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#black wall street
mermazeablaze · 9 months
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I thought some of my Tumblr mutuals would be interested to see this article.
Viola Ford Fletcher, aged 109, just published a memoir 'Don't Let Them Bury My Story' about her experience during the Greenwood/Tulsa Massacre. It will be available for purchase August 15th.
"Her memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story,” is a call to action for readers to pursue truth, justice and reconciliation no matter how long it takes. Written with graphic details of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that she witnessed at age seven, Fletcher said she hoped to preserve a narrative of events that was nearly lost to a lack of acknowledgement from mainstream historians and political leaders.
The questions I had then remain to this day,” Fletcher writes in the book. “How could you just give a mob of violent, crazed, racist people a bunch of deadly weapons and allow them — no, encourage them — to go out and kill innocent Black folks and demolish a whole community?”
“As it turns out, we were victims of a lie,” she writes.
Fletcher notes in her memoir just how much history she has lived through — from several virus outbreaks preceding the coronavirus pandemic, to the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008 to every war and international conflict of the last seven decades. She has watched the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. lead the national Civil Rights Movement, seen the historic election of former President Barack Obama and witnessed the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement."
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mister-gee509 · 2 months
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krystaljasper · 4 months
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angelishere407 · 2 months
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thechanelmuse · 2 years
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Y’all wanted more, ya got it 😏.
This is Part 3. For more: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Bonus
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odinsblog · 5 months
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Tens of thousands of people visit Bank of America stadium to watch the Carolina Panthers play football each year – never realizing they are walking on top of lost remnants of a once-thriving Black neighborhood established in the aftermath of the Civil War.
The stadium itself is built directly atop a relic of segregated healthcare: Good Samaritan Hospital, the first private hospital built in North Carolina to serve Black patients. Built in 1891, this historic hospital was one of the oldest of its kind in the United States.
It was also the site of one of the “most horrific racial incidents in Charlotte's history,” according to Dan Aldridge, professor of History and Africana Studies at Davidson College.
A mob of 30 to 35 armed, white men invaded the hospital, dragging a man out of the hospital and into the streets – and shooting him dead in front of the building.
The concept of “urban renewal” destroyed Black neighborhoods, communities, businesses and homes all across North Carolina, especially between 1949 and 1974.
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Durham, for example, once had a prominent Black Wall Street, where Black businesses flourished; however, the historic community was almost completely destroyed by construction of the Durham Freeway.
Likewise, Raleigh once had 13 historic Freedmen's Villages, built entirely by men and women freed from slavery in the aftermath of emancipation. Today, only two are remaining, and Oberlin Village, the largest one, was cut in half by the construction of Wade Avenue.
Similarly, Charlotte's Brooklyn community was built by men and women freed from slavery in the late 1800s. Like many Black communities around the state, it was forced into an awful geographical location – on low-lying land where flooding, sewage and sanitation issues made life hazardous.
According to history in the Charlotte Library, the Brooklyn area was first identified on maps as ‘Logtown’ in the late 1800s – a name that matches closely with titles given to similar freedmen villages in the Triangle area, which were often called slang names like ‘Slabtown’ or ‘Save Rent’ due to their inexpensive homes.
In the 1900s, the area became known as Brooklyn, “a name that would become synonymous with the Black community until urban renewal.”
“It's a tragedy that so many stadiums were built on sites that were once Black communities,” said Aldridge. “They're poor neighborhoods. They're struggling neighborhoods. I won't romanticize them by claiming they're all like Black Wall Street, but they were people's homes and people's communities, and they were taken from them.”
Many historically significant Black sites were lost in urban renewal; likewise, many Black communities were forced to build in geographically unfit areas, making growing wealth and property more difficult – and more easily lost over time.
At its peak, Brooklyn was home to:
Charlotte's first Black public school
Charlotte's only Black high school
The city's first free library for Black patrons
The first companies to offer white collar jobs to Black workers
The first private hospital for Black citizens in Charlotte
Today, football players run up and down the Bank of America field for the amusement of thousands of cheering fans. However, in 1913, over a century ago, that same land had a very different story.
(continue reading) related ↵ related ↵
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blackbrownfamily · 1 month
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readyforevolution · 10 months
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After slavery, our African ancestors pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and built prosperous African Communities all across America. Then, as usual, Whitey started hating on our ancestors’ prosperity and independence. With the help of the government, in some instances, Whitey burned down our ancestors’ Communities and massacred our African ancestors.
They didn’t teach us this in school! But all of these massacres occurred and are historically documented.
Ready For Revolution!
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zumainthyfuture · 2 months
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You might have heard of Black Wall Street. Meet the founder, O.W. Gurley.
In 1905 Gurley and his wife sold their property in Noble County and moved 80 miles to the oil boom town of Tulsa. Gurley purchased 40 acres of land in North Tulsa and established his first business, a rooming house on a dusty road that would become Greenwood Avenue. He subdivided his plot into residential and commercial lots and eventually opened a grocery store.
As the community grew around him, Gurley prospered. Between 1910 and 1920, the Black population in the area he had purchased grew from 2,000 to nearly 9,000 in a city with a total population of 72,000. The Black community had a large working-class population as well as doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who provided services to them. Soon the Greenwood section was dubbed “Negro Wall Street” by Tuskegee educator Booker T. Washington.
Greenwood, now called Black Wall Street, was nearly self-sufficient with Black-owned businesses, many initially financed by Gurley, ranging from brickyards and theaters to a chartered airplane company. Gurley built the Gurley Hotel at 112 N. Greenwood and rented out spaces to smaller businesses. His other properties included a two-story building at 119 N. Greenwood, which housed the Masonic Lodge and a Black employment agency. He was also one of the founders of Vernon AME Church.
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tredawakandan · 1 year
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We really are our ancestors. Don't fail them now by forgetting all our rich heritage and struggles as a people. For that is what made us great and will make us great again 😤
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paisholotus · 1 month
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No, because speak on it. It doesn't surprise me that schools don't teach us about black wall street. We had our own schools, our own banks, our own restaurants, our own hospitals, etc, and they burned that shit down. Someone needs to teach y'all the history of Central Park in New York.
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lotus-flower-writes · 8 months
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Photos of the Tulsa Race Massacre 1921
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mister-gee509 · 14 days
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Friday vibes... lolll
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sassysophiabush · 2 years
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angelishere407 · 1 month
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You might have heard of Black Wall Street. Meet the founder, O.W. Gurley.
In 1905 Gurley and his wife sold their property in Noble County and moved 80 miles to the oil boom town of Tulsa. Gurley purchased 40 acres of land in North Tulsa and established his first business, a rooming house on a dusty road that would become Greenwood Avenue. He subdivided his plot into residential and commercial lots and eventually opened a grocery store.
As the community grew around him, Gurley prospered. Between 1910 and 1920, the Black population in the area he had purchased grew from 2,000 to nearly 9,000 in a city with a total population of 72,000. The Black community had a large working-class population as well as doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who provided services to them. Soon the Greenwood section was dubbed “Negro Wall Street” by Tuskegee educator Booker T. Washington.
Greenwood, now called Black Wall Street, was nearly self-sufficient with Black-owned businesses, many initially financed by Gurley, ranging from brickyards and theaters to a chartered airplane company. Gurley built the Gurley Hotel at 112 N. Greenwood and rented out spaces to smaller businesses. His other properties included a two-story building at 119 N. Greenwood, which housed the Masonic Lodge and a Black employment agency. He was also one of the founders of Vernon AME Church.
Source: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/o-w-gurley-1868-1935/
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thechanelmuse · 6 months
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Hughes "Uncle Redd" Van Ellis (1921-2023) ❤️🕊
Mr. Hughes was a WWll combat veteran and one of the last three survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, in which jealous European-American mobs went into the thriving, economic, 35-block area of the Greenwood district created by Black Americans (survivors and descendants of American chattel slavery) in Tulsa, Oklahoma known as “Black Wall Street,” and looted, burned & bombed it to the ground and murdered Black Americans through government sanction.
Justice for the Tulsa Race Massacre survivors has been intentionally slow-moving for over a century now to insure injustice is given to those who survived it. Even to the point where people try to bury the history or give a revisionist lie of it being a race riot. But just as reparations for US chattel slavery (perpetual ownership passed on through birth as someone's property and form of capital through labor and body), the debt is still owed from the US government.
The stolen generational wealth from forced labor, the stolen wealth from the Freedmen's bank ($93 million today) amongst other things, the stolen land to this day, and the continued remnants of slavery (including, Jim Crow, ethnocide and genocide) that are government sanctioned in our homeland our ancestors built from scratch. The debt will always be owed until it's paid. A debt doesn't die.
Reparations are currently happening at a slow pace across a number of states and municipality levels as of now, but at the same time we have to fight against Pan-African and obstructionist Democrats to ensure it's lineage-based for Black Americans only, direct cash payments to remove any hiccups, and protective policies our ancestors should've always had and we should've inherited.
When you don't have protective policies on the books for the largest ethnic group who descends from America and strip/impede on their potential accumulation of wealth and assets to pass down to their families, what do their descendants inherit?👂🏽
Some survivors and the descendants of Black Wall Street tried to rebuild their district, but when you're stripped of your wealth and "urban renewal" starts intruding I-244 called "Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Expressway" 😒 into your land, you can imagine the results. Mr. Hughes inherited displacement and poverty, passed down poverty to his family, and died in poverty. Mama Viola Fletcher, 109 (who is the sister of Mr. Hughes pictured above) and Mama Lessie Benningfield Randle, 108, are the last two survivors and still in the fight. They, too, live in poverty.
The passing of Mr. Hughes and our Black American ancestors will never go in vain as we continue to stand 10 toes down for them and us and see it through.
Rest easy, Uncle Redd (Jan. 11, 1921 - Oct. 9, 2023) ❤️🕊
This was his testimony before Congress in 2021:
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