Built from the Fire

A generational saga of a family and a community in the most famous haven for black entrepreneurship in America--Tulsa's Greenwood district, or "Black Wall Street"--that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification. When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa in 1914, drawn away from Jim Crow Mississippi, his family joined a growing community--one in a constellation of Black towns in Oklahoma--on the cusp of becoming the center of Black life in the West. But, just a few years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood. They burned down his house, his church, his universe, laying waste to 35 blocks and murdering as many as 300 people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the worst acts of racist violence in United States history, a ruthless attempt to smother a gleam of black independence. But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. The Goodwins and many of their neighbors soon rebuilt the district into "a Mecca," in Ed's words, where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy lived comfortably alongside public storefronts. Prosperity and poverty intermixed, and icons from W.E.B. Du Bois to Muhammad Ali ambled down Greenwood Avenue, alongside maids, doctors, and every occupation in between. Ed grew into a prominent businessman, always alert to opportunity and soon to the neighborhood's needs, too. He bought a community newspaper called the Oklahoma Eagle to chronicle its resurgence and battles against ever-shifting forms of white bigotry and, with his genteel wife Jeanne, raised an ambitious family, who became literal poster-children for black progress. Their son Jim, an attorney, embodied their hopes for the Civil Rights Movement with some of the cases he took on, but by the 1970s urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood, even as Jim and his neighbors tried to hold onto pieces of Greenwood. Today, while new high-rises risk wiping out the neighborhood's legacy for good, the family newspaper remains, and Ed's determined granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists. In Built from the Fire, journalist Victor Luckerson moves beyond the mythology of Black Wall Street to tell the story of Greenwood, an aspirant black neighborhood that, like so many others, has long been buffeted by racist government policies. Through the eyes of dozens of race massacre survivors and their descendants, Luckerson provides an honest accounting of this potent national symbol of success and solidarity and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.