A Black Space Elevated on a Hill: An Archaeology of Hate and Racial Violence in Black Wall Street’s Most Affluent Neighborhood

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In this paper, we present an archaeology of anti-Black violence and economic inequality in early 20th Century Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here, white jealousy, hatred, and class resentment exploded in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, leading to almost unimaginable consequences for Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood district. We treat the Tulsa Race Massacre as one example of a broader landscape of terror for Black and Indigenous families in the wake of emancipation and removal. At the same time, we examine the Massacre from a longer-term perspective, placing it within a history of evolving structures of racialized violence, while shedding light on Greenwood’s resilience in the face of these structures. Drawing on records of objects, structures, and trees recorded during our pedestrian and geophysical survey of Standpipe Hill in 2021, we present a place-based history of racial violence and Black resilience and examine the changing role that the hill itself played within Tulsa’s settler-colonial history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow