white folks came into her house, destroyed her piano with a hatchet. and when they left, she went over there, and they struck the keyboard, and there was still sound coming out of that piano. that s who greenwood is. you might destroy the outside of me. you might shoot me. you might burn me. you re not going to destroy my soul. we still got a song to sing. we have these cycles of greenwood s being built, destroyed, rebuilt. if you look at it all together in a hundred-year journey, it s a consistent story of resilience. we are so close to getting
custody was moved to the fairgrounds east of greenwood. they set up cots in the kitchen. they dug latrines. those who stayed there were expected to work. the women would prepare the meals. the men were sent out to work cleaning up greenwood. folks in these internment camps had to have a green card. i don t know how they got these little cards printed so fast, but everybody had a little i.d. card. schoolchildren and all, told what you did, and you had to have that little i d wherever you went. and to get out of these internment centers, they needed to be countersigned by a white person. essentially, a white person would vouch for them and get them out of these internment centers.
lawyers. this section of tulsa was a city within a city. every face seemed to wear a happy smile. we re sitting in the mackey house. that s lucy. the mackeys are really emblematic of the kind of middle-class black person who lived in the greenwood community during its peak. but i think if we fixate on the things that are glamorous and more flattering, and we forget that the greenwood district is a part of a city called tulsa. you have a black segregated community that s not getting its fair share of tax dollars for infrastructure, like roads, like sewer systems, and things like that.
within a week or two of the massacre to collect stories of people, of survivors, including herself. on leaving the frisco station, going north to archer street, one could see nothing but negro business places. going east on archer for two or more blocks, there you would behold greenwood avenue, the negro s wall street. mary parish was a remarkable woman. originally from mississippi, she had set up a secretarial school right on greenwood avenue to teach young women all of these different skills so they could get work as secretaries to some of greenwood s black doctors and
in the 1920s, there was a strong black community here in tulsa called greenwood. these people were the core of black entrepreneurship. people call it the black wall street. greenwood was like putting harlem, bourbon street, and chocolate city all in one place. but white tulsans talked about greenwood as little africa or [bleep] land. tulsa was a powder keg, needing only something to set the community alight.