How A Tulsa Mayor Tried to Erase Greenwood After the Massacre

A newly released document from the Tulsa City Commission archives sheds disturbing light on just how deliberate the city’s response to the 1921 Race Massacre was. In the days following the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, while the ashes of Black Wall Street still smoldered, Tulsa Mayor T.D. Evans penned a letter to city commissioners. It should have been a moment for reckoning. Instead, the letter was a blueprint for land theft.

Disguised as a call for “reconstruction,” Mayor Evans’ message blamed Black victims, excused the White mob, and laid out a plan to seize the land of the very people whose homes and businesses had just been burned to the ground. “Let the negro settlement be placed farther to the north and east,” he wrote. “This district is well suited for industrial purposes.”

In other words, Greenwood must go.

Evans praised the National Guard, vigilantes, and officers who enabled or participated in the violence, calling their actions “valiant” and “wise.” He downplayed the massacre as a contained disturbance and argued it was “good generalship” that the destruction happened where it did. There was no mention of the hundreds killed, the thousands left homeless, or the $27 million in property damage done to a thriving Black community.

What Evans proposed was not reconstruction but displacement. A forced removal of Black people under the cover of urban planning. He even proposed a Reconstruction Committee—entirely White and handpicked—to oversee this process, locking out any possibility of Black self-determination.

But what he didn’t anticipate was resistance.

Greenwood survivors, many of whom lived in tents and church basements, refused to surrender their land. Led by attorney B.C. Franklin, they sued to retain the right to rebuild. And they won. Within a year, Black Wall Street began to rise again—without the city’s help, and in defiance of its intentions.

While the immediate land grab failed, the long game of dispossession succeeded. Greenwood was later carved up by highways during the so-called urban renewal era of the 1960s. Redlining, disinvestment, and systemic racism did the slow work of erasing what the fire did not. Today, Tulsa lives in the legacy of Evans’ vision—even if he didn’t live to see it fully realized.

That’s why Tulsa’s first Black mayor, Monroe Nichols, made history. Standing in the very community Evans tried to erase after the massacre, Tulsa Mayor Nichols announced a $105 million reparative initiative—the Greenwood Trust. For the first time in 104 years, the city is acknowledging its role and beginning to repair the damage.

Evans believed the world would forget. But we haven’t. And now, we have the opportunity to prove that justice delayed can still be justice delivered—if we’re willing to confront the truth.

The road to repair must begin with the road that was nearly stolen.

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