LAKE HAVASU CITY – In honor of Black History Month, Lake Havasu got the opportunity to learn more about a lost but not forgotten historic era.The Black Wall Street discussion took place on Tuesday, February 20 at Mohave Community College.
The free event was brought to the community by the public programs non-profit Arizona Humanities. Keynote speaker was Dr. Tamika Sanders. Dr. Sanders is the current proprietor of Savvy Pen, the company that gives a collective curriculum which includes multicultural training and the arts to join socioeconomic and cultural divides between students and educators.
Dr. Sanders has a Bachelors of Arts in Communications, a Masters in Business Administration, and a PhD in Higher Education. The doctor’s ultimate goal is to carry out her mission to shatter boundaries, develop social change, and bring people together of all ethnicities and backgrounds. During the discussion, Dr. Sanders shared the rise and collapse of the 1920s Black Wall Street in Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The founder of the town, Ottowa Gurley. Gurley was a product of freed slaves and self-educated.
Gurley, who married his high school sweetheart, held jobs as a teacher and U.S. Postal worker. In 1893, he was an active participant in the Cherokee Outlet Rush. This was a Native American territory where he staked a claim in Perry Noble County. Later, Gurley owned and operated a shop in the neighborhood and became the principal of a local school. Eventually, he purchased forty acres of land that he subdivided into commercial and residential lots.
As the Greenwood area grew Gurley thrived. Within a decade, the black population of the area went from 2,000 to 9,000 and eventually, the population of the town was 72,000. The working class was filled with lawyers, doctors, and many other professions. It was a town that Civil Rights Leader Booker T. Washington coined, The Negro Wall Street.
By 1919, accusations of a young black male sexually assaulting a white female caused violent threats. The Greenwood community tried to prevent authorities from lynching the accused at the courthouse. However, their quest resulted in a physical altercation between a black and white man and a gunfire spark. That spark is what many historians have depicted as the beginning of the Tulsa Massacre in 1921. This dispute was coupled with the forcible resettlement of southeast Native Americans who previously owned slaves. Gurley was arrested for inciting the disagreements but his release was secured by newspaper editor A.J. Smitherman and hotel owner, J.B. Stradford.
In the aftermath of the massacre, it was estimated that three hundred black people were murdered, and Black Wall Street was demolished by fire. Officials erased the ordeal from Tulsa’s historical records as the graves remained unmarked. Dr. Sanders shed light on the grim conclusion with factual stories about the breakthrough discoveries for some of the victim’s graves almost a century later. In 2020, six sets of exhumed remains were found which generated DNA that could be traced back to living relatives. By 2022, state archeologists were able to have twenty two bodies analyzed for DNA.
More findings still remain in the works, as more graves have yet to be discovered. Visit Home Front Page – AZ Humanities to learn more about how this organization continues to bring education, human experiences, and history to communities.
Phaedra Veronique
