TULSA, Okla. — On a recent Sunday, Ernestine Alpha Gibbs returned to Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Not her body. She had left this Earth 18 years ago, at age 100. But on this day, three generations of her family brought Ernestine’s keepsakes back to this place that meant so much to her — a place that was, like their matriarch, a survivor of a long-ago atrocity.
After her community was leveled by white rioters in 1921 — after the gunfire, the arson, the pillaging — the high school sophomore temporarily fled Tulsa with her family. “I thought I would never, ever, ever come back,” she said in a 1994 home video.
But she did, and somehow she found a happy ending.
“Even though the riot took away a lot, we still graduated,” she said, a smile spreading across her face.
Not that Black Tulsa ever really recovered from the devastation that took place 100 years ago, when nearly every structure in Greenwood, the fabled Black Wall Street, was flattened — aside from Vernon AME Church.
The Tulsa Race Massacre is just one of the starkest examples of how Black wealth has been sapped by racism, forcing generation after generation to start from scratch.
“Greenwood proved that if you had assets, you could accumulate wealth,” said Jim Goodwin, publisher of the Oklahoma Eagle, a local Black newspaper established in Tulsa a year after the massacre. “It disproved the whole idea that racial superiority was a fact of life.”
Prior to the massacre, only a couple of generations removed from slavery, unfettered Black prosperity in America was urban legend. But Tulsa’s Greenwood district was far from a myth.
On Black Wall Street, many Black Tulsans spent the money they earned working for white people, in a booming city within a city. Black-owned grocery stores, soda fountains, cafes, barbershops, music venues, cigar and billiard parlors — Greenwood had it.
Tensions between Tulsa’s Black and white populations inflamed when, on May 31, 1921, the white-owned Tulsa Tribune published a sensationalized report describing an alleged assault on Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white girl working as an elevator operator, by Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoeshine.
“Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” read the Tribune’s headline.
Rowland was arrested. A white mob gathered outside of the jail. Word that some in the mob intended to kidnap and lynch Rowland made it to Greenwood, where two dozen Black men had armed themselves and headed to the jail to help the sheriff protect the prisoner.
Some white Tulsans took the sight of angry, armed Black men as evidence of an imminent Black uprising. Over 18 hours, between May 31 and June 1, whites vastly outnumbering the Black militia carried out a scorched-earth campaign against Greenwood. More than 35 blocks were leveled.
