Finalist: Staff of The Wall Street Journal

In 1921, a massacre destroyed a thriving segregated community. Today, Black Americans still struggle to recreate that same kind of prosperity.

In the following series, The Wall Street Journal explores the legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre and its economic reverberations, piecing together a story of both resilience and loss.

How the Tulsa Race Massacre tragically rippled across one family in segregated Oklahoma

By Lee Hawkins and Charity L. Scott

Jack Scott, a 33-year-old professional boxer-turned-trainer who lived in Tulsa’s thriving Greenwood neighborhood, would often tell his wife Daisy, “We’re going to be rich one day.”

On May 31, 1921, he found himself outside the county courthouse, one of more than 75 Black men who had gathered to prevent the rumored lynching of a 19-year-old Black man. The next 24 hours would upend his plans and change the trajectory of the Scotts’ lives.

The Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department was holding and protecting Dick Rowland, a shoe shiner, in a jail cell on the top floor of the courthouse, according to Scott Ellsworth, a historian at the University of Michigan, who teaches in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies. The day before, a white male store clerk had accused Mr. Rowland of entering an elevator and assaulting its teenage white operator, Sarah Page.

Even though she rejected that account and refused to press charges, the Tulsa Tribune published an editorial headlined “To Lynch Negro Tonight” in one of its May 31 editions, Prof. Ellsworth said. Talk of a lynching spread through Tulsa and a white mob that swelled to 1,000 gathered outside the courthouse.

Mr. Scott and a cadre of Black World War I veterans and others headed there in response. But their plan to help protect Mr. Rowland was derailed when an elderly white man attempted to wrest away a gun from a tall Black man and it went off, Prof. Ellsworth said.

That was the beginning of what has long been known as the “Tulsa Race Riot,” though in recent years Oklahoma began to officially use the term “massacre” instead. The details of the tragedy and its aftermath are known from court documents, newspaper articles, eyewitness accounts and oral history projects involving generations of Tulsa families, as well as from the work of historians and other experts.

The Black men retreated to Greenwood, the segregated neighborhood on the other side of the railroad tracks that divided the town, after exchanging gunfire with the portion of the mob that pursued them. Some white Tulsans spent the night planning an invasion of the neighborhood. Police deputized hundreds of the white men who had gathered in front of police headquarters. In Greenwood, some residents prepared themselves to defend their homes and lives, while others decided to flee, Prof. Ellsworth said.

Around 5 a.m. on June 1, thousands of armed white civilians and special deputies poured over the train tracks into the district, overrunning the neighborhood. Over the next eight hours, white Tulsans shot and killed residents and looted and burned down 35 square blocks, with uniformed white police officers aiding in the destruction, according to eyewitness accounts. Thousands of people were left homeless, with more than 1,200 homes destroyed. An additional 215 homes were looted but left standing, the American Red Cross reported.

Some 6,000 Black citizens were held in makeshift internment camps before being relocated to the fairgrounds, where some of them were forced to work by the National Guard, cleaning up the rubble left by the mobs, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society. Most of the residents who didn’t flee the city lived in a Red Cross-erected tent city built on Greenwood’s smoldering ashes for at least a year.

The residents did succeed in saving Mr. Rowland’s life. He was indicted on a charge of attempted rape on June 6, 1921, but charges were dropped after Ms. Page refused to cooperate with his prosecution. He moved away and “slipped out of history,” Prof. Ellsworth said, as historians don’t know when and where he died.

The Makings of a Riot

The city of Tulsa is located in the northeast part of Oklahoma, which had been founded in 1907 and was racially segregated by law. Greenwood had its own post office, library, schools, a hospital and several churches. Despite the Jim Crow laws that relegated Black Tulsans to a lower-class status, by 1921 Greenwood had grown into a “prosperous, vibrant” district that thrived through economic collaboration and interdependence, said Prof. Ellsworth, who served as the lead scholar on the 1921 Race Riot Commission. A Tulsa native, he drew on those experiences to write his new book, “The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice,” which delves into the massacre’s contemporary issues and legacy.

The most affluent Blacks were usually the top-tier merchants, many of whom owned modern one- and two-story homes, while a larger class of Black entrepreneurs operated smaller businesses such as cafes and tailor shops. But the lifeblood of the community was the thousands of Blacks who patronized those businesses—the maids, butlers, chauffeurs, dishwashers, cooks and laborers who worked in the white community.

These people, about 85% of Black Greenwood, primarily lived in very modest wooden homes, most of which lacked running water or electricity, Prof. Ellsworth said. But their spending with Greenwood’s Black-owned businesses helped the community thrive. According to a review of the 1921 Tulsa City Directory conducted by the 2001 Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot, Greenwood had 191 businesses by 1921, including doctor’s offices, law practices and two newspapers. It was home to nearly 9,000 Black residents.

Before the massacre, Mr. Scott traveled all over the country as a lightweight boxer. He met Daisy during a trip to Little Rock, Ark., and they married in 1917 and settled in Tulsa. Daisy Scott became a political cartoonist for one of the local Black newspapers, the Tulsa Star. Her work spoke to the will of many Blacks to fight the continuous stream of lynching across the U.S. and Jim Crow laws. She was pregnant with the couple’s second child at the time of the massacre and gave birth that September.

Rebuilding

Within days of the violence, Black Tulsans had already begun the long process of rebuilding Greenwood. Black business owners filed claims for their losses, but they were denied because authorities characterized the incident as a Black uprising. Deeming the event a riot, as city officials did, triggered a commonly used exclusionary clause that prevented payouts and applied to claimants of any race.

The Scotts lost their home, personal belongings and everything associated with the milliner and seamstress business Daisy ran out of their home, said Lea Michelle Cash, their 68-year-old granddaughter. The Scotts went on to have 10 more children, but didn’t tell them about the massacre.

“They never spoke about it,” Ms. Cash said about the elders of her family and the broader Tulsa community. “They kept it quiet, and it disappeared. Generation after generation learned nothing about it.”

Ms. Cash never located any paperwork documenting her family’s losses, but she did find her grandfather’s name on a plaque in Greenwood memorializing unpaid claims, which lists $48,980.50 in Scott family losses. That is equivalent to $739,008 in today’s dollars.

Five days after the massacre, Tulsa County indicted Mr. Scott, along with other men, for traveling to the courthouse “in a violent, boisterous, unlawful and tumultuous manner” and shooting “at and against the peaceable citizens of the City of Tulsa,” according to a copy of the original indictment provided by Ms. Cash.

There was never a trial, and he didn’t serve time in prison. Some of the other men charged, such as Stradford Hotel owner J.B. Stradford, decided to flee. Police chief John Gustafson was indicted and convicted for his mishandling of the massacre, and was removed from office, according to “Black Wall Street,” one of several books on the massacre by lawyer Hannibal Johnson. Mr. Gustafson never served jail time. The charges against Mr. Scott and 53 other Black men were officially dropped in 2007.

“For those men who were indicted, this hung over them like a dark cloud for the rest of their lives,” Prof. Ellsworth said, “because they never knew whether they would get arrested or picked up.” The exoneration “was very meaningful to me, because of the fact that [the charge] was a lie,” Ms. Cash said. “They did not incite the massacre. They were protecting the life of a young man.”

After the massacre, the Scotts rebuilt, with Mr. Scott training and managing boxers. They rented out two homes and owned a small grocery store. Daisy Scott never returned to her editorial cartoons.

The memories still linger in the minds, hearts and bodies of Black families from Greenwood. The financial impact remains an open wound for many. These mental images of burning buildings, bloody corpses, charred remains and people living in tents are part of why so many Tulsans across races weren’t told about the massacre by their families, said New York-based psychoanalyst Lee Jenkins, whose work focuses extensively on racial trauma.

Many managed to rebuild, but the loss of their initial assets meant that they had less wealth to pass to the next generation, which compounded the effects, said Dr. Jenkins.

“If the idea that a Black man and a white woman being together on an elevator and the resistance to Black progress would cause white people to feel justified in destroying an entire neighborhood,” Dr. Jenkins said, “think about the day-to-day challenges they faced in trying to get properly educated, applying for positions and all the ways that they were excluded because of their color. That would have an effect on anybody.”

The men who were indicted didn’t have the benefit of society understanding the effects of post-traumatic stress. It was as though what happened during the massacre “was all their fault, when they hadn’t done anything but be victimized,” Dr. Jenkins said. “But they were able to live in spite of it.”

Ms. Cash’s mother, Altamese Marion Scott-Hudson, born 11 years after the massacre, didn’t learn about the family’s history until she was 66 years old. She had always described her father as an “angry Black man,” which led to “domestic violence in the family,” Ms. Cash recalled. Learning of the massacre gave Ms. Cash a better understanding of her grandfather, she said.

One afternoon in August 1946, two of Daisy Scott’s preteen daughters found her fallen ill. They called a priest from St. Monica, the main Catholic parish in the Greenwood District, who happened to be white. He rushed over before calling another priest, and they offered to take her to the hospital. But when Mr. Scott walked in and saw the two white men, he yelled, “We don’t need your charity,” and ordered them to leave. Later he beat Altamese for calling them, Ms. Cash said.

Mrs. Scott died five days later, at age 48. The cause on the death certificate: “A cerebral hemorrhage due to heat exhaustion.”

“There’s a blame that was put on their father’s head,” Ms. Cash said, because of the domestic violence the children had both witnessed and experienced. Over time, nine of the 11 Scott children moved out of Tulsa and “their association with their father was limited,” Ms. Cash said. By the time Mr. Scott died in 1964, he was estranged from most of his children.

Ms. Cash said her mother spoke of often seeing her father leaf through papers he stored in a trunk when she was a little girl. Whenever she asked what the papers were, he would say, “We’re going to be rich one day.” But he never discussed the documents or the events of 1921.

“Everything went up in smoke. That total of his riches disappeared overnight,” Ms. Cash said. “What did that do to his heart, and any man’s heart that had big dreams?”

Years later, Ms. Cash delved into her grandfather’s estate paperwork and unearthed property records showing that he had acquired land in Tulsa, Centerville, Texas, and El Dorado, Ark. None of the heirs probated his will and therefore they never claimed any of the land, which totaled at least 15 parcels, she said. Ultimately, Ms. Cash said she believes that the Scott children’s estrangement from their father and the resulting breakdown in communication cost them their inheritance.

No white civilians were charged for their involvement in the massacre. Media reports quickly shifted from calls for peace to casting blame on the residents of Greenwood for its destruction. “It has been extremely difficult to ever get any white person to admit that they participated in the riot or even for descendants to admit that fact,” Prof. Ellsworth said.

Tulsa native Eric Celeste, 53, isn’t afraid to discuss his family’s involvement. Last year, his father told him that his great-great uncle, Benjamin Fowler, was among the white rioters.

Mr. Celeste said the news stunned him. He had known for years that a relative on his mother’s side of the family was “at least sympathetic to the KKK [Ku Klux Klan].” But Mr. Fowler was a paternal relative. “It was shocking to me that it came from the side of my family that I always took pride in, that sort of formed my world outlook as being somebody who would be horrified by that,” he said.

Still, he wasn’t as surprised that the family didn’t talk about it. “We’ve always been a ‘Keep your problems buried in your toes and talk about it with your wife or your priest or your therapist’ kind of family,” Mr. Celeste said.

Reparations for the 1921 massacre have become a public topic in Oklahoma on at least three occasions. A majority of the commissioners responsible for the 2001 report on the massacre supported reparations for Greenwood. But the body said it had no formal authority to “determine damages, to establish a remedy, or to order either restitution or reparations.”

The commission’s report and supporting documents detailed the role the National Guard and the Tulsa Police Department played in the invasion of Greenwood. The roughly 135 survivors living at the time, who were in their 80s or older, received no monetary restitution. Then-Gov. Frank Keating initially endorsed some form of reparations, but later said he didn’t believe the survivors would receive compensation because the commission report didn’t demonstrate the state’s culpability.

“The commission recommended that they be given a cash payment,” Prof. Ellsworth recalled. “The state of Oklahoma refused to do that and instead gave them a gold-plated medal.”

More recently, a team led by Tulsa attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons has brought a lawsuit against the City of Tulsa and other defendants on behalf of survivors. The lawsuit seeks the creation of a victims’ compensation fund, among other things.

Mr. Celeste said learning about his family connection made him more open to the idea of reparations for descendants of the massacre survivors. “It’s totally fair for there to be an examination of what can be paid to these people,” he said. “I don’t know how you could over-measure. I don’t know how you could make the bill too high.”

Corrections & Amplifications
Jack Scott’s boxing promo photo is from 1915. An earlier version of the caption incorrectly said it was from 1907. (Corrected on May 29)

Insurers pointed to an exclusionary clause that entailed a lack of liability in the event of a riot or invasion, preventing payouts on many claims

By Jared Council

Loula Williams ran a popular theater and candy store in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Okla., during the 1910s, making her one of the most prominent businesswomen in the neighborhood.

Williams Dreamland Theatre was doing so well that she started two other theaters near Tulsa, according to newspaper accounts and Charles Christopher, her great-grandson. Together, the three formed the Dreamland Theatrical Co.

Ms. Williams bought insurance for her businesses—though like some in the neighborhood, she was only able to patch together partial coverage through several policies. Even that did her no good when white mobs destroyed Williams Dreamland Theatre, along with most of Greenwood, during the city’s race massacre in 1921.

Ms. Williams suffered an estimated $79,164 in losses, according to lawsuits she later filed, equivalent to $1.2 million today. The three insurance companies to which she paid premiums denied her claims.

The massacre took the lives of dozens of Black residents. It also left behind a devastated neighborhood and many property owners struggling to cover their losses. Ms. Williams was one of at least 70 Greenwood property owners who filed insurance claims after the massacre. After many of their claims were denied, Ms. Williams and others sued the insurance companies and later the city of Tulsa, unsuccessfully.

Greenwood property and business owners suffered at least $1.5 million in losses in 1921 dollars, according to a 2001 report from a bipartisan commission appointed by the state to study the event. That’s roughly $22 million in today’s dollars, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figure likely underestimates total losses, as not everyone had full insurance coverage or went to court.

Ultimately, insurance companies fell back on an exclusionary clause that prevented payouts on many claims. The policies with that clause said insurers wouldn’t be held liable for loss “caused directly or indirectly by invasion, insurrection, riot, civil war or commotion, or military or usurped power.”

Examined alone, riot exclusions weren’t intentionally racist, said Christopher Messer, a sociology professor at Colorado State University-Pueblo who has studied the Tulsa massacre. However, in the early part of the 1900s, insurance companies knew what the outcome would mean for Black property owners when the clause was enforced, due to the prevalence of such attacks, he said.

“These riots didn’t just happen anywhere—they were primarily characterized by white mobs coming into Black neighborhoods and destroying them. It was never the other way around,” he said.

The insurance issues have long cast a shadow over Tulsa. A lawsuit in Oklahoma filed by survivors and descendants of the massacre against the city of Tulsa and other local agencies cites insurers’ refusals to pay claims. Tulsa residents and politicians have questioned how insurance companies classified the event as well as the implications. Descendants of massacre victims wonder how their ancestors’ assets could have benefited their families today had claims been paid.

After the massacre, Ms. Williams is believed to have sold her two theaters outside Greenwood, her family said, and to have used the funds to help rebuild the one in Greenwood. “Maybe those insurance claims could have just gone to rebuilding the Dreamland, and she could have kept the other theaters,” said Danya Bacchus, Ms. Williams’s great-great-granddaughter. “The empire could have continued to grow.”

Court records don’t paint a complete picture of how insurers responded to the massacre, researchers say. Some business owners may have had their claims honored, while others may have been unable or unwilling to pursue litigation for denied claims.

Some people filed multiple lawsuits. Of the 96 lawsuits filed against more than 30 insurance companies, 76 were dismissed and the other 20 didn’t have documentation of the outcome, according to records maintained by the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Historians said the records indicate that before the massacre some of Greenwood’s most successful businesspeople had to piece together insurance policies with narrow coverage options that didn’t fully protect the value of their properties. Insurance regulators say having multiple policies on a property wasn’t uncommon for the time.

Ms. Williams’s Greenwood properties and their contents, including the theater and the building that housed the confectionery, were worth nearly $80,000, according to her lawsuits. Her eight insurance policies through three companies on her various assets only covered $31,700. Ms. Williams reported paying $865.51 in premiums for policies that were in effect during the massacre, but her lawsuits don’t specify whether that was over one year or multiple years.

After nearly a year and a half of litigation, two insurance companies paid Ms. Williams $566.25 in returned premiums, court records show. Her claims were still denied.

One criticism of insurers at the time was that they didn’t conduct their own due diligence and instead relied on a characterization of the Greenwood event that proved to be false: that the destruction resulted from a riot instigated by unruly Black residents.

“It appears that it was convenient to take the words of the newspapers and the people that did it than to investigate and do the right thing,” said Kevin Matthews, an Oklahoma state senator and founder of the state’s 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which formed in 2016 in part to commemorate the tragedy.

Using the word “riot” to describe what happened remained a sore spot for Black Tulsans for decades, Mr. Matthews said. It suggests that there was a Black uprising and that Greenwood residents destroyed their own neighborhoods, he said. “Many people in my community still have heartburn with that word ‘riot.’ ”

When Mr. Matthews founded the centennial commission in 2016 it was originally called the “Race Riot” commission, he said. In 2017, Oklahoma passed bipartisan legislation to help fund its work. A year later, he and other leaders decided to change “riot” to “massacre” after constituent feedback, altering how people and historical markers in Greenwood refer to the event today.

Investigations into the event by insurers might not have made a difference in denied claims because the exclusion clauses were so broad, said Mr. Messer of Colorado State, including the words “invasion” and “insurrection.” The era’s racism would have made it easy to justify dismissing claims, no matter the actual reason, he added. “And the city really tried to paint this as an event that was caused by militant Blacks,” he said.

Two insurers that sold policies to Greenwood residents still exist today— Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. and Great American Insurance Group.

Hartford wrote a $1,500 policy for Emma Gurley, who owned multiple Greenwood Avenue properties. Great American wrote a $1,400 policy for a property Hope Watson owned. After denying claims for losses due to the massacre, each company was a defendant in separate lawsuits that were ultimately dismissed.

Each company declined to comment on the lawsuits or riot clauses, citing the difficulty of getting information about policies written decades ago. “Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to comment on litigation and what coverage may have been available a century ago,” said a spokesman for The Hartford.

CNA Financial Corp. and Chubb Ltd. have made acquisitions that could give the two companies control over the policies cited in as many as half of the 96 insurance lawsuits, with 39 for CNA and nine for Chubb. CNA and Chubb declined to comment.

Riot clauses date to at least the late 19th century, likely influenced by the tumult of the Civil War and concerns around labor strife, said Robert Hartwig, an insurance researcher and director of the Center for Risk and Uncertainty Management at the University of South Carolina.

By the 1930s, insurance regulators set out to simplify policy language. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners proposed removing riot exclusions in 1937, according to the proceedings of its annual meeting that year. The proceedings said the riot exclusion wasn’t needed as manufacturers, who risked facing labor riots, were often able to secure coverage against riots by getting endorsements, or riders, at no extra cost. The proceedings also noted that riots rarely resulted in building fires.

Assessing the risk associated with riots paved the way for the industry to eliminate riot clauses, said Mr. Hartwig. Since the 1950s, policies have generally covered multiple perils such as riots and civil unrest, he said, including riots in the 1960s and nationwide protests in 2020.

After the Greenwood massacre, some property owners took out loans or mortgaged their land to rebuild. By 1941, there were more than 240 businesses in the section, according to a recent copy of the neighborhood’s application for the National Register of Historic Places.

Ms. Williams’s Dreamland theater doesn’t appear to have ever returned to its prior prosperity, Ms. Williams’s great-granddaughter Jan Elaine Christopher said, citing a 1924 letter she wrote to her son, William Danforth Williams, about the theater’s struggles.

“At first, the whole family was running it,” Ms. Christopher said. “And then after everything happened, it looks like she was just running everything, pretty much by herself. So it was a lot smaller.”

Several of Ms. Williams’s descendants said the trauma of the massacre played a role in her death in 1927 at age 47. Her husband, John Wesley Williams, who owned an auto repair shop in Greenwood, died in 1939. The theater is believed to have been sold after her death, but the family didn’t know any details of a sale. Today, part of the interstate highway sits where it once stood.

Leslie Scism contributed to this article.

Destruction of hundreds of businesses in 1921 massacre had reverberations on family wealth for generations

By Aisha Al-Muslim and Amber Burton

TULSA, Okla.—“Destroyed 1921, Not Reopened.”

That is how dozens of plaques commemorate the Black-owned businesses that once made up the city’s Greenwood neighborhood.

Before it was destroyed by mobs of white people during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the 35-block district had about 200 Black-owned registered businesses, including hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, beauty salons, movie theaters and a bank. Some local residents and business leaders estimate there may have been as many as 600 entities, including unlisted firms and sole proprietors.

Greenwood was among the few places in Tulsa where Black people could build wealth. They were able to buy land in their names and operate businesses in the area north of the railroad tracks that divided the segregated city. The neighborhood’s nearly 9,000 Black residents in 1920 primarily spent their money in their own community.

The majority of the businesses destroyed in the massacre were never rebuilt. Some that managed to rebuild didn’t last, at least partly because of the stresses of the massacre and the Great Depression that followed.

It has been four generations since the riot, and its effect on generational wealth for the descendants of those business owners lingers.

While Black residents before the massacre could bank with financial institutions, they also used alternative systems that they trusted such as secret societies or thrift clubs, said Shennette Garrett-Scott, an associate professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Mississippi who studies Black finance and banking before the Depression.

People also acted as informal bankers for their neighbors, holding on to money for community members, and those with a lot of wealth informally made loans, she said.

“What Black Wall Street was able to do was to create an ecosystem that fed customers to these businesses, and they were successful,” said Tiffany McGhee, founder of institutional investment advisory firm Pivotal Advisors LLC. “And when you destroy those businesses...then that ends the wealth.”

Descendants of Greenwood’s early Black entrepreneurs wonder what would have been different for them economically if their ancestors’ businesses hadn’t been destroyed. Despite income gains for Black families in the U.S., the median net worth of Black households is about one-eighth that of white households, according to government data.

In the years following the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Greenwood’s business district rebounded with more businesses than before. However, decisions to demolish buildings in the name of blight removal, relocate businesses and run a highway through Greenwood contributed to the emptying out of the district, local historians and residents said.

Today, what remains of the historic district consist of a few blocks. The main block is home to 10 buildings that house about 30 small businesses, according to Freeman Culver, chairman of the historic Greenwood Chamber of Commerce.

Here are the accounts of three Tulsa families and the generational wealth they sought to build.

The Ross family

J. Kavin Ross paused for a moment to stare at a black granite monument listing scores of businesses that were destroyed during the massacre. Once he spotted the name of his great-grandfather’s establishment, he slid his fingers across the engraved title, Isaac Evitt’s Zulu Lounge.

A few hundred feet away, a small plaque commemorates where the lounge once stood. It is tucked under an elevated section of Interstate 244, also known as the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Expressway, which now runs directly over where the lounge used to be.

“A freeway stands on top of my possible inheritance,” said Mr. Ross, a paraprofessional working with special-needs students. “Who is to say what Isaac Evitt’s Zulu Lounge would be today if it hadn’t been for a so-called riot.”

Mr. Ross said his great-grandfather never recovered financially from the loss of the Zulu Lounge, once at 501 E. Cameron St. His great-grandfather sold most of the family’s remaining land in the neighborhood. He couldn’t rebuild because white shop owners refused to sell him building materials, Mr. Ross said.

“Frustrated, he would leave my grandmother and the rest of the family here in Tulsa and go to California,” Mr. Ross said.

Mr. Ross’s father, former Oklahoma state Rep. Don Ross, advocated for the formation of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission to study the massacre and helped develop the Greenwood Cultural Center.

The Rogers family

John W. Rogers Jr., founder of investment company Ariel Investments LLC, is the great-grandson of J.B. Stradford, who owned Greenwood’s Stradford Hotel. The three-story luxury hotel burned down and is counted among the businesses that were never rebuilt following the massacre.

“We did not have the benefit of building multigenerational wealth because his entire empire was destroyed,” Mr. Rogers said. “Many successful families continue to build on the dividends of prior generations’ business leadership.”

Before the massacre turned the 54-suite Stradford Hotel into a smoldering pile of bricks and debris, it was the crown jewel of Mr. Stradford’s real-estate empire, which included two dozen rental properties in Tulsa.

After the destruction ended, Mr. Stradford was detained and charged with inciting the massacre. Somehow, he escaped from a detention center and boarded a train for his brother’s home in Independence, Kan. He eventually headed to Chicago, where he successfully fought extradition to Tulsa with the help of his son, Mr. Rogers’s grandfather, who was a lawyer.

“There was real fear he could possibly be lynched,” said Mr. Rogers, who grew up in Chicago. “He was exonerated many years later when people realized what truly happened.”

In Chicago, Mr. Stradford tried and failed to open a hotel.

“He never remotely approached the success that he had in Tulsa,” Mr. Rogers said of his great-grandfather, who graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio and Indiana University’s School of Law. “And he was very disappointed and disillusioned to go from this giant business success in Tulsa to kind of a struggling lawyer and businessman in Chicago.”

Jewel Stradford, Mr. Stradford’s granddaughter and Mr. Rogers’s mother, became a prominent lawyer. She was the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School, the first female deputy solicitor general of the U.S. and the first Black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, among other achievements.

Still, she resented that she was never able to create the wealth she thought could come from having a law degree, and still worked every day, even when she was dying of breast cancer at age 75, Mr. Rogers said.

Mr. Rogers said his career path has been inspired by his hotelier great-grandfather. In 1983, Mr. Rogers made history as the first African-American founder of an asset-management firm, which urges companies to create a more diverse and inclusive corporate environment, he said. The firm, Ariel, had $16.2 billion in assets under management as of March 31, according to its website.

“I did not inherit wealth, but I inherited an education and early exposure to finance, which inspired my career path,” Mr. Rogers said.

The Nails family

James Nails Sr. arrived in Tulsa from Honey Grove, Texas, after oil was found in the area and before Oklahoma became a state in 1907. In 1917, he got a college vocational degree in shoemaking. He wanted to own his own business.

He opened a combined shoe and record store with his brother on the main thoroughfare, Greenwood Avenue. Another brother operated a limousine-and-taxi service. A nearby park that the Nails family owned was home to the Nails Dance Pavilion and Recreation Rink.

The Nailses lost all their business assets, homes and money the night of the massacre.

Property deeds helped Brenda Nails-Alford, the granddaughter of James Nails Sr., piece together details about the three family businesses. Although each deed listed just one name, the business operated as a collective, giving each Nails brother a piece of the pie that was intended to build wealth for their families.

Nails Brothers Shoes is now commemorated by a plaque in the sidewalk on Greenwood Avenue. The weathered plaque stands apart from the others for one reason—it reads “reopened.”

Though the combined shoe and record store reopened after the massacre, it only survived until the early 1930s, when it succumbed to the Great Depression and the lingering stresses of the massacre.

One of the family’s other businesses, the park that housed the dance pavilion and recreation rink, was acquired for $1 by Henry Brady, the son of a local businessman and Ku Klux Klan member, Wyatt Tate Brady, the Tulsa World reported.

The stress of losing his businesses took a toll on James Nails Sr., and he no longer was able to support his family. His wife, Vasinora, raised their four children on her own and worked as a domestic helper in a white household.

“My grandfather did everything he was supposed to do and, still, it wasn’t enough,” Ms. Nails-Alford said.

Ms. Nails-Alford’s family still maintains the family home in the Greenwood district. The original family home was torn down and replaced as part of the city’s urban-renewal efforts. Ms. Alford said she gets offers for the property all the time from real-estate agents and individuals from in and out of the state, but when she was a little girl she remembers people saying, don’t sell your properties.

A generation later, James Nails Jr. tried to follow in the footsteps of his father, James Sr., by going to college for shoemaking, at Langston University in Tulsa, and opening a shoe store on North Greenwood Avenue in the 1970s.

He operated the store for only a brief period. Greenwood and other Black neighborhoods were losing businesses as dollars flooded out of the community after desegregation opened up more opportunities for Black people to spend their dollars elsewhere. Urban renewal and a new highway that cut right through Greenwood Avenue rearranged the geography of the business district.

James Nails Jr. shut down his store and spent the rest of his career working at other people’s businesses.

“He wanted to carry on the family legacy, and he couldn’t do that,” Ms. Nails-Alford said.

Robert Barba contributed to this article.

Property owners in Tulsa’s Greenwood district raised money by leveraging the land beneath the rubble, helping to bring businesses back

By Keiko Morris

TULSA, Okla.—After all the destruction and loss of life, what survived the 1921 attack in the Greenwood district proved the most valuable and enduring in the neighborhood’s midcentury recovery: the ambition of Black entrepreneurs and landowners.

The ability of property owners to raise money by leveraging the land beneath the rubble helped seed a local economy of Black-owned businesses for the next decades, according to interviews, court filings, newspaper articles and an analysis of Tulsa County real-estate records by The Wall Street Journal.

Rebuilding Greenwood after the massacre had seemed a long shot. There was little or no government assistance. Insurers largely denied claims from people who had lost their homes and didn’t compensate business owners for lost inventory. Many residents instead used their property as collateral to secure short-term mortgages from financial institutions, more affluent individuals and community lending pools, records show.

The loans helped the neighborhood flourish in the 1940s and 1950s, residents and historians said. In 1940, the homeownership rate among Black residents in Tulsa was 49%, surpassing the rate of 45% among white residents, U.S. Census data show. In those decades, grocery stores lined the commercial spine of North Greenwood Avenue, and the district featured chili parlors, movie theaters, barbecue restaurants, drugstores, pool halls and doctors’ offices. By 1942, Greenwood was home to more than 240 businesses, according to Hannibal B. Johnson’s “Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Greenwood District.”

“All the odds were against us, and we survived anyway,” said James O. Goodwin, publisher of the Oklahoma Eagle, Greenwood’s century-old Black newspaper. Yet, this second renaissance would, too, meet its own calamity.

The story of Black property ownership in Oklahoma began well before the 1921 massacre. Many of the territory’s early Black residents were descendants of those formerly enslaved by Native Americans who had been pushed west by the U.S. government in the 19th century, according to Larry O’Dell, director of development and special projects at the Oklahoma Historical Society. In later agreements with the U.S., these Native Americans and the more than 23,000 formerly enslaved Black men and women of the tribes—known as freedmen—became eligible for allotments of as much as 160 acres in Oklahoma, Mr. O’Dell said. Many formed all-black towns in Oklahoma, largely in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The opportunity to own land drew Black migrants from other states to Tulsa. Many found work as skilled laborers and in service jobs in an economy buoyed by agriculture and, later, the oil industry. Some who settled in Greenwood started businesses and bought property.

P.S. Thompson was among the Greenwood residents who mortgaged property to rebuild after the massacre. He filed a claim against the city for failing to protect his house and drugstore from destruction, fires and looting, according to documents with the Tulsa Historical Society & Museum and research compiled by the Oklahoma Historical Society. The following year, Mr. Thompson and his wife, E.B. Thompson, used their property as collateral to obtain a $750 loan from L.S. Cogswell Lumber Co., about $12,000 when adjusted for inflation. The loan was for 15 months at an annual interest rate of 10%, according to records from the Tulsa County Clerk. The average U.S. mortgage rate was around 6% at the time. The couple paid off the loan and obtained several more short-term mortgages in amounts from $500 to $1,500.

Well-to-do Greenwood residents made loans to other members of the community. In the 1920s and 1930s, James Henri Goodwin, a businessman and real-estate investor, extended mortgage loans to local residents, according to county clerk documents, and borrowed himself. Some Greenwood property owners were able to borrow from savings-and-loan associations.

Restrictive real-estate covenants limited the mobility of Black residents and property owners beyond Greenwood’s boundaries. Private-lending practices, common across the U.S., rated the presence of Blacks in a neighborhood as an elevated property risk, historians said, and blocked many Black home buyers from getting mortgages.

By 1958, the proportion of white home buyers had grown dramatically. Black residents made up 10% of Tulsa’s population but only 3% of buyers of new housing in the city, according to a Tulsa Urban League report issued that year.

Even with new homes being built, very few Black buyers could qualify for financing, according to the report, provided by the University of Tulsa’s Department of Special Collections. The passage of civil-rights legislation in the 1960s began to open up opportunities for some residents to move out of Greenwood amid efforts to desegregate communities, a move that cut into business owners’ clientele.

Greenwood’s second calamity was, in part, a consequence of broader urban renewal efforts in the 1960s. Redevelopment plans and the clearing of blighted properties uprooted local businesses and residents, accelerating the neighborhood’s decline, residents and descendants of former business owners said. In some instances, businesses were forced to move because of redevelopment, they said, and some had to move several times while trying to stay close to longtime customers.

The construction of Interstate 244 through Greenwood in the late 1960s upended the local economy, piercing the heart of the business district and forever changing the neighborhood.

Here is a snapshot of some properties and entrepreneurs who contributed to Greenwood in its second heyday, the period of neighborhood revival after the 1921 massacre.

521 North Detroit Avenue

What was there?

The home of P.S. and E.B. Thompson, husband and wife, survivors of the 1921 massacre, had 11 rooms, according to the damage claim filed against the city. The couple also had a drugstore listed in court documents at 23 North Cincinnati Street.

Who owned it?

The Thompsons.

What is there now?

The Helmerich Research Center at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa takes up the block where the Thompsons’s home likely stood. The building, bordered by grass, backs onto Detroit Avenue, where the front of the Thompson home would have faced. The I-244 abuts the southern end of the block.

122 and 123 North Greenwood Avenue

What was there?

Goodwin family properties and former homes of the Oklahoma Eagle, a family-run newspaper. Various business ventures occupied the sites over the years, including a haberdashery, printing business and ice-cream shop.

Who owned it?

Members of the Goodwin family. Carlie and James H. Goodwin moved to Greenwood from Water Valley, Miss., with ambitions of giving their children a better education, their son Edward Goodwin Sr. said in a 1971 interview provided by the Columbia Center for Oral History. James H. Goodwin co-owned an undertaking business and invested in real estate, passing an entrepreneurial tradition to his son. After the massacre, James and Carlie Goodwin listed losses of several houses and buildings totaling more than $27,000—about $410,000 when adjusted for inflation—according to an analysis by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Hours before the start of the May 31 attack, Edward Goodwin was decorating the Stradford Hotel for the prom the following night, according to the Greenwood Cultural Center.

Edward Goodwin, who owned the printing business, haberdashery and ice-cream shop, brought home shows to Greenwood in the 1950s, putting on events at places like the Big 10 Ballroom. Black and white vendors and marketers brought in appliances and other housewares, and featured fashion shows. Mr. Goodwin bought the Oklahoma Eagle newspaper, which he used to advocate for racial equity. He owned as many as 40 to 50 properties in Tulsa, he said in the 1971 interview. He is credited with helping save the last block of Greenwood from being razed for redevelopment by negotiating agreements with the city. His son James is the current publisher of the Oklahoma Eagle.

What is there now?

A section of I-244 rises close to where the Goodwin property at 123 North Greenwood once stood. The entrance to ONEOK Field, a minor-league baseball stadium that is home of the Tulsa Drillers, is near the former site of 122 North Greenwood.

749 and 751 North Greenwood Avenue

What was there?

Lynn & Clark Cleaners opened around 1926 at 749 North Greenwood Avenue. Banner Grocery Market opened in 1937 at the neighboring address, according to the Tulsa Historical Society & Museum.

Who owned it?

Clark C. and Lynn H. Holderness, brothers, and Jobie Holderness, Lynn’s wife. By Lynn Holderness’s death in 1966, the family’s properties encompassed about 50 lots in the city, according to estate documents filed with the county clerk’s office. Mr. Holderness lived in Tulsa as early as 1916, and he worked as a porter at the Bohnefeld Cleaning & Hat Works and later as a cleaner for Lloyd-Richey Cleaners, according to the local historical society. Jobie Holderness continued to run Banner Market until 1982, according to Mr. Johnson’s “Black Wall Street” book.

What is there now?

Oklahoma State University parking lots and buildings.

1624 East Apache Street

What was there?

The Big 10 Ballroom, which drew such top-tier musicians and performers as Ray Charles, James Brown and Otis Redding in the late 1940s and through the mid-1960s.

The large white building boasted a dining area, as well as a bar and lounge that opened to a ballroom with a dance floor and a stage, according to family members and a 1948 Tulsa Tribune feature story about its launch. The club, which sat at the outskirts of Greenwood, was among several neighborhood venues where world-class jazz and R&B musicians performed.

Who owned it?

Lonnie Williams and Richard Thompson. Andranez Williams-Stephens, Lonnie Williams’s daughter, remembers her mother cooking spaghetti for musicians at their home. “It was huge and beautiful,” Ms. Williams-Stephens said of the Big 10. “On the front of the building was this huge window that you could see out on Apache and the parking lot.”

Her father, a Tulsa police officer, ran multiple businesses, including a local pool hall and liquor store. Later, he opened up a bail-bond company. He eventually quit the police force, finding his enterprises were much more lucrative, Ms. Williams-Stephens said. Her father closed the pool hall and liquor store when redevelopment uprooted Greenwood businesses, she said. Urban renewal also forced him to find a new home in the district.

What is there now?

A nonprofit called A Pocket Full of Hope is renovating the building to serve as a venue for the organization’s theater productions and other events aimed at supporting local youth, said Lester Shaw, the nonprofit’s executive director. The project has been in the works for more than a decade and is expected to open later this year as the Historic Big 10 Ballroom.

Dr. Shaw turned down a donor who wanted to tear down the structure and build a new facility. “I knew the Big 10 Ballroom had a historical perspective,” he said, “and it’s hard to empower kids without a historical perspective.”

Shane Shifflett contributed to this article.

A century after the Tulsa Race Massacre, data show more deaths from heart and lung disease, diabetes and cancer, and lower life expectancies in the area with many Black Tulsans

By Shalini Ramachandran

One hundred years ago, a line of Black doctors’ offices in the Greenwood neighborhood were burned down during the Tulsa Race Massacre. After a brief recovery, the Black community’s medical infrastructure entered a long decline. It has never recovered.

The health divide between North Tulsa, the area within the city where Black residents make up around one-third of the community, and almost anywhere else in Tulsa is large. Disparities are often greatest when compared with South Tulsa, the area where roughly 70% of residents are white and 10% are Black.

North Tulsans die up to 13 years earlier than their neighbors to the south, according to Oklahoma health data collected in 2018. The data measured gaps in life expectancy between ZIP Codes.

The differences are also seen in other U.S. cities, Virginia Commonwealth University research on the topic showed.

North Tulsans face a dearth of primary-care doctors, federal data show, and nearly three-fourths of them live in a “food desert” with limited access to a grocery store, fresh produce and nutritious food options. The district has the city’s highest death rates from heart disease, lung disease, diabetes and cancer, according to the Tulsa County Health Status Report.

In Tulsa County as a whole, Black infants are 2.5 times more likely to die before their first birthday than white infants, state health data show.

“The way it feels, being a North Tulsan, and the way it has felt, since our community was destroyed with the great healthcare system we once had, was that the City of Tulsa has never been a place for us, and it’s a place where we sort of had to make do with the scraps,” said Gregory Robinson, a director at Metcares, a community wellness and education organization. “The data really bears that out.”

After their neighborhood was burned to the ground, the Black community rebuilt Greenwood with a number of thriving Black doctors’ practices and grocery stores serving the community in the 1940s and 1950s, older residents say.

The government later built an Interstate through the neighborhood, demolished buildings in the name of urban renewal and used eminent domain to force sales of Black businesses and properties. The moves tore apart the community and dispersed many of its residents, pushing them further North.

North Tulsa lacks urgent-care centers, and its closest hospital is located downtown, considered by residents to be outside the community, according to Tulsa Health Department’s Chief Operating Officer Reggie Ivey, who grew up in North Tulsa and is the first Black senior leader in the department.

Many Black doctors in recent decades have pursued opportunities at major hospital systems outside the neighborhood rather than going into private practice, contributing to the shortage of primary-care physicians.

“It causes our residents to delay getting care because the resources are not in the community where they live,” Mr. Ivey said. “By the time they do seek care, for many of them it turns into a chronic disease and for some of them it may be too late.”

Mr. Ivey said hospitals that were in other parts of the city never set up satellite branches serving North Tulsa.

In 1920, before the massacre, the Greenwood district was home to roughly 9,000 Black residents, and their medical needs were served by at least 17 doctors and physicians, including the nationally renowned surgeon, Dr. A.C. Jackson.

The neighborhood also had its own hospital and four well-equipped drugstores, according to Mary E. Jones Parrish, a Black typist and journalist who fled the violence with her young daughter but came back to gather eyewitness accounts. At least 10 doctors’ offices were destroyed, she said in her 1922 book, “Events of the Tulsa Disaster.”

Dr. Jackson was shot dead by the mob, after he walked out of his home with his hands held up, Ms. Parrish reported.

Another physician, James M. Key, was “forcibly arrested and taken to a detention camp” on June 1, according to a lawsuit he later filed against the city of Tulsa and its leaders. His property “had been burned to the ground” after the police dropped turpentine bombs from an airplane, according to his suit.

He tallied property losses totaling $13,798, including the destruction of two houses and valuables including a piano—the losses would be around $209,000 in today’s dollars. Dr. Key was “practically out of doors” for a “long time thereafter,” and his health was “seriously impaired,” the lawsuit alleged.

Gospel singer and Grammy Award nominee John P. Kee remembers the stories his father told him about the race massacre and his father’s great uncle, Dr. Key. Though his father’s family largely lived in poverty, the family knew there was a well-to-do family member named “Dr. James” in Tulsa and “he was an educated Black man”—at times resented for changing his last name from “Kee” to the more anglicized “Key,” according to family stories Mr. Kee’s father told him.

After Dr. Key lost everything in Tulsa, he migrated to New Jersey, the family lore goes. Mr. Kee doesn’t know what happened to the doctor’s direct descendants.

Greenwood residents after the massacre had closer access than North Tulsans do today to a hospital, the health department’s Mr. Ivey said.

The American Red Cross, which provided relief efforts after the 1921 massacre, helped set up a full-service hospital in North Tulsa, operated by Black nurses and physicians. It evolved to become Moton Memorial Hospital, named after a president of Tuskegee Institute, Dr. Robert Russa Moton.

The hospital closed in 1967, due in part to funding issues and competition from other hospitals, which after the end of segregation opened their doors to Black patients, residents say. It retained only its outpatient services.

The outpatient center, later renamed Morton Comprehensive Health Services—after a local physician named W.A. Morton—now operates primary-care clinics in North Tulsa but has no emergency room or urgent-care center.

A plan proposed in the 1950s to expand and remodel the old hospital never materialized, said Julius Pegues, 86, a lifelong Tulsan whose uncle, a survivor of the massacre, gave him the blueprint for the new hospital when he was 15 years old.

Oklahoma State University Medical Center is the closest full-service hospital to the North Tulsa community, home to about one-fifth of the city’s residents, though Mr. Ivey says North Tulsans consider the OSU hospital to be in downtown, since it is south of Interstate 244.

Another quarter of the city’s population lives in South Tulsa, where there are three general hospitals and another two specialty hospitals for heart disease and psychiatric care.

Between the two neighborhoods is the downtown area, with slightly more than a quarter of Tulsa’s residents, which has two hospitals and two psychiatric hospitals.

“If you break a leg, you have at least a 15-minute drive to get to a hospital,” said Janel Pasley, a longtime resident and advocate through the North Tulsa Community Coalition, an organization focused on community healthcare.

Healthcare inequities are worsened by discrimination in economic and social policies, such as banks’ past practice of avoiding lending in certain areas, and often to lower-income and Black communities, said Derek Chapman, interim director of the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center on Society and Health, who helped map the life-expectancy gaps across ZIP Codes. “It didn’t happen by chance,” he said.

Life-expectancy gaps like Tulsa’s were found in 20 other communities across the country, from major cities to rural towns, the university’s research found. Dr. Chapman said residents in neighborhoods need access to an emergency room during a heart attack, but to prevent heart attacks, they need safe housing and access to affordable, nutritious food.

North Tulsans, on average, are exposed to a greater number of negative events during childhood, including substance-abuse and mental-health conditions, than South Tulsans, leading to chronic stress and worsened medical conditions in adulthood, according to new data compiled by Dr. Jason Beaman, chair of Oklahoma State University’s psychiatry and behavioral sciences department. The damaging effects of the massacre and racism also reverberates throughout generations, he said.

“Your body teaches itself to stay in that fight or flight mode,” said Dr. Jennifer Hays-Grudo, another psychiatry professor there, “and you see the rates of cancer, heart attacks, strokes” go up.

Susan Savage, the CEO of Morton and a former mayor of Tulsa, said 40% to 50% of Morton’s patients are uninsured. She said the health system has a variety of outreach initiatives for the community, including door-to-door transports and protocols in place to transport those with emergency needs to hospitals to get treatment.

In the decades after the massacre, there were a number of Black primary-care doctors who set up private practices in North Tulsa, older residents say. Among them was Dr. Charles James Bate, who was the first Black physician admitted to the Tulsa County Medical Society professional group, according to his obituary.

But in the 1980s and 1990s, many private practices began to close their doors, Mr. Ivey of the health department said, as older doctors retired without anyone taking over their practices, and many doctors found it harder to run clinics without being connected to a major hospital system.

Dr. Bobby Woodard, a pharmacist, helped found the private-practice Westview Medical Center, a community clinic, in 1984, hoping to recruit Black physicians to work in North Tulsa. Westview became an incubator for attracting talent, he said, but there still aren’t enough doctors. He and others said North Tulsa is a tough sell for aspiring young, Black physicians in medical school, as many choose opportunities connected with working for a major research institution or hospital system elsewhere.

The dearth of community doctors has heightened the mistrust against the medical establishment, residents and healthcare workers say.

“A lot of African-Americans before would go to their private doctors because they trusted them, and now they are afraid to go to the big clinics because they may see someone new every time, and they have trust issues,” said Darlene Reynolds, a nurse at Morton, whose family has lived in Greenwood for generations.

Ms. Reynolds said she recently saw a patient who made no follow-up visits after a mastectomy. “There was no care coordination, no one sought her out,” she said. She later died, Ms. Reynolds said.

Such mistrust also is a factor in the slower pace of Covid-19 vaccinations among Black residents in North Tulsa. Only 16% of Black North Tulsans have received at least one vaccination dose as of late May, according to Tulsa Health Department data. Roughly 26% of the white residents in North Tulsa have had at least one dose.

Philanthropies, such as the George Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Tulsa Health Department have expanded outreach to the North Tulsa community in the past decade, including opening a community health and wellness center in September 2012. The city and philanthropic groups also have provided backing for a grocery store, Oasis Fresh Market, which opened its doors in North Tulsa this month.

Stephanie Vanterpool, whose mother began working in North Tulsa in the 1960s as a surgical nurse, said before the new store opened, it was common for North Tulsans like herself to drive at least 15 to 20 minutes to reach the nearest full-service grocery store.

For Dr. Runako Whittaker, a pediatrician who works at Westview, parents shopping for groceries at dollar stores—the primary option for groceries in North Tulsa—makes her worry about the increase in childhood obesity and the impact on the health of pregnant women. “I can counsel patients and their families all day long about, ‘Eat healthy, eat healthy,’ but when they are out of my office, where are they going to go to get the healthy snack foods that I talk about?”

Melanie Evans contributed to this article.