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‘The foundation of the wealth’: Why Black Wall Street boomed

Steve ScottJune 1, 2021

In this Monday, June 15, 2020 photo, Kristi Williams speaks during an interview at her home in Tulsa, Okla. Unlike Black Americans across the country after slavery, Williams' ancestors and thousands of other Black members of slave-owning Indian nations freed after the war “had land,” says Williams, a Tulsa community activist. “They had opportunity to build a house on that land, farm that land, and they were wealthy with their crops." (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

Americans have commemorated a long-suppressed part of U.S. history.

Monday marked the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, an attack that erased a thriving black Tulsa community known around the country as Black Wall Street.

But Tulsa’s Black Native Americans say there’s another bit of history that also deserves more attention: the source of the seed money that helped Black Wall Street boom.

The U.S. compelled American Indian nations that enslaved people and fought with the Confederacy to share wealth and land with Black people who were freed.

Historian Alaina Roberts of the University of Pittsburgh says that makes communities like Black Wall Street part of the world’s only large-scale examples of the difference reparations could have made after slavery.