next day the building was gone,
and nobody has seen Mr Gardner since,” said Baccus.

The highway forced
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more than 1,000 people to relocate, while shuttering or displacing
dozens of businesses. As Greenwood’s economic opportunities shrank,
residents lost jobs. There was less capital available to repair homes
and sidewalks. Houses were abandoned and then stripped for copper
wires and lead pipes. “The decline was rapid,” Johnson said.

The current effort to reverse that decline in some ways began a decade
ago. That was when a Georgetown University student named Cody Brandt
wrote his undergraduate thesis about how Tulsa could benefit
economically from removing the highway. He later discussed the idea
with Rep. Goodwin, who saw it as a way to rebuild Greenwood.

“We brought in folks from across the nation that showed us that it
was absolutely possible,” Goodwin later explained
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to the Tulsa World. She and Brandt applied for a “Reconnecting
Communities”
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grant from the Biden administration along with the North Peoria Church
of Christ, beating out a competing proposal
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from the Oklahoma transport department, which wanted to keep the
highway but make it more aesthetically pleasing.

They’ll be studying the actual logistics of taking out I-244 from
Greenwood. One model they’ll consider is Rochester, New York, which
shut down
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part of a sunken six-lane freeway circling downtown and filled it with
mud from Lake Ontario. It’s now a road lined with trees and new
apartment buildings.

Doing something similar in Tulsa would open up about 30 acres of new
land. Advocates of the plan want to restore Greenwood’s historic
street plan. This could “provide the opportunity for the
construction of thousands of new residential units and over hundreds
of thousands of square feet of commercial space for new businesses”,
according to
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a group called Congress for the New Urbanism in a report about US
freeway removal projects.

Goodwin wants the area zoned in ways that prioritize new affordable
housing and small local businesses. She hopes that with cars actually
entering the neighborhood, rather than blasting over it on a highway,
there will be more visitors with money to spend. Families that own
local small businesses “could thrive and be self-sustaining”. All
that new economic activity could bring $10m a year to the city, county
and state through property and sales taxes, she and other advocates
estimate
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Not everyone shares their optimism. Freeman Culver is all for
revitalizing the area. But as president of the Greenwood Chamber of
Commerce
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he has concerns about who actually benefits. A recent development boom
in and adjacent to Greenwood has resulted in $42m
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in city tax incentives and loans mostly going to white-owned
businesses. “Gentrification has already begun,” Culver said. “If
we’re not careful, the new growth will consume the history that’s
here.”

The Rev Warren Blakney of the North Peoria Church of Christ has given
thought to that as well. He’s pushing for any land reclaimed by
highway removal to be put into a community land trust, which can buy
up newly available properties and sell to people who share the goals
of keeping this historic Black community alive.

One thing that trust might do is offer opportunities for families
originally displaced by I-244 to obtain new homes in the area, and
“that could allow for rent to own and other types of construction
not typically undertaken in private for-profit development”,
explains
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the Congress for New Urbanism. In this future Greenwood, Blakney said:
“Some of the foundational pieces of systemic racism are beginning to
fall down.”

Blakney feels a personal moral urgency to make it happen. One of the
last living survivors of the 1921 massacre was a member in his church.
She died years ago, but at one point she confided in Blakney about the
experience. “She talked to me as her pastor about what they went
through, businesses which she saw burning, folks hiding, children
running, parents killed before their eyes – she lived through all
that,” Blakney said. “So I’m working for her, for her children,
for her grandchildren.”

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* Tulsa Oklahoma; Greenwood;
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