An Economic Story
At MDC, our work in any community begins with “reading reality truthfully” – using history and data as a starting point for charting a bold course forward. Accordingly, we believe the first step in building a racially equitable South is taking an honest look back at how we got where we are. Our work is enriched by the stories that individuals and communities share with us, and there is a wealth of stories to be told. The historical and experiential distance between enslavement, colonization, Emancipation, Jim Crow and the web of inequities we are confronted with today are not often captured in miles; in the distance between Huntsville, Alabama and Tulsa, Oklahoma – approximately 615 miles – a story of economic subjugation, exclusion, theft and devastation emerges.
On December 25, 1868, Ottawa W. (O.W.) Gurley was born in Huntsville, Alabama. The son of formerly enslaved parents, Gurley grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas where he was largely self-educated. “Gurley married his childhood sweetheart, Emma, became a teacher, and then took a relatively cushy job with the U.S. Postal service but he dreamed of a better life in America.” At 25 years old, Gurley made his way to Perry, Oklahoma to participate in the Land Run of 1893. The chaos of the event meant that most participants experienced a mixture of hardship and disappointment before it even began – the demand was far greater than the available land. Only a relatively small number of participants were able to actually secure and hold land, and even then, their struggles continued. “Towns were over-built; farmers went broke on land unsuitable for farming. Other similar problems assured that many claims were abandoned by the end of the year.” Gurley was successful in staking a claim.
He tried his hand at politics and later became principal of the town’s school. He found economic success in the general store that he opened and operated for ten years. “By the turn of the century, Gurley and his fellow homesteaders heard tales of giant oil fields in the nearby boomtown of Tulsa.” In 1905, Gurley sold his store and land in Perry and moved to Tulsa, already home to a concentration of affluent Black residents. Gurley purchased 40 acres of land and began to map out a city for other “upwardly mobile” Black folks looking for opportunities. He opened a grocery store and a boarding house and subdivided his land into residential and commercial lots.
Gurley and J.B. Stradford, another Black entrepreneur, worked together to build up the area that they eventually named Greenwood, after a town in Mississippi. The town became a refuge, and the name held a special significance for Black folks fleeing the harsh oppression of Mississippi. “Greenwood was perceived as a place to escape oppression – economic, social, political oppression – in the Deep South.” The town was special, but it wasn’t immune to the violence of white supremacy.
For decades, the full story of what happened in Tulsa on June 1, 1921, was willfully buried in history. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 killed hundreds of residents and erased years of Black success. “When the community was burned down… over 800 people were admitted to surrounding hospitals, an estimated 10,000 were left homeless, 35 city blocks housing 1,256 residencies were destroyed, and 600 successful businesses were lost, including 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores, two movie theaters, and a hospital.” All in less than 24 hours. Those who survived were rounded up by the National Guard and put in internment camps for many weeks and months. No one was ever prosecuted or punished.
Historically, American capitalism has thrived with an elite few maintaining power and wealth. In Greenwood, a wave of domestic white terrorism caused Black dispossession. The private industry and state did not hesitate to benefit economically from the destruction. Two days after the riot the mayor established the Reconstruction Committee to redesign the Greenwood District for industrial purposes. The Black residents were offered below market value for their property; the government and private industry worked in concert to bring down land prices and maintain the white-dominated power structure.
Despite all the economic damage, neither the survivors nor their families ever received the reparations suggested by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, which had recommended reparations for people who lost property and proposed the establishment of a scholarship fund. Black residents of Tulsa were left with no redress, and their fight continues to the present day.
O.W. Gurley and his wife Emma survived the massacre and were eventually released from the National Guard internment camp. With his land and wealth destroyed and decimated, Gurley left Greenwood and made the journey west to Los Angeles, where he died in 1935. The wealth he accumulated in Greenwood never had an opportunity to expand beyond himself – there was no generational wealth to pass down, no economic opportunities to create a growing community, no fortune to fund philanthropic endeavors. A distance of 615 miles moved Gurley from economic insecurity, to security, to stability and back.
Over a hundred years later, Tulsa’s Black-majority neighborhoods are no longer financial hubs. While Black people comprise about 10% of the Tulsa metropolitan population, Black-owned businesses comprise only 1.25% of the area’s nearly 20,000 businesses. “Without direct connection to sources of capital investment and loans, Tulsa’s Black residents and communities face barriers to creating and expanding businesses, and thus also face barriers to the personal and communal wealth that business ownership can create.”
The Economic Security and Mobility team at MDC is working to close the distance between economic insecurity to economic mobility for individuals, families, and communities in the South. Learn more about their work here.
Reading
“Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921” by Scott Ellsworth
Kamilah A. Pickett is Director of the Race Matters Institute at MDC (RMI). Kamilah leads the social entrepreneurial work of RMI, which offers customized training, technical assistance, coaching, and product development to advance concrete actions in both operations and programming that strengthen an organization’s mission performance. RMI focuses specifically on promoting racial equity in organizational strategies, policies, and practices as a complement to the work of others who focus on racial equity at the individual and interpersonal levels.
