Built from the Fire
The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street,” that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification
“Ambitious . . . absorbing . . . By the end of Luckerson’s 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 Times
WINNER: The Dayton Literary Peace Prize; The MAAH Stone Book Award; The SABEW Best in Business Book Award; The Lillian Smith Book Award; The Oklahoma Historical Society’s E. E. Dale Award
FINALIST: The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
When 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 Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived and small businesses flourished. Ed bought a newspaper to chronicle Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry, and his son Jim, an attorney, embodied the family’s hopes for the civil rights movement. But by the 1970s urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood. Today the newspaper remains, and Ed’s 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Luckerson debuts with an immersive history of Greenwood, the prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., that was burned to the ground by white rioters in 1921. Detailing multiple phases of the neighborhood's history, he notes that by 1920, Greenwood boasted Black-owned beauty shops, grocery stores, and saloons, as well as A.J. Smitherman's Tulsa Star newspaper, which covered topics of interest to Black Tulsa, and the Stradford Hotel, which owner J.B. Stradford intended to cater to affluent Black customers. After the massacre, Greenwood residents overcame many obstacles to reestablish the area as a rich wellspring of Black culture and business, but highway construction and "urban renewal" programs in the 1960s and '70s splintered the community. Documenting the fight to maintain the spirit of Greenwood, Luckerson spotlights the Goodwin family, including patriarch J.H. Goodwin, who left Mississippi for Tulsa in 1913, and his great-granddaughter Regina Goodwin, the only Black woman in Oklahoma's House of Representatives. The sprawling narrative also touches on the Black Lives Matter movement, the search for mass graves of the riot's victims, and debates over how best to mark the 2021 centennial of the massacre. It's a comprehensive and impassioned portrait of a community fighting for its survival. Photos.
