It was exciting to hear that a group of business people from Pine Bluff were taking a field trip to Tulsa. As the organizers explained it, they are intrigued by the existence of what came to be known as America’s Black Wall Street.
That one area holds the story of one of the brightest and one of the bleakest episodes in Black history.
The neighborhood, known as Greenwood, was filled with successful Black-owned businesses of all types. People worked and played in this area and were able to engage in life like few other places in the country.
One of our very own had a lot to do with the area’s creation. An Explore Pine Bluff feature, published in June, was about O.W. Gurley of Pine Bluff who was once one of the wealthiest Black men in America and the founder of Black Wall Street.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
But the whites in the area apparently became jealous of the success of the area and affluence of the Blacks involved, and in 1921, a violent white mob burned the area to the ground, along with 1,250 Black-owned homes. An estimated 300 people were killed. Like the name of the area, that incident got its own title: the Tulsa Race Massacre.
A May 2021 story about the massacre in the New York Times put it thusly:
“But what took years to build was erased in less than 24 hours by racial violence — sending the dead into mass graves and forever altering family trees.
“Hundreds of Greenwood residents were brutally killed, their homes and businesses wiped out. They were casualties of a furious and heavily armed white mob of looters and arsonists. One factor that drove the violence: resentment toward the Black prosperity found in block after block of Greenwood.”
The trip is being led by Benito Lubazibwa with ReMix Ideas and Advancing Black Entrepreneurship. He said Black business people and those wanting to get into business for themselves can take some cues from how Black Wall Street came into being.
“This trip to Tulsa is very important,” he said. “The reason we decided to go to Tulsa was the connection with Pine Bluff.”
As a story in The Commercial about the trip stated: “By empowering them through business ownership, the organization aims to elevate transformative concepts capable of impacting both individual lives and entire communities.”
Said Lubazibwa: “We need a better infrastructure when it comes to Black-owned businesses. The infrastructure is not in our favor.”
No, but perhaps that will change with the enthusiasm of people eager to engage in and be in charge of their own destinies in ways that have been blocked from them for too long.