“One hundred years in the neighborhood that refused to be erased,” the cover reads. But the story of Greenwood begins before the Tulsa Massacre, before the white citizens descended upon their innocent neighbors to destroy their homes, their businesses, and take their very lives. The story starts with a dream of a better life, with Southern blacks coming to Oklahoma and working hard and building a vibrant community.
For all the Greenwood community had achieved, and lost, and built again, they still face systemic racism, political powerlessness, a corrupt justice system. The fight is ongoing.
Greenwood’s story is America’s story. A story of the limits of the American Dream, based on color. A story of the struggle for rights guaranteed under the Constitution. A story of strength and endurance and persistence.
My Civics teacher stood in front of our class in spring of 1967 and proclaimed, “There is only one race–the human race.” And yet that summer we watched armed tanks going down Woodward Avenue and helicopters fly overhead, on their way to Detroit.
There is the idea. And there is the reality.
A few years ago I read Scott Ellison’s The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City’s Search for Justice. So, Built From the Fire caught my interest. Luckerson covers the massacre in one chapter, the bulk of the book dedicated to the history of Greenwood before and after. He takes us into the community through the people who built Greenwood and their descendants who stayed to rebuild it. Hearing their stories makes this a particularly emotional read. We respect these people, we care for them, we cry with them.
I became so incensed by what I read. Of course, by the hateful violence of the massacre, but also by the intrenched white supremacy that endures to this day.
I remember hearing about ‘urban renewal,’ but as a girl I didn’t realize it was better understood as “Negro removal,” as James Baldwin is quoted as saying. Here in Detroit they are removing the highway that destroyed black neighborhoods in the 1960s. The highway barrier may be removed, but it can’t undo damage inflicted decades ago.
The Tulsa Massacre was hidden history for decades. Those who survived, and those who heard the stories from survivors, share their stories in these pages. I was extremely moved. And angred. And saddened.
Luckerson is a masterful writer.
I received a free book from the publisher. My review is fair and unbiased.
Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street
by Victor Luckerson
Pub Date May 23, 2023
Random House
ISBN:9780593134375
from the publisher
When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center of black life. But, just seven years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a spark of black independence.
But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt it into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy lived comfortably alongside public storefronts. Prosperity and poverty intermixed, and icons from W.E.B. Du Bois to Muhammad Ali ambled down Greenwood Avenue, alongside maids, doctors, and every occupation in between. Ed grew into a prominent businessman and bought a newspaper called the Oklahoma Eagle to chronicle Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry. He and his wife, Jeanne, raised an ambitious family, and their son Jim, an attorney, embodied their hopes for the Civil Rights Movement in his work. But by the 1970s, urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood, even as Jim and his neighbors tried to hold on to it. Today, while new high-rises and encroaching gentrification risk wiping out Greenwood’s legacy for good, the family newspaper remains, and Ed’s granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists.
In Built from the Fire, journalist Victor Luckerson moves beyond the mythology of Black Wall Street to tell the story of an aspirant black neighborhood that, like so many others, has long been buffeted by racist government policies. Through the eyes of dozens of race massacre survivors and their descendants, Luckerson delivers an honest, moving portrait of this potent national symbol of success and solidarity—and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.
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