The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2021
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
May 30, 1921. Dick Rowland, a Black teenager, works as a shoeshine in the predominantly white downtown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. On his break, he goes into a nearby office building to use the restroom, and gets on the elevator. Sarah Page, a white teenager, is the elevator operator. What happens next is just an innocent accident, but it sparks the deadliest episode of racial violence in American history. What was the story behind Greenwood, the Tulsa neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street?” And why was it decimated on one horrific night?
Special thanks to Kalenda Eaton, professor of Africana Literature at the University of Oklahoma, and Kendra Field, professor of history at Tufts University and author of Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War.
And for more history around the end of Reconstruction, listen to our episode from November 2, 2020, "Stealing the Presidency."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | History this week, May 30th, 1921. |
| 0:10.0 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:13.0 | In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Dick Rowland is at work, shining shoes at a pool hall downtown. |
| 0:20.0 | Rowland is a black teenager, and this isn't the part of the city where he lives. |
| 0:24.0 | Tulsa at this point is extremely segregated. |
| 0:27.0 | And home for Rowland is in a part of town called Greenwood, north of the train tracks. |
| 0:32.0 | Greenwood is a thriving black neighborhood. |
| 0:35.0 | On Greenwood Avenue, you could find the Stratford Hotel, the largest black owned hotel in the United States, 54 rooms, |
| 0:42.0 | drugstore, barbershop, restaurant, and banquet hall. |
| 0:45.0 | There was the Williams Dreamland Theatre, which featured silent films and live concerts. |
| 0:50.0 | From the Dreamland Theatre and other venues, jazz music would pour into the streets at night, |
| 0:54.0 | providing a soundtrack to what was known as Black Wall Street. |
| 0:59.0 | In Greenwood, people know who Dick Rowland is. |
| 1:03.0 | He's a former star half-back from Tulsa's Booker T. Washington High. |
| 1:07.0 | A sharp dresser, he's spent some of the tips from his shoe-shine job on handmade suits and a diamond ring. |
| 1:13.0 | So people in Greenwood call him diamond dick. |
| 1:16.0 | But downtown, south of the tracks. |
| 1:19.0 | A lot of white people see him as just a black shoe-shine. |
| 1:24.0 | Most of Rowland's customers are white. |
| 1:27.0 | And at the building where he works, all of the restrooms are whites only. |
| 1:31.0 | So he has a standing agreement with the owner of a nearby office building, |
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