Gentrifying Greenwood: Excavating Lost Futures in Tulsa’s Black Wall Street

• In Event: Cultural Geographies of Space and Crime

Abstract

After its destruction in 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Black Wall Street, was subject to several attempts to revive its status as a Black cultural and economic hub. In the 1960s the slowly reemerging district was cut in half by highway overpass, effectively stunting its growth, in the 1990s, Greenwood was host to a short-lived jazz festival, and in 2020 amidst the George Floyd uprisings the city became the focal point of media productions, political spectacles, and an influx of outside capital, which all contributed to an expansive “revitalization” project. Greenwood now stands as a façade, a simulacrum of its former self, marked by new business developments and historical markers throughout the district. Contemporary Black Wall Street thus comes to symbolize a lost future, through the combination of new businesses which draw on the “Black Wall Street” moniker explicitly, educational institutions new and old, and the decaying murals of past revival efforts which together conjure two things: a regrettable past and an unattainable future. Greenwood thus comes to symbolize a lost future of a Black Capitalism, where the racial violence of the past was mitigated or eliminated, and the structural contradictions and deprivations of capitalism never take shape.

Author

• Dylan Sears, Kansas State University