[song playing]
[Hill] The Greenwood district
was one of the most prominent and affluent Black communities in the country.
It was a symbol of what is possible
for Black people in America.
But to understand
the story of Black Wall Street,
we have to go back to the Trail of Tears.
First Black people to come to Oklahoma
were actually members of the Native American tribes.
[Harjo] The five tribes, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek and Seminole
were slave-holding tribes.
Some of them wanted to show that they were in allyship
by mimicking what like the white settlers are doing.
Indigenous people were affected by anti-Black racism.
The process invited them into the slave-holder culture,
even as they were subject to the worst forms
of oppression and discrimination of themselves.
When the Five Tribes signed a Removal Treaty,
they had to remove their Black slaves too.
[Harjo] The Indian Removal Act of 1830
forcibly evicts Native American tribes in the southeast,
and transfers their lands to white farmers
to expand cotton plantations.
Over 100,000 Native Americans
and approximately 4,000 enslaved African-Americans
make the treacherous journey to Indian territory,
now known as Oklahoma.
The over 5,000 mile brutal and deadly removal
is known as the Trail of Tears and Death.
[Grayson] When everybody got to Oklahoma,
there were many different ways...
Black people were still enslaved here.
They still were property.
And they had to rebuild what the Indian tribes had in the Deep South.
After the Civil War, you had freed men living in Oklahoma.
You have a freed Black population,
able to live on tribal lands in a communal way.
[jazz music playing]
[narrator] The Dawes Act passed in 1887,
allowing the Federal government to break up
tribal lands into individual plots.
[Luckerson] Black people in Oklahoma owned more land
than any other part of the country.
About two million acres of land were allotted to freed men.
So when you think about forty acres and a mule, and that false promise
after the Civil War,
Black people actually got that in Oklahoma.
[Hill] Those land allotments become the seeds of more than 50 Black towns
that emerge in Oklahoma.
More than any other state in the country.
Once the five tribes received their allotment,
then whatever was left,
that was deemed surplus
and the government opened it for sale to whoever wanted to buy it.
OW Gurley was a Southerner who hailed from Arkansas,
who came to Tulsa to purchase land.
The land that Greenwood exists on,
was not land that whites at that time deemed as valuable,
but as land that could be sold to "a negro buyer."
Gurley purchases an allotment of land.
His goal was to incubate a Black community.
[Luckerson] OW Gurley opened a grocery store on what would become Greenwood Avenue.
He was really able to tap into a lot of dynamics happening throughout the state,
where people would be travelling to meet different communities.
And some of the freed men went up and set up on Greenwood.
They were able to provide some of that nurturing wealth.
[Hill] Land for recently enslaved people
is everything.
Because we have to imagine a world
in which an enslaved person did not have property rights in themselves.