Black History Month 2022: O.W. Gurley

The Visionary of Black Wall Street Tulsa, Ok

Baron of Black Wall Street

1. O.W. Gurley was once known as the wealthiest black man.
2. Born to freed slaves in Huntsville, Alabama, he grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas where he was largely self-educated.
3. He was a landowner from Arkansas, who traveled the United States to take part in the Oklahoma Land Grab of 1889.
4. The young businessman resigned from a presidential appointment under then-president Grover Cleveland to venture out and found his own town.
5. In 1906, Gurley moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma where he bought 40 acres of land that was only “to be sold to colored.” Black ownership was unheard of at the time.
6. One of Gurley’s first businesses was a rooming house which was built along a dusty trail near the railroad tracks. This road would later become Greenwood Ave. of the legendary Black Wall Street.
7. Adding to the rooming house, Gurley went on to build three two-story buildings and five residential homes. He also purchased an 80-acre farm in nearby Rogers County.
8. The entrepreneur later founded a church, today known as Vernon AME Church.
9. By 1913, more businesses began springing up in Gurley’s Greenwood district, including hotels, law and doctor’s offices, cafes, pharmacies, barbershops, movie theaters, hair salons, pool halls, auto repair shops, grocers, and funeral homes. There was a Y.M.C.A and a roller skating rink, a hospital, and a U.S. post office substation. Eventually, there were hundreds of businesses, all were Black-owned and operated.
10. It was calculated that every dollar spent in Greenwood circulated the Black economy nearly thirty times as business thrived. 
11. Booker T. Washington himself dubbed  Greenwood “Negro Wall Street,” because all of those businesses were Black-owned, 
12. After hundreds of thousands of Black veterans returned to Jim Crow and segregation, there was “Red Summer” in 1919, which was a period of white supremacist terror with lynching’s and race riot and the reemergence of the Klu Klux Klan.
13. On May 30,2021, a black shoeshine man named Dick Rowland was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman, Sarah Page, in the elevator of a downtown office building. Racial tensions flared when he was arrested and Gurley tried to make peace but the town succumbed to violence and fire by a mob.
14. The 2001 Commission to study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, reported that kerosene bombs were dropped from airplanes to demolish buildings, and when the assault was over, as many as 50 whites and 200 Blacks were dead, and more than 35 square blocks had been destroyed.
15. Those who survived the riot were rounded up by the National Guard and put in internment centers for many weeks and months.
16. The entrepreneur lost all he had built after an angry white mob attacked and set fire to the Greenwood district, burning everything to the ground. He lost an estimated $200,000, or over 5 million today, in the 1921 race war.
17. It was rumored that Gurley had been lynched by a white mob in the race war, but the memoirs of fellow Greenwood pioneer, B.C. Franklin indicate that he exiled himself to California where he later died.