“The foundation of the wealth:” Why Black Wall Street boomed

Image: PBS

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Americans are about to commemorate a long-suppressed part of U.S. history. Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, an attack that erased a thriving black Tulsa community known around the country as Black Wall Street.

However Tulsa’s Black Native Americans say there’s another bit of history that also deserves more attention: the source of the seed money that helped Black Wall Street boom. The U.S. compelled American Indian nations that enslaved people and fought with the Confederacy to share wealth and land with Black people who were freed.

Historian Alaina Roberts of the University of Pittsburgh says that makes communities like Black Wall Street part of the world’s only large-scale examples of the difference that reparations could have made after slavery.