Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street

ISBN: 0593134397

Author: Luckerson, Victor

Condition: New

A multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsas Greenwood district, known as Black Wall Street, that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrificationAmbitious . . . absorbing . . . By the end of Luckersons outstanding book, the idea of building something new from the ashes of what has been destroyed becomes comprehensible, even hopeful.-Marcia Chatelain, The New York TimesWINNER OF THE SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARD A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEARWhen Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his family joined a community soon to become 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, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people in one of the worst acts of racist violence in U.S. history.The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt the district into a Mecca, in Eds words, where nightlife thrived and small businesses flourished. Ed bought a newspaper to chronicle Greenwoods resurgence and battles against white bigotry, and his son Jim, an attorney, embodied the familys hopes for the civil rights movement. But by the 1970s urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood. Today the newspaper remains, and Eds granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists to revive it once again.In Built from the Fire, journalist Victor Luckerson tells the true story behind a potent national symbol of success and solidarity and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.