Excerpt from The Ground Breaking by Scott Ellsworth, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In Greenwood, there are African American men and women who own stores, hotels, and two- and three-story red brick office buildings. They pay property taxes, conduct business transactions with buyers and jobbers across the country, and live in newly built homes furnished with mahogany sideboards, cut-glass chandeliers, and carports. Their daughters take piano lessons and learn poise and elocution, while their sons dream of glory on the gridiron or baseball diamond. Women entrepreneurs are far from uncommon. Elizabeth Sawyer and Dora Wells operate their own dressmaking establishments. Other women manage real estate and run their own restaurants and shops.

Armed with grit, gumption, business acumen, hard work, and sometimes a bit of luck, the leading Black merchants of Tulsa have flourished. They read the Bible, newspapers, and novels, go to church on Sunday, and dress for dinner. The white bankers downtown know who they are, as do the shipping clerks and freight agents at the railway terminals. And while the overwhelming majority of African Americans in Tulsa live far more modestly, in rented rooms and shacks without running water, for those who have pulled ahead, Greenwood is a wonder, a living and breathing Black edition of the American Dream.

But Greenwood is far more than just a land of fat wallets and bulging coin purses.

It is also a mindset, a bearing, a way of engaging with the world. In an age when people of color are constantly being told that they are lesser beings, here is a community who knows that they are just as good as anyone. Nationally known African American leaders, such as Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, have visited Tulsa to see what all the fuss is about. Jazz bands from Kansas City and Chicago will regularly come to Greenwood to play the latest, genre-busting sounds of a music that is fast capturing the attention of the world. Ideas flourish here as well. In classrooms and living rooms, across shop counters and in columns in the Tulsa Star and the Oklahoma Sun, they take root and cross-pollinate, are weighed and debated. There are political clubs, reading circles, and missionary societies. Hemmed in by a white world that values only their labor, Greenwood is an outpost of vitality, achievement, and pride

The evidence is everywhere.

You can see it in the women who drape themselves in pearls and fur for a show at the Dreamland or the Dixie. It's there, as well, in the steely gaze and set jaws of the neighborhood's World War veterans, who gather for reunions on Armistice Day. You can sense it in the comportment of the women and men who run their own businesses. And you can feel it in the presence of independent craftsmen who never, ever have to approach a white man with their hats in their hands. But it is there, as well, in those who take in laundry and scrub floors and wash dishes. For there is a frontier mindset here, an ironclad self-confidence and a can-do spirit. Greenwood isn't a gift from anyone. It is something they have built. It is their own.

By five o'clock, most of the merchants are closing up for the day and locking their doors. The maids are long gone, while the last of the shoppers make their final purchases and start to head home. As the shadows lengthen and wheel across Greenwood Avenue, and the afternoon sun glances off the top floor of the Stradford Hotel, there is once again a slight chill in the air. And while they do not know it yet, the people of Greenwood are on a collision course with the unimaginable.


Memorial Day, Monday, May 30, 1921.

An African American teenager walks along a downtown sidewalk. His name is Dick Rowland. Nineteen years old, a former football player at Booker T. Washington High School, he lives with his mother, Damie, in Greenwood, but works during the day in a white-owned and patronized shoeshine parlor located downtown on Main Street. When done correctly, a proper shoeshine takes more skill than meets the eye. Seated on a short-legged wooden stool in front of the thronelike chairs where the customers sit, Rowland will use a stiff horsehair brush and a soft rag to remove any caked-on dirt and grime. Then, with a cotton ball stuck on the end of a twisted length of wire, he will daub edge dressing, ink-black and smelling of alcohol, along the outer edges of the sole and heel. As that dries, he will dip a second rag into a tin of shoe paste and expertly apply it to the uppers, paying special attention to the cracks and creases of well-worn brogans and cap-toe oxfords, and to the delicate drilled patterns on the collars and facings of wing tips. Then he will buff and polish each pair to a glimmering shine.

Excerpted from The Ground Breaking by Scott Ellsworth. Copyright © 2021 by Scott Ellsworth. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.