Much of what the world knows about the Tulsa massacre, one of the most consequential events of state-sanctioned racial violence and displacement in America’s history, started with the work of one woman. Although Mary E. Jones Parrish’s name has made a resurgence in recent history, the impact of her book about the disaster still isn’t fully recognized — a situation one of her descendants is looking to change.

From May 31 to June 1, 1921, Tulsa’s thriving Greenwood district — dubbed “Black Wall Street” by Booker T. Washington — was decimated. One of the most affluent all-Black communities in the country at the time, Greenwood had an estimated 10,000 residents, many seeking refuge from the racial violence in other parts of the United States. Its 35 blocks boasted 121 Black-owned businesses and the nation’s largest Black-owned hotel.

Over less than 24 hours, hundreds of people were killed, more than 800 were injured, and over 1,200 homes and Black-owned businesses were burned and bombed to their foundations, leaving the community with damage amounting to over $27 million in 2021 dollars.

The events leading to the massacre began on May 30, 1921, when unfounded allegations that a 19-year-old Black boy, Dick Rowland, had assaulted a 17-year-old White girl, Sarah Page. The allegations energized White residents of Tulsa as rumors of and plans for his execution spread.

Many argue that the impetus of the massacre was not the allegations, but the way the Tulsa Tribune, a White newspaper, sensationalized the events, weaponizing the afternoon’s headline as more a call to action: “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.”

A mob of White Tulsans, estimated to be in the thousands — at least 500 of whom were deputized by the police chief and given weapons — took to the streets of Greenwood.

In the days after the massacre, White media remained complicit in hiding its true nature, naming it a riot and obscuring details. The full number of people killed and true nature of the economic impact remain unknown, but what historians have been able to uncover is due to the work of Parrish, a journalist and typewriting instructor whose 1923 book, “Events of the Tulsa Disaster,” was the first book to be published accounting the massacre.

“Parrish’s work became a vital primary source for other people’s writings,” wrote in his recently released book, “Built From the Fire.” “Yet her life remained unknown, even as the facts that she had gathered — such as several firsthand accounts of airplanes being used to surveil or attack Greenwood — became foundational to the nation’s understanding of the massacre. She was, quite literally, relegated to the footnotes of history.”

Parrish’s great-granddaughter Anneliese Bruner is following in her footsteps as a writer and editor but didn’t learn of her connection to Parrish — or the events of Tulsa — until she was in her 30s.

A routine visit to her father, William Bruner Jr., for the holidays was all Bruner had set out for. She arrived at her dad’s expecting the usually jovial and lighthearted man she’d grown up with but found him uncharacteristically serious as he waved her into his room and closed the door behind them.

He produced an envelope and out of it pulled a small, red, cloth-wrapped rectangular book that wore its age well and had the words, “Events of the Tulsa Disaster by Mrs. Mary E. Jones Parrish” embossed on the front in gold lettering.

“This is a book your (great) grandmother wrote,” Bruner’s father said, revealing to her for the first time the depth of her ancestry, who her grandmother, Florence Mary was, and why the events of the Tulsa massacre were such an integral piece to her bloodline’s story. “I’m giving this to you. I want you to see what you can do with it.”

When “Events of the Tulsa Disaster” was first published in 1923, it was done so privately by Parrish out of an abundance of caution. Today, few copies of the original work exist.

In 2021, Bruner answered her father’s call, promising to spread Parrish’s work, and worked with the Trinity University Press to secure wide release of the book, titling the new edition, “”

“I want people to know this work,” Bruner told The 19th. “As well as the person who did this work. I want people to see her courage. Her motherliness. Her agency and certainty in herself. Her spirit. … I want them to see her humanity.”

Just two paragraphs into the book, Parrish writes, “How recent seems the beginnings of this little book!” For Bruner, aside from its stature, there was nothing small about the book. She pored through it in one sitting with what felt like a sense of urgency, learning of the horrors of those two days and those that followed, uniting with her great-grandmother all the while.

After the massacre, against the wishes and caution of her friends and loved ones, Parrish stayed in Tulsa to accept a job from the Inter-Racial Commission to report on the events. The commission, created not even a month after the massacre, was an amalgam of what Parrish describes as “fair-minded white” and “no less representative” Black people with the common goal of creating a “greater and better Tulsa.”

Parrish used this opportunity to take a microscope to the events, contextualizing race relations in Tulsa as she interviewed scores of eyewitnesses, cementing the accounts of survivors, salvaging photographs of the ruins and lives lost and even creating a list that would become the foundation of what is known of the economic loss.

Parrish begins her book with her own account. Her knowledge of the massacre began when her 9-year-old daughter, Florence, said, “Mother, I see men with guns.” After waiting for the sounds of the violence to diminish, Parrish wrote that she “breathed a prayer to heavenly father for strength” and escaped with Florence.

The book then details survivors’ accounts, including James T.A. West, a local high school teacher, who recalls being rounded up with other men.

“They (the Home Guard) told me to line up in the street. … They refused to let one of the men put on any kind of shoes. After lining up some 30 or 40 of us men, they ran us through the streets to Convention Hall forcing us to keep our hands in the air all the while. While we were running some of the ruffians would shoot at our heels. They actually drove a car into the bunch and knocked down two or three men.”

“When we reached Convention Hall we were searched again. There people were herded in like cattle. The sick and wounded were dumped out in front of the building and remained without attention for hours,” West said.

Parrish intersperses her own recollections as well. “I can never erase the sights of my first visit to the hospital,” Parrish wrote. “There were men wounded in every conceivable way, like soldiers after a battle. Some with amputated limbs, burned faces, or bandaged heads. There were women who were nervous wrecks, and some confinement cases. Was I in a hospital in France? No, in Tulsa. One mother was so thoughtless as to burden her infant for life with the name of June Riot.”

“There were to be seen people who formerly had owned beautiful homes and buildings and people who had always worked and made a comfortable honest living all standing in a row and waiting to be handed a change of clothing and feeling grateful to be able to get a sandwich and glass of water,” Parrish wrote.

“Dreamland,” as Greenwood was called for the exceptional economic and social potential it held for Black Americans, was no more. “Soon we reached the district which was so beautiful and prosperous looking when we left. This we found to be piled of bricks, ashes and twisted iron, representing years of toil and savings.”

“We were horror-stricken but strangely we could not shed a tear.“ Parrish writes, “We did not enter there through the section of town, but they brought us through the White section, all sitting flat down on the truck looking like immigrants, only that we had no bundles. Dear reader, can you imagine the humiliation of coming in like that, with many doors thrown open watching you pass, some with pity and others with a smile?”

“It is my sincere hope and desire that this book will open the eyes of the thinking people of America.”

At the start of the award-winning television series Watchmen, there’s a of destruction and terror, as a racist mob destroys a Black town. Civilians are shot, homes are bombed from planes overhead, and stores are set on fire. While Watchmen is fictional, this story is true.

“That really did happen,” says Phil Armstrong. “They just put visuals to what it must have been like, based on eyewitness accounts.”

Armstrong is project manager of a charged with commemorating the 100th anniversary of one of the largest racial massacres in American history, a two-day rampage by a white mob that devastated the all-Black community of Greenwood, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission is also the guiding force behind , an interactive history center scheduled to open later this year. Created in partnership with (the design firm behind the , in New York, and the , in Alabama), Greenwood Rising will tell the story of the historic neighborhood before, during, and after the carnage.

A preview of the site suggests that visitors are in for an emotional journey. Much of the information will likely be new to them. Until recently, it was possible to visit Tulsa and remain unaware of the that began June 1, 1921, after , a Black 19-year-old, was accused of assault.

The center’s dual focus on both the past and the vital present spotlights the real people who were, and are, affected by historic actions and inaction, says Greenwood Rising project director Lorraine Arthur Mensa.

“Right now, in this nation, there’s a lot of talk about Black trauma and focusing on stories of oppression versus telling the whole story,” says Mensa, who says it was equally important for all involved to “show Black joy at times and to show the resiliency, the work ethic, [and] the communal spirit, and to get the visitor to connect to that.”

Black Wall Street

Before the massacre, was a place of economic opportunities, with theaters, groceries, confectionaries, and restaurants lining its main street, dubbed Black Wall Street. “By 1880, there were 30 all-Black towns in Oklahoma,” says Armstrong. “They actually began having discussions with the government to just declare Oklahoma to be an all-Black state.”

The “Black Wall Street” moniker derives from a comment made by on the proliferation of Black Oklahoma towns (Muskogee, Langston, and Boley, among them), a year before Greenwood was established. On the other side of the tracks from downtown Tulsa, Greenwood was founded on segregationist beliefs and cemented with . But while racist ideas set the soil, Black businesses did the planting, and success quickly took root.

By 1921, an estimated 12,000 African Americans were living within the 35 city blocks of the neighborhood. Homes and businesses were all owned and operated by Black people, says Armstrong.

But over the course of a few days in 1921, all of it disappeared. Most homes were destroyed, along with dozens of buildings, including churches. An estimated 300 people were killed (although still being uncovered suggest the number could be much higher). When it was over, the Black community was financially and physically decimated.

Since the massacre was labeled a “riot” at the time, insurance claims were denied, and courts dismissed all cases without hearings or reviews, says Armstrong. To date,

The only silver lining was that legal attempts to force families to adhere to newly created, expensive building regulations (an attempt, Armstrong suggests, to dissuade reconstructing the community altogether) were thwarted by an unprecedented Oklahoma State Supreme Court decision.

Here’s where the resilience shines through: The community rose phoenix-like from the ashes. Within five years, and with the support of Black communities across the country, Greenwood was able to host delegates from the 1926 National Negro Chamber of Commerce. And by 1943 the economic activity of the area doubled, says Armstrong.

“It’s an incredible American story,” he says. “Not only [did] they stay. They built it back bigger than it was the first time.”

The Third Wave

Urban renewal programs in later decades (including the routing of Interstate 244 through the heart of the community) and eventual gentrification continued to change the community makeup. Today, the neighborhood includes the , whose mission is to preserve African American heritage in the area and promote cultural exchange. The center is partnering with park on the Tulsa Riverfront this summer to co-host the —one of the largest collections of historic art and artifacts of its kind.

Although there is only one commercial building remaining on Black Wall Street that is Black-owned, the strong heartbeat of the community continues. This is where opened in July 2020, “a space where children and adults can walk in and see themselves reflected on the shelves,” according to owner Onikah Asamoa-Caesar. Also here, Venita Cooper founded , a vintage fashion and high-end sneaker shop and art gallery, which recently raised enough through community donations (including their own) to pay the rent for more than 25 local families who were in need. Other Greenwood Black businesses include spas, cafés, and galleries.

“It’s about the reclamation of a legacy that was interrupted,” says Asamoa-Caesar. “We’re the third wave of the rebuilding of Black Wall Street. We are carrying a torch for that entrepreneurial spirit that was here in Tulsa.”

“The destruction, the hate, the racism, all that stuff in the past, it prevented us from reaching our potential for all of these decades,” says Cooper. “There are so many cool things that are happening in the city now, especially from Black artists, creatives, and entrepreneurs. I wouldn’t be here if I felt like there was no hope.”

Black-owned businesses are also hoping the increased tourism to the neighborhood results in an economic win for the community.

A collaborative “Buy Black Tulsa” handbook, launched in February, is being developed into the website BuyBlkTlsa.com, as a resource for visitors looking to benefit the community through their shopping dollars.

“My greatest fear, especially for this year, is that people are going to go to Greenwood Rising, see the signs, and look at the plaques in the ground, but nothing is going to sustainably and tangibly change for the community that’s here,” says Asamoa-Caesar. “People need to be very critical and intentional about how they spend their time and their money once they’re here. It’s great to go to a museum but think about your impact while you’re there.”

Additionally, for putting money and resources toward cultural tourism rather than ensuring reparations. Others are focused on fulfilling the original promise of Black Wall Street.

Inside Silhouette Sneakers, Cooper keeps a framed picture of Grier Shoe Shop, which once stood in that very spot. Destroyed in 1921, it reopened against the odds a few years later, and now a plaque on the sidewalk identifies it for passersby.

By establishing Silhouette here, Cooper says she feels a responsibility to honor those whose own dreams were cut short. “It’s like a natural progression,” she says, “from what had already begun.”

This article originally appeared at and is published in partnership with

More than 100 years ago, a white mob attacked Tulsa, Oklahoma’s thriving Greenwood District, home to the city’s African-American community, killing hundreds and destroying businesses.

Now, a group of young students are bringing some of those businesses to life in a project that links coding and history.

Ahead of the centennial commemorating the Tulsa Race Massacre earlier this month, Urban Coders Guild was working with local students to build websites for the businesses destroyed during the horrific event a century ago, as if those businesses were still around today. The project can’t undo the horrors of what came to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre — one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history — but the people behind it hope that it will help spur knowledge around the horrific event as well as teach students an invaluable skill along the way.

“While a good many of the businesses were rebuilt after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, none of them exist today,” says Mikeal Vaughn, founder and executive director of Urban Coders Guild, a nonprofit organization providing STEM education opportunities to underrepresented communities in Tulsa.

So the students are reimagining what they would look like today by building the websites. Along the way, they are learning coding skills and learning about a historic event that has only recently been talked about in mainstream media.

“The students were given some creative license to use their combined skill sets to create an awesome website for each business that tells that business’ story as if it were an existing business today,” he says.

Erina Katoh, 14, is among a group of students focusing on , which was destroyed during the massacre.

“This and other websites that the Urban Coders Guild is creating represent what could possibly have been these stores’ online sites if [they] had not been destroyed during the Tulsa Race Massacre,” Katoh says. “Through this project, I have been able to learn more in depth of what occurred and caused the Tulsa Race Massacre.”

The site, Katoh says, was created to look like it might if it was still around today, meaning it has a variety of pictures and hairstyles that customers can choose from. It also includes information about the barber shop and location and the owner of the business.

Katoh says Urban Coders Guild is a “prep” course for the future because she has learned how to interact with others as well as listen to and accept input from others.

Urban Coders Guild offers web and mobile app development courses and lessons in the fundamentals of project management and entrepreneurship, Vaughn says. To date, more than 60 middle and high school students have been involved.

In past projects, students worked on prototypes for a Black business directory. “In everything that we do, we try to instill a commitment to using technology to address the needs of the community,” Vaughn says.

The first semester of the course was instruction, says Jeremy Benedik, the program’s web development instructor, while the second semester has focused on the creation of the sites, . Urban Coders Guild also partnered with Tulsa Community College students to create the content and logos as part of their coursework.

Like with many things, the pandemic has produced challenges for the program. The students turned to online lessons, which, according to Benedik, many of the students were already familiar with due to their student classwork turning virtual last spring.

However, Vaughn says the hurdle has been recreating teacher-student relationships and peer relationships in a virtual setting.

“Struggling at times to keep the students engaged after a day full (day of) Zoom classes and learning to code became a second hurdle, really a by-product of the first,” he added.

Emilia Nguyen, 11 and in sixth grade, says she was aware of the Race Massacre before the project but wanted to get involved to learn more about her community.

Nguyen says she was nervous going into the class but soon realized it was a very friendly and inviting atmosphere in which learning and asking questions is paramount.

“I was scared that it was going to be something where everyone kind of already knows coding and they’re looking at me weird when I’m trying to ask a question because I’m confused and I’ve never done this before,” she says.

“But no matter if you’ve done it before or you haven’t, they still include you and they ask you to reach out if we need to ask any questions, because they know that this is a very hard concept that we’re learning. They show that they’re very proud of us that we’re taking it all in and we’re working hard at it. So they definitely understand.”

She and some other classmates are currently working on creating the online presence for their second business, she says.

She adds that the coding has been challenging and they might do some back-and-forth with the instructor to get it to work.

“I’m not going to say that it’s super easy, but it’s definitely a good learning experience and it’s super fun because you get to spend time with other people and interact with them and ask them about their different opinions on things,” she says. “You get other people’s insight on your work and they’ll tell you what they know and you tell them what you know.”

This article originally appeared at and is published in partnership with