There Were Dozens of Black Wall Streets — You Only Know Tulsa Because It Burned

There is a version of Black American history that has been polished down to a single parable, smooth and portable and ultimately useless: once upon a time there was a place called Greenwood, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Black people built something magnificent, and then white people burned it to the ground, and the lesson is that white supremacy will always destroy what we build, so perhaps we should not build at all but instead wait for restitution that is always promised and never delivered. It is a story designed to produce outrage and despair in equal measure, and it has the additional convenience of requiring nothing from the listener except the performance of sorrow. But it is not the whole story. It is not even the most important part of the story. Because Greenwood was not an anomaly. It was not a miracle. It was one district among dozens — dozens — of thriving, self-sustaining, economically formidable Black business communities that existed across the United States from Reconstruction through the mid-twentieth century, and the fact that you know Tulsa and cannot name the others is itself a kind of erasure more devastating than fire.

The question that should haunt us is not why Greenwood burned. The question that should haunt us is why the others disappeared — quietly, without flames, without mobs, without a single shot fired — and what their disappearance tells us about the actual mechanics of Black economic decline in America.

The Geography of Black Prosperity

Let us begin with a tour of what existed, because the scope of it has been so thoroughly suppressed that even well-educated Black Americans cannot name more than one or two of these districts, and most white Americans cannot name any. In Atlanta, there was Sweet Auburn Avenue, which in 1956 Fortune magazine called “the richest Negro street in the world.” It was home to the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, Citizens Trust Bank, the Atlanta Daily World (the nation’s first Black daily newspaper), and the Rucker Building, which housed Black professionals — doctors, lawyers, dentists — who served a community that white professionals would not. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on Auburn Avenue. His father pastored Ebenezer Baptist Church there. The district stretched for a dozen blocks and contained virtually every service a person could need, provided entirely by Black hands.

In Chicago, there was Bronzeville, the South Side neighborhood that between 1920 and 1950 was the cultural and economic capital of Black America. It had its own banks, its own insurance companies, its own hospitals, its own newspapers (the Chicago Defender, the most influential Black newspaper in American history), its own entertainment venues (the Regal Theater, the Savoy Ballroom), and its own publishing houses. Bronzeville produced Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong (during his Chicago years), Ida B. Wells, and an entire generation of Black intellectuals and artists who shaped the twentieth century. The economic output of Bronzeville’s Black-owned businesses ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s currency.

In Richmond, Virginia, there was Jackson Ward, known as the “Harlem of the South” and “Black Wall Street of the South” long before anyone applied that phrase to Tulsa. Jackson Ward was home to the Southern Aid Society (one of the oldest Black-owned insurance companies in America), the Consolidated Bank and Trust (the oldest continuously operating Black-owned bank in the United States, founded in 1903), and Maggie Lena Walker, who in 1903 became the first woman of any race to charter and serve as president of a bank in America. Jackson Ward had its own theaters, its own hotels, its own restaurants, and its own professional class, and it operated with the sophisticated financial infrastructure — banks, insurance, credit — that is the prerequisite for any community’s economic self-determination.

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. You do not need the sociologist to tell you that.”
— James Baldwin

In Durham, North Carolina, there was Parrish Street, which Booker T. Washington himself called the “Black Wall Street of America” in 1910 — a full decade before Tulsa’s Greenwood earned the name. Parrish Street was home to the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (the largest Black-owned business in America for most of the twentieth century), Mechanics and Farmers Bank, and the Mutual Community Savings Bank. Durham’s Black business ecosystem was so sophisticated that W.E.B. Du Bois, who disagreed with Washington about almost everything, surveyed the city and conceded that it represented the most impressive example of Black economic organization in the country. Also in Durham was the Hayti district, a self-contained Black community of over 70,000 people with its own schools, churches, businesses, and social institutions — a city within a city.

In Kansas City, Missouri, there was the 18th and Vine district, which produced Charlie Parker, Count Basie, and an entire jazz tradition, but which was also a complete economic ecosystem: hotels, restaurants, barbershops, medical offices, law firms, and the Kansas City Call newspaper. In Dallas, there was Deep Ellum, where Black entrepreneurs built a commercial district that thrived from the 1870s through the 1940s. In Wilmington, North Carolina, before the 1898 coup (which is another story that demands its own reckoning), Black citizens had built a political and economic infrastructure so impressive that it provoked a violent white supremacist overthrow of the elected government — one of the only successful coups d’état in American history.

What They Had in Common

These districts were separated by hundreds of miles and by the particular textures of their local histories, but they shared a set of structural features that explain their success and, more importantly, explain what has been lost. First, they were self-contained economies. Because Jim Crow barred Black consumers from white businesses (or subjected them to humiliation when they entered), Black dollars circulated within the Black community multiple times before leaving it. Economists call this the “multiplier effect,” and studies of these districts suggest that a dollar circulated within the Black community an average of six to nine times before exiting, compared to roughly one time today. Every haircut, every insurance premium, every bag of groceries, every doctor’s visit enriched a Black business owner, who employed Black workers, who spent their wages at Black establishments.

Second, they had Black-owned financial institutions. This point cannot be overstated. Every one of these districts had its own bank, its own insurance company, or both. These institutions performed the function that is the lifeblood of any economy: they aggregated community savings and reinvested them as business loans, mortgages, and lines of credit within the same community. The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in Durham, at its peak, had assets exceeding $200 million and was making loans to Black businesses and homeowners who could not access white capital. Citizens Trust Bank in Atlanta, Mechanics and Farmers in Durham, Consolidated in Richmond — these were not symbolic institutions. They were the financial engines that made everything else possible.

Third, they had professional classes who lived in the same community they served. Because residential segregation confined Black doctors, lawyers, teachers, and entrepreneurs to Black neighborhoods, these communities had the benefit of their most talented and educated citizens as residents and stakeholders. The doctor who delivered your baby was your neighbor. The lawyer who handled your property dispute went to your church. The insurance agent who sold you a policy had children in the same school as yours. This was not merely pleasant; it was structurally decisive. It meant that the community’s human capital — its most educated, most skilled, most ambitious members — had a direct material interest in the community’s success.

The Paradox of Jim Crow Prosperity

Here is the truth that is almost impossible to speak in our current intellectual climate, and yet it must be spoken because the alternative is to continue misdiagnosing the disease: Jim Crow was evil, and the economic ecosystem it inadvertently created was effective. Both of these statements are true. They are not in contradiction. Segregation was a moral catastrophe and a human rights atrocity. It was also, by the brute mechanics of captive markets, the most powerful engine of Black business formation in American history. The lesson is not that segregation was good. The lesson is that economic self-containment — the circulation of dollars within a community, the investment of savings in community enterprises, the patronage of community institutions — produces prosperity regardless of the circumstances that create it, and the destruction of that self-containment produces decline regardless of the freedoms that accompany it.

This is not a theory. It is what happened. And the mechanism of destruction was not, in most cases, fire or violence. It was something far more insidious, something that arrived dressed in the language of progress and liberation.

How Integration Destroyed What Segregation Could Not

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the desegregation rulings that preceded it were moral triumphs. They dismantled a system of legal apartheid that was incompatible with any civilized conception of human dignity. But they also had an economic consequence that no one anticipated, or if anyone anticipated it, no one discussed, because to discuss it would have been to provide ammunition to segregationists: when Black consumers gained access to white businesses, they left Black businesses behind.

The moment the department stores downtown would serve Black customers, the Black-owned clothing stores on Auburn Avenue and Parrish Street and 18th and Vine began to lose their customer base. The moment the white hospitals would admit Black patients, the Black-owned hospitals and medical practices lost theirs. The moment the white banks would process Black mortgage applications (at higher rates, with more scrutiny, but they would process them), the Black-owned banks saw deposits migrate. Integration gave Black consumers more choices, and Black consumers, like all consumers, chose the larger inventories, lower prices, and perceived prestige of white-owned establishments. They were not wrong to do so. But the cumulative effect was catastrophic.

“What happened to Black business in the wake of the Civil Rights movement was not unlike what happened to neighborhood stores when Wal-Mart came to town: the logic of the market is merciless to the smaller competitor, and in this case the smaller competitor was the entire Black business ecosystem.”
— Robert Weems, Jr., historian

Robert Weems, in his essential study Desegregating the Dollar, documented how the desegregation of consumer markets simultaneously liberated Black consumers and devastated Black producers. The number of Black-owned retail establishments declined precipitously in the two decades following the Civil Rights Act. Black-owned insurance companies, which had thrived precisely because white companies would not insure Black lives, saw their market share collapse when mainstream insurers, now legally required to serve Black customers, entered the market with larger reserves and lower premiums. Black-owned banks, which had never had access to the capital reserves available to white institutions, were outcompeted the moment the playing field was nominally leveled.

And then came urban renewal.

The Federal Bulldozer

If integration was the slow bleed, urban renewal was the amputation. Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating through the 1970s, the federal government’s urban renewal programs — which James Baldwin called, with his usual precision, “Negro removal” — demolished the physical infrastructure of Black business districts across the country. Interstate highways were routed, with suspicious precision, through the hearts of thriving Black neighborhoods. The construction of Interstate 40 through Durham destroyed the Hayti district, severing a community of 70,000 people and demolishing hundreds of Black-owned businesses. Interstate 85 cut through the heart of Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn. The Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago was deliberately routed to create a physical barrier between Bronzeville and white neighborhoods, accelerating the district’s decline. In Richmond, the construction of Interstate 95 bisected Jackson Ward.

This was not accidental. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 gave state and local officials the power to determine highway routes, and those officials, in city after city, chose routes that demolished Black neighborhoods while preserving white ones. The residents displaced received minimal compensation — often below market value, since the very announcement of a highway route depressed property values — and were scattered to public housing projects and suburban peripheries where no business infrastructure existed. In a single generation, the physical capital that had taken a century to build — the buildings, the storefronts, the banks, the churches, the theaters — was reduced to rubble and asphalt.

The Flight of the Black Professional Class

The third mechanism of destruction was the departure of the Black professional class from the communities they had once anchored. When fair housing laws opened white suburbs to Black families with means, the doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs who had once been confined to Black neighborhoods left. They were exercising a right that had been unjustly denied them, and no one can blame them for wanting better schools, safer streets, and larger homes. But their departure removed from Black neighborhoods the human capital, the institutional leadership, the economic demand, and the social modeling that had sustained those communities for generations.

William Julius Wilson, in his landmark study The Truly Disadvantaged, identified this outmigration of the Black middle class as the decisive factor in the creation of the concentrated poverty that now characterizes America’s inner cities. When the Black doctor and the Black teacher and the Black insurance executive lived on the same block as the Black janitor and the Black factory worker, the neighborhood had economic diversity, institutional stability, and visible models of professional success. When they left, they took all of that with them, and what remained was a community stripped of its most capable members, its financial institutions, its businesses, and its hope.

What These Districts Teach Us Now

The story of the Black Wall Streets is typically told as a tragedy — look what was taken from us — and it is a tragedy, but it is also something more important: it is a blueprint. These districts prove, with the force of documented economic history, that Black Americans are fully capable of building self-sustaining, prosperous economies without government assistance, without white patronage, and without the permission of any external authority. They did it under conditions that were incomparably worse than anything that exists today. They did it without SBA loans, without venture capital, without affirmative action programs, without diversity grants, without corporate mentorship pipelines, without a single one of the institutional supports that are now considered prerequisites for Black economic participation.

They did it with each other. They did it by keeping their dollars in their communities. They did it by building their own banks and insurance companies. They did it by patronizing their own professionals. They did it, in short, by practicing the kind of economic self-determination that is now dismissed as separatism by those who prefer the comfortable dependency of perpetual complaint.

The data on the modern Black dollar is damning. According to research from the Selig Center for Economic Growth, Black Americans have over $1.7 trillion in annual buying power. That figure makes Black America, considered as a separate economy, the fifteenth-largest economy on Earth — larger than Mexico, larger than Indonesia, larger than the Netherlands. And yet, by multiple estimates, a dollar circulates in the Black community for approximately six hours before leaving it, compared to roughly twenty days in white communities and nearly thirty days in Asian American communities. Six hours. The money enters the community and leaves it before the sun moves across the sky.

The builders of Sweet Auburn and Parrish Street and Bronzeville and Jackson Ward understood something that we have forgotten, or have been taught to dismiss as unsophisticated: wealth is not a paycheck. Wealth is what happens when money stays. When it circulates. When it is deposited in community banks and lent to community businesses and spent at community establishments and re-deposited and re-lent and re-spent. Wealth is a cycle, and the cycle requires containment — not the involuntary containment of Jim Crow, but the voluntary, strategic, deliberate containment of a people who understand that their economic survival depends on their willingness to invest in themselves.

The Blueprint, Not the Elegy

There are those who will read this and hear a call for re-segregation. They are hearing what they want to hear, not what is being said. No one is arguing that Black Americans should be confined to separate districts by law. The argument is that Black Americans should choose, strategically and deliberately, to direct their economic power toward Black-owned institutions — not out of racial chauvinism, but out of the same economic self-interest that every other successful ethnic group in American history has practiced. Korean Americans support Korean-owned businesses. Jewish Americans built and sustained their own financial institutions. Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Chinese Americans — every immigrant group that achieved economic stability in America did so by circulating capital within its own community until that community was strong enough to compete on equal terms in the broader market.

Black Americans are the only group in the country that is told, by its own leadership and its own intellectual class, that the desire for economic self-determination is regressive, that the proper path to prosperity runs through corporate America and government programs, that the highest aspiration of a talented young Black person should be a seat at someone else’s table rather than the construction of a table of their own. This is not liberation. It is a different kind of captivity, and the proof is in the numbers: $1.7 trillion in buying power and a median household wealth of $24,100, compared to $189,100 for white households.

The builders of the Black Wall Streets — all of them, not just the one that burned — knew something that we must learn again, or learn for the first time, or stop pretending we do not know. They knew that economic power is the only power that cannot be given and cannot be taken by vote or by decree. It must be built, brick by brick, dollar by dollar, business by business, in the specific and particular community where you live, among the specific and particular people who share your condition. They built it. We can build it again. The only question is whether we will choose to — or whether we will continue to mourn what was lost while refusing to do what the builders did, which was not to mourn at all, but to build.