Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street; One Hundred Years in the Neighborhood That Refused to Be Erased

Journalist Luckerson debuts with an immersive history of Greenwood, the prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., that was burned to the ground by white rioters in 1921. Detailing multiple phases of the neighborhood’s history, he notes that by 1920, Greenwood boasted Black-owned beauty shops, grocery stores, and saloons, as well as A.J. Smitherman’s Tulsa Star newspaper, which covered topics of interest to Black Tulsa, and the Stradford Hotel, which owner J.B. Stradford intended to cater to affluent Black customers. After the massacre, Greenwood residents overcame many obstacles to reestablish the area as a rich wellspring of Black culture and business, but highway construction and “urban renewal” programs in the 1960s and ’70s splintered the community. Documenting the fight to maintain the spirit of Greenwood, Luckerson spotlights the Goodwin family, including patriarch J.H. Goodwin, who left Mississippi for Tulsa in 1913, and his great-granddaughter Regina Goodwin, the only Black woman in Oklahoma’s House of Representatives. The sprawling narrative also touches on the Black Lives Matter movement, the search for mass graves of the riot’s victims, and debates over how best to mark the 2021 centennial of the massacre. It’s a comprehensive and impassioned portrait of a community fighting for its survival. Photos. (May)