The Social And Economic Effects Of The Tulsa Race Massacre

African Americans most notably have disparate figures in wealth in contrast to white Americans. In 1920 in a neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, however, the wealth gap was hardly visible. In Greenwood, African Americans developed their own community that was enriched with Black-owned stores and economic prosperity. In 1921, Greenwood’s Black neighborhood was bombed, burned, looted, and destroyed along with its wealth and history in it. Today, it is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. The underlying reasons behind the massacre, including animosity against African Americas for their wealth, and the effects that followed afterward were a precursor and a predictor of the wealth divide.

Black Wall Street is what the neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa,

The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 was the result of those three things which led to the destruction of Black Wall Street. Messer et. al. (2018) explains the cause of animosity and jealousy by utilizing the group threat theory. It states that “dominant groups seek to preserve their advantaged social position and view encroachments on their prerogatives by minority groups as disrupting the existing social order” (Messer, et. al., 2018, p. 794). At the time of Black Wall Street’s existence, the United States was racially segregated and just experienced the aftermath of the Red Summer of 1919 in which white Americans brutally murdered and attacked African Americans across the United States (Messer, et. al., 2018). For white Americans, witnessing a prosperous Black community at the time of Jim Crow was a threat to their existence, especially economically. White Americans in Greenwood felt threatened by the increasing African American population and their increasing wealth (Messer, Shriver, & Adams, The Destruction of Black Wall Street: Tulsa's 1921 Riot and the Eradication of Accumulated Wealth, 2018). Thus, the threat of violence was looming on Black Wall Street. The Tulsa Massacre began after a young African American man was accused of assaulting a young white woman (Messer, Shriver, & Adams, The Destruction of Black Wall Street: Tulsa's 1921 Riot and the

The racist legislation that followed after the destruction of Black Wall Street haunted generations of African Americans then and now. It is this legislation, rooted in both fear (from feeling threatened), jealousy, animosity, and racism that has perpetuated the racial wealth gap. These legislations and the threat of violence have led to a decrease in homeownership for African Americans; 49% of African Americans owned homes in contrast to 76% of whites between 1994 and 2017 (Asante-Muhammad, et. al., 2017). Although the black middle class increased greatly during the 1950s and throughout the 1980s—with 4 million African Americans belonging to the middle class between 1960 and 1965—it began to decelerate (Gregg, 1998). This was the result of legislation that decreased government employment, the increase of service jobs where skilled workers were paid less, and the US military not hiring many African Americans (Gregg, 1998). “Thus, although the size of the black middle class continued to increase during the 1980s, so that as many as a third of all Black families now earn between $25,000 and $50,000, thereby placing them at the low end of the American middle class…” (Gregg, 1998, p.