Summary

The book opens with an illustration of a Black family driving a car toward a town. There are oil derricks in the background. The narration details prospectors finding oil in Tulsa. People came to the town looking for jobs. Blacks came to the portion of town known as Greenwood. They were descended from people who had come north looking for a respite from the violence and racism they had encountered in the South.

The Black and White communities were divided by train tracks as segregation laws still required Blacks to have separate schools, phone booths, and railroad cars. In Greenwood, there was a street where there were so many Black-owned businesses that Booker T. Washington called the area the “Negro Wall Street of America” (??). It later became known as Black Wall Street.

The narration describes the variety of businesses on Black Wall Street...