Greenwood Rising

In the early 1900s Black families who came to Tulsa settled north of the Frisco tracks in the Greenwood District, and rigid segregation turned it into a self-contained economy. Greenwood Avenue, Black Wall Street, had hotels, newspapers, theaters and scores of Black-owned businesses. The history center begins with the people who built it, among them O. W. Gurley, J. B. Stradford, the surgeon A. C. Jackson, the lawyer B. C. Franklin, and John and Loula Williams.

On May 31, 1921, the Tulsa Tribune reported that Dick Rowland, a Black shoe shiner, had attacked a white elevator operator, and a lynch mob gathered at the courthouse. Armed Black men, many of them veterans of the First World War, went there to help protect him. Shots were fired. At dawn on June 1 thousands of armed white men poured into Greenwood, looting and burning. A. C. Jackson was shot after he surrendered. More than 1,000 homes and businesses were destroyed, and credible estimates of the dead run from 50 to 300. No white person was ever sent to prison. Greenwood rebuilt, with 242 Black-owned businesses by 1942, before integration and urban renewal emptied it from the 1960s. The City of Tulsa's 1921 Graves Investigation is still identifying victims.

The center, built by the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, opened in 2021. Its four galleries use projections and survivors' recorded words, many from interviews gathered by Eddie Faye Gates. A content warning precedes the massacre gallery, and an emotional exit lets visitors bypass it.