During the night of May 31, 1921, mobs of white people stormed the thriving Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. With some individuals deputized by local officials, they burned more than 1,000 Black-owned homes and businesses and killed upwards of 300 people. The full tally of the dead is unknown because the horrific event was not investigated seriously in the Jim Crow era, and it was deliberately left out of history books in the decades that followed.
Now, the full story is being told. Greenwood Rising, a new museum that opened in the historic neighborhood in early August, explores the tragedy of the massacre in vivid ways. Through video mapping and an audiovisual depiction of the event based on oral histories of survivors, the museum reconstructs one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.
But it also tells a broader narrative about the thriving economy known in the early 20th century as Black Wall Street, including how the community developed and the systems of oppression that allowed such violence to tear it all apart.
The multimedia museum experience was designed by Local Projects, the New York–based firm known for its work on the National September 11 Memorial Museum, as well as nuanced historical venues such as Hyde Park Barracks, a museum focused on the early days and mixed impacts of colonialism in Australia.
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