Through a mixture of hubris and active malice, Tulsa city leaders undermined the rebuilding of Greenwood. Black people brought the neighborhood back anyway.
The tents stretched across the burned-out prairieland for acres, surrounded by dirt and rubble and trees stripped bare of all their foliage. Where the Dreamland Theater had once welcomed jubilant patrons every night, there was a tent. On Independence Street, behind an unnamed man standing sentry over his personal wreckage, there was a tent. The Red Cross officially furnished more than 400 of them to Greenwood residents, but more than 1,200 homes in the neighborhood were destroyed, which means that most families actually found their own way in the brutal aftermath of the massacre. Some crowded into the houses of family members whose homes had survived. Others erected their own makeshift shelters amidst the destruction. Many must have assumed that no one was ever going to step in and help them, so they might as well help themselves.
Immediately after the massacre, city leaders signaled that they intended to rush to Greenwood’s aid. “The city and county is legally liable for every dollar of the damage which has been done,” Loyal J. Martin, a former Tulsa mayor, said at a meeting of white businessmen the day after the massacre. “Other cities have had to pay the bill of race riots, and we shall have to do so probably because we have neglected our duty as citizens.”
Martin became the chair of the Public Welfare Committee, the city’s agency for coordinating reconstruction efforts. Because the race massacre had been a national news story, landing on the front page of the New York Times, offers poured in from around the United States offering to aid Tulsa’s newly destitute citizens. Martin fielded the telegraphs himself. But he believed Tulsa should go it alone in rebuilding Greenwood, and his personal opinion became institutional policy. “I telegraphed back that this was our trouble,” he later said. “We were to blame for it and…we would take care of it.”
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