The historic greenwood area is the area where he bought this property. It became known as the black wall street because of the number of Business Developers and entrepreneurs that came to the greenwood area to start a business. There was a lot of promise here because although blacks were not allowed to work in the oil fields, there was a lot of opportunity for those people who work for the wealthier people who were in the oil business, and so there was a lot of promise. Good jobs. Good paying jobs. The people took advantage of it. In the greenwood area, you have doctors. You have lawyers. You have pharmacists. You have educators, just anything that went into sustaining a quality of life for a community could be found in the greenwood area. That was the origin of people looking for opportunities. There was land available here in tulsa. Subsequently, it just flourished and when they arrested this young man for this alleges assault on the a legelleged alleged assault at this Downtown Department store, word got around that they were going to lynch him, and quite naturally, the community said, no, there isnt going to be a lynching. The first night, they went down, and nothing happened, but the second night they went down, a shot was fired. The melee started. Chaos just broke out everywhere. As a result, the whole greenwood area was burned to the ground. The only building left standing was the high school. That is where the red cross director who was sent from st. Louis set up the aid station that was set up by the red cross. The aftermath of that was that people did not have any place to live, and the city passed an ordinance that said that you could not rebuild unless you use brick. Using brick was a prohibitive cost. Bugsy franklin, who was an attorney that had just recently moved to tulsa, he filed a lawsuit and got that ordinance taken off the books. People were able to rebuild their homes using wood or brick. The Greenwood District was by the middle of the 1930s they had rebuilt the Greenwood District. That is what this story should be all about, and that is the resiliency of the people and them being able to recover from such a disaster. We are standing in reconciliation park. The purpose of the park was to call the attention to people who do not know about the 1921 race riot. For people to remember that such a disaster happened, and hopefully, it will never happen again. Our effort here in tulsa now is reconciliation. We are all about reconciliation. If you look at the tower of reconciliation, it gives you the history of coming to indian territory, people working and living together, and then up at the top, you will see people reaching down, helping other individuals up to the top. That is really what we ought to be about really all the time. Man should treat man like we are all human beings. You can watch this and other programs on the history of communities across the country at cspan. Org cities tour. This is American History tv only on cspan 3