Greenwood Mapping Project

We speak of Greenwood’s destruction in specifics. We speak of its successes in the abstract because they’ve never been compiled and curated. There is no one comprehensive place that one can view Greenwood’s breadth/scope, and certainly no place where one can get a sense of Greenwood’s growth, destruction, and rebuilding, over a span of time. The lack of a comprehensive visual tool leaves many people—especially in Greenwood—with a missing sense of what this community consisted of.

Throughout the two-year research process of writing The Victory of Greenwood, we uncovered several data sources which included land deeds, addresses of families and businesses, census data, business directory data, municipal land records, and other sources of information that have never been corroborated and displayed together in one place. We’re compiling all these data sources together to create an online map of Greenwood that would be interactive—showing Greenwood’s growth from 1905 to 1921, and its rebuilding after the Tulsa Race Massacre.

The map would allow the website user to scroll through each year and view, street by street, block by block, building by building, what existed in that place and when. It would be the first time in Tulsa’s history that this information would be cross-referenced and displayed on one visual, digital exhibit.