Omni Circle visits Black Wall Street

OMNI CIRCLE came prepared.

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OMNI CIRCLE is a Topeka, KS  based community empowerment collaborative providing workspaces and professional development, which also focuses on sustainability.

 

Reaching beyond Topeka, that development prompted OMNI CIRCLE to take 30 future entrepreneurs (aka high school students) on a 10 hour trip back in time to BLACK WALL STREET in the Historic Greenwood district of NORTH TULSA.

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Everyone from Kansas had done their homework. You'll hear Chris, the guide at Greenwood Rising, and Alnetta Morris at OSU-Tulsa in the clips below, but, just as often you'll hear OMNI CIRCLE professionals explaining the significance of Oklahoma's most decorated scholar, Dr. John Hope Franklin, or why two of the nation's rarest historical markers are located on the campus of OSU-Tulsa.

 

OMNI CIRCLE's tour bus arrived at the Greenwood Cultural Center on a Friday afternoon in June at about 11am. Half of the group continued on to Greenwood Rising with the tour planner as guide, the remaning group of 20, adult chaperones and students, remained with Green Book Travelers creator Mike McUsic, visiting the center's vast collection telling the story of Historic Greenwood both before and after the nation's only domestic aerial bombing of a US city occurred in 1921.

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Divided into 4 groups of 10, OMNI CIRCLE paid the ultimate compliment to BLACK WALL STREET, next, having lunch at Wanda J's Next Generation, Fat Guy's Burgers and Lefty's on Greenwood.

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Oklahoma State University-Tulsa Community Engagement Coordinator, introduced the full tour to OSU=Tulsa's Black Settler in Tulsa exhibit by world-renowned photographer Don Thompson with narratives by historian Eddie Faye Getes whose pivotal earlly work identifying and interviewing survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre with a youhg videographer, Kavin Ross, became a major catalyst for the state's recent 1921 commemorations.

 

Followed by a walking tour of the BTW marker recognizing the current campus sits on the 1905 and 1920s sites of the Booker T. Washington High School located in Black Wall Street until the 1950s, continuing on, the group paused for future OSU hopefuls to take photos in front of the OSU sign at the south end of the campus.

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At the Ellis Walker Woods Memorial, one of only a handful of major monuments anywhere in the world dedicated to African Americans, Mrs. Morris revealed the early history of NORTH TULSA from 1913-1951...from Ellis Walker Woods' arrival to his death in  NORTH TULSA.

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Non-negotiable on the tour was a visit to OAKLAWN CEMETERY and the 1921 Gravesites excavations. On this final leg of the tour, 1921 Gravesite Oversight Committee member Kavin Ross (yes the same young man who, decades earlier, held the camera while Mrs. Eddie Faye Gates interviewed 1921 Race Massacre Survivors) gave an overview of progress at Oaklawn, via microphone to phone, on board the bus.

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We'd forgotten something.

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Back to Historic Greenwood and the Greenwood Cultural Center for a photo at the colorful mural.

 

update: The mural is painted on the highway overpass wall that replaced Cameron Street. 

Greenwood Avenue was not the only bustling businsess street destroyed in the 1921 disaster. Cameron Street was also one of the oldest and most prominent Black business miles of the many other BLACK WALL STREET streets destroyed in 1921 and throughout the last century.

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This March, 2023, a grassroots community-led coalition was granted $1.6 million by the federal Department of Transportion to undertake a study to remove the highway overpass and recover approximately 23 acres of the 36 square blocks destroyed in 1921, entering as a community trust.

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lopment

 

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