Entry · catalog no. 1144
Black Wall Street
/ /blæk wɔl striːt/ /BLAK wawl STREET
proper noun · Greenwood District, Tulsa, Oklahoma; extended nationally · 1950s
✓ Verified
1.
The Black business district in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, built up after O.W. Gurley bought forty acres there in 1906 and sold lots to Black buyers. Under Oklahoma segregation, Black dollars circulated inside the district's own grocers, hotels, theaters, doctors' offices, law practices and newspapers rather than leaving it, and the density of that ownership is what the name points at. White mobs burned the district over roughly eighteen hours on May 31 and June 1, 1921. The state commission that studied the attack estimated 100 to 300 people killed and more than 8,000 left homeless.
“My great-grandmother's people had a shoe shop on Greenwood — that was Black Wall Street before they burned it.”
2.
Extended sense: any Black commercial corridor with enough Black-owned capital in it to sustain itself, used of historic districts such as Parrish Street in Durham, Jackson Ward in Richmond, Sweet Auburn in Atlanta and Bronzeville in Chicago, and used aspirationally of present-day efforts to rebuild Black business ownership on a single strip.
“They're calling that corridor the new Black Wall Street, but ownership is what makes the name, not signage.”
Origin & Attribution
The place is Black Tulsa; the era is 1906 to 1921 for the district and roughly the 1950s onward for the phrase itself in wide circulation. The near-universal claim that Booker T. Washington coined the term after visiting Greenwood — supposedly saying "the Negro Wall Street of America" — does not hold up to sourcing. Washington toured Indian Territory in 1905, a year before Gurley platted Greenwood, and the writing that survives from his Oklahoma travel praises the all-Black town of Boley, not Tulsa; his 1908 Outlook piece is titled for Boley. His documented Durham writing, in The Independent in 1911, praises that city's Black enterprise without using any Wall Street comparison. North Carolina's state history sources date the Parrish Street nickname to roughly the 1950s. The honest position: the phrase is a Black American coinage of uncertain individual authorship that attached itself to several districts, and Greenwood's claim on it rests on what was built and what was destroyed, not on a celebrity christening.
1906
O.W. Gurley buys forty acres in north Tulsa and begins selling lots to Black buyers; Greenwood takes shape
1921
White mobs destroy the district on May 31 and June 1; hundreds killed, thousands left homeless
2001
Oklahoma's state commission delivers its final report, putting the death toll at 100 to 300
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Greenwood District, Tulsa, Oklahoma; extended nationally · 1950s
Spoken by
Black Americans nationally; Greenwood descendants and Tulsa residents; Black business and civic organizations; historians and journalists
$BLACKWThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady76 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
92/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1950
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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By region — how it actually sounds
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Final Report (State of Oklahoma, submitted 21 February 2001)
report · government
■
Michael Hill, "Black Wall Street, Durham, North Carolina," NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina, 2003) — cites Booker T. Washington, "Durham, North Carolina, a City of Negro Enterprise," The Independent, 30 March 1911, which uses no Wall Street comparison
reference · encyclopedic
■
Victor Luckerson, "The Other Black Wall Streets," Run It Back, 8 April 2021
news · reported
■
+ Cite a sourceBooker T. Washington, "Boley, a Negro Town in the West," The Outlook, 1908
magazine · printed
See also