Glossary

O.W. Gurley: Black businessman who bought land on Greenwood Avenue in 1906 and sold parcels to Black buyers, helping found the district.
J.B. Stradford: Born into slavery in Kentucky; became a lawyer and built the Stradford Hotel, widely described as the largest Black-owned hotel in America.
A.J. Smitherman: Founder and editor of the Tulsa Star (1913), Greenwood's watchdog and megaphone.
Dr. A.C. Jackson: Greenwood surgeon the Mayo brothers reportedly called the most able Black surgeon in America; killed in the massacre.
Dick Rowland: Nineteen-year-old Black shoeshiner whose arrest on May 31, 1921 set off the events that followed.
Sarah Page: The white elevator operator in the Drexel Building. The most widely accepted account is that Rowland tripped and grabbed her arm; she did not press charges.
Buck Colbert Franklin: Black lawyer who practiced from a tent after the massacre and won the court fight against the city's attempt to block rebuilding.
Loula and John Williams: Owners of the Dreamland Theatre and the Williams Confectionery on Greenwood Avenue.
Booker T. Washington: Educator often credited with coining the phrase "Black Wall Street," though the original source is unclear.
Greenwood: Tulsa's Black district, centered on Greenwood Avenue; by 1921 one of the most prosperous Black communities in America.
Black Wall Street: The nickname for Greenwood's thriving business district.
Indian Territory: The land, later Oklahoma, where the Five Tribes were forcibly relocated and where Black towns and Freedmen communities grew.
The Five Tribes: The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee) and Seminole nations.
Freedmen: Black people formerly enslaved by citizens of the Five Tribes, entitled by treaty to citizenship and land.
Dreamland Theatre: The Williams family's roughly 750-seat theater: silent films, live acts, and community pride.
Stradford Hotel: J.B. Stradford's three-story, 54-room hotel with a dining hall and saloon.
Mount Zion Baptist Church: Greenwood congregation that dedicated its new brick sanctuary in April 1921, weeks before it was burned.
The Drexel Building: The downtown Tulsa building where the May 30, 1921 elevator incident occurred.
Greenwood Rising: The history center in Tulsa today dedicated to Greenwood's story.
The Tulsa Race Massacre: May 31 to June 1, 1921: a white mob, many deputized and armed, looted and burned Greenwood, destroying some 35 blocks.
Jim Crow: The laws and customs that enforced racial segregation across the American South.
Segregation: The forced separation of Black and white people in public life; in Tulsa it pushed Black spending into Black-owned businesses.
Lynching: Killing by a mob, without a trial, used to terrorize Black communities.
The Dawes Rolls: The federal enrollment of the Five Tribes and Freedmen that turned tribal land into individual allotments.
Allotment: The breaking up of communally held tribal land into individual parcels, opening the rest to white settlement.
Glenn Pool: The great oil field south of Tulsa whose boom made the city rich.
The Tulsa Star: A.J. Smitherman's Black-owned newspaper, founded 1913; destroyed in the massacre.
The Tulsa Tribune: Tulsa's white afternoon paper, whose May 31, 1921 coverage inflamed the city; the editorial page is missing from archived copies.
Red Summer: 1919, when white mob violence against Black communities erupted in dozens of American cities.
Martial law: Military rule, declared in Tulsa on June 1, 1921 as the district burned.
Deputized: Given temporary police powers; hundreds of white men were deputized and armed during the massacre.
Reparations: Compensation for a wrong; survivors and descendants have sought it for a century.
The Great Migration: The movement of millions of Black Americans from the rural South to northern and western cities.
The Ku Klux Klan: The white supremacist organization that grew in Oklahoma in the years around the massacre.
Moore v. Dempsey: The 1923 Supreme Court case that overturned death sentences of Black men convicted after the Elaine massacre.