History School: Eli Grayson - Lesson

Eli Grayson opens up on Black labor and how it created the historic district of Greenwood.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Money Movers, Welcome back to Money Moves, the daily
podcast determined to give you the keys to the Kingdom
of financial stability, wealth and abundance. This is east and west.
This is north and south. And because Tulsa is at

(00:23):
an angle, downtown Tulsa is at an angle, it's hard
to tell. You think you're going north and south, you're
going to east and west. So this is actually straight
north here. And because the town was built on the
angle of the railroad, uh, it's kund of off, you know. So,
but this is um Unfortunately, this isn't a map to

(00:48):
show what they looked like back in the day. This
is actually a new map because everything here, even though
it doesn't have the freeway in there, the the it
it's not showing the lots of nineteen nineteen and nineteen
twenty and all of that. It's just showing showing, um,

(01:08):
let's see what's this dream. Well, yeah, it's got some
of the old buildings here, but it's not showing the
all this area that got burnt out. You know, this
is Mary Turley's allotment here that ow Gurley gets to
credit for. Right here, this is the town site of Tulsa,
right in here, and so this is the beginning of

(01:31):
that um. The Greenwood community named for Greenwood Boulevard, which
is because Gustine Dave Patten were from Greenwood, Arkansas. They
kind of slipped that in there. They named the chiefs themselves.
It was not a permission from the Cree nation. And
I often tell people when they say, well, no, it's
name not the you know black people in Greenwood and

(01:53):
this and that, And I said, well, then why are
all if you get in the neighborhood of Greenwood, why
isn't there like a streets named that the black people.
Why are the streets named Apache and this and that?
None of the streets are named out there well known
black people of the day. So why would Greenwood just

(02:15):
be named that the Because that's not what happened. It
was named Greenwood because Gustin Dave Patton were from Greenwood, Arkansas.
And that's actually named that. The a Confederate guy something
something Greenwood. I can't remember his first name, but you
can google it. What Greenwood, Arkansas is named for. Greenwood,
Mississippi is named for Greenwood the floor who's a Choctaw chief.

(02:38):
And I can guarantee you in the Creek Nation, there
would be no street name for a Chocoa Chief, all right.
So we're looking south along the Arkansas River, and this
is this map here basically, and if if I angle
it this way like this, this is how this is

(03:00):
looking here. There's the railroad track right there, see it
going like that, the railroad track right here. This is
it here, So it's actually like this here. This is
the Oakland Cemetery. This is actually not in the town site.

(03:21):
This is in the town site over here. The town
site over here was started in dred. This is the
allotment land. This particular allotment here is allotted to a
black girl named Centennial Manuel. She was seventeen years old
when she got that allotment. You know, this up here
would be Greenwood. This area here, all of this area

(03:43):
north of this track is the Greenwood area. And as
you could tell, even in eighteen it's not that developed
as Tulsa is developed in the main area. And that's
why we're saying. You see, when you look at this,
you ab saying buildings and stuff like that. Those buildings

(04:04):
and grow from seeds, They grew from work, They grew
from labor, and somebody had to build this, and the
people that had to build this were black hands with
black skills, people that knew how to do this. That's
why there was a huge population of black people that
came here, not because they were landowners the freedmen were

(04:24):
the landowners and the Indians, but because they were black
people who needed white people needed them to build this.
All of this out here. You know, this would be
as far south, I think as eighteen Street. This here
would be there's Peoria. Here is um sixth Street, so

(04:47):
this has to be eleven Street. Here would be the
next big street, and this would be as far as
eighteen streets south. This is the Midland Valleys. Have you
guys been to the gal The main place that would
be over here today, right in this area right here,
this is midtown where you are right now in My

(05:08):
house is about right here on the horizon that far
south because I live one street off one major street
off Peoria. So you know, but this is eighteen and
the mass of the growth had yet to happen. I
often say Greenwood is like you moved to a brand

(05:30):
new subdivision. It's brand new. All the houses are brand new,
all the buildings. They just put a brand new McDonald's in.
They just put a brand new you know, Church's fried
chicken whatever. They just built the stuff, and then it's
burned down the next day. It hadn't been there a
long time. It's a brand new neighborhood and then it's

(05:50):
burned down. And that's what people need to also understand.
This isn't a hundred year old community that was burned down.
It was relatively new. It was so new, in fact,
that there wasn't enough homes for everybody that came here.
So when you look on the lot on the population census,
you'll find every other house a mom, dad, kids, a lodger, lodger,

(06:13):
lodger lodger because they had no place to go go
check that out. They had no place to go because
there was not enough places because it was being built
so fast. And the same reason why it was being built,
the same reason why Tulsa was growing, we're still the

(06:35):
reason in July of that this neighborhood started to rebuild back.
It's like, I hate to put it like this. You
ever kicked over and bed and come back two hours later,
you go, damn that and bed is back. Because the
food is the source of food is still in the

(06:56):
area and it builds itself back. The queens ah y'all
got to get back to work. We still got food.
Even though some idiot kicked our stuff down. They build
it back. The jobs were still there, the oil and
gas were still being produced. The agriculture crops around and
sell his rural area that's yes to be developed. That

(07:17):
was the countryside. A third of that land was owned
by black folk. To look on the U. S. Population census,
it tells you the occupation of people. What people actually
do O W. Gurley When you look him up on
a U. S. Population census, he's a realtor. It's not
the only one, but that's what he does. The area.

(07:38):
Once you see where this street curves up north here,
this is all Muskogee Creek Nation until you get to
this one street right here, which then started going north directly.
This is going north northwest. This way this is this
is going northeast out of way. But when you get
to this one area here where the street is just

(08:01):
kind of different, that's the Cherokee Nation bound area. This
is an allotment, Indian allotment named Mary Turley. And if
you look at the original deeds of any of those
places up there. It starts with her name, and as
you go farther north, you get into Luney Price, who
is another Cherokee Indian, not a freedman, no one black.

(08:24):
He was another by blood member of the Cherokee Nation.
The Burnett brothers which are over in this area all
Cherokee Indians. Actually, you have no freedman in this area
at all within the Cherokee Nation. However, south of here
where the Creek Nation is where this line is here,
this is all the Mescoga Creek Nation here. When you

(08:47):
get out of the town site and you see the
streets are going north and south again these are going
east and west. These are all allotments. That's where you
find something very interesting. You find here is the the
now the You can look really close at this. You
see these little grave sites. See those little headstones there.

(09:09):
That's the Oakland Cemetery and that's where they're actually digging
the graves up to day to see if the mass
graves are there. This is a black girl's allotment. Her
name is Centennial Manual Creek Citizen. Right next to here
about this area right here where a train track goes through,
is forty acres that belonged to Bismarck renting black kid

(09:30):
five years old, he got forty acres right there. He
got another hundred and twenty acres. When you cross the
river on the other side, he his other hundred and twenty.
The allotments were a hundred and sixty acres. Forty was
considered homestead and one twenty was considered surplus. But your

(09:50):
total was a hundred and sixty. Sometimes it was all together,
sometimes it was divided up. So for example, this is
this area right here is roughly about twenty acres of
land that belonged to Centennial Manuel. Her other hundred and
twenty acres happened to be this area right here. All

(10:12):
of this area right in here, she got a hundred
and sixty acres here. She's just one of a few
of the black people who were property owners at statehood
when all this stuff was going on. Now, Greenwood burned
down in Oklahoma state it was in eighteen o seven.
Tulsa started in nineteen hundred as the Town Site Act,

(10:35):
officially as the Town Site Act in nineteen twenty, So
just an amount of a couple of decades, it went
from being nothing really to seventy eight thousand people. Everything's new.
This isn't a London, this isn't a one thousand year
old town. It is a brand new town. And it's
a validation of the treaty because it shouldn't exist. But

(10:57):
the fact that it is is state black acts and
state whites that immigrated here the Creeks makes this illegal
Cherokees too. But it happened, and so but getting the
story right of why it happened, how it happened. The
landownership being the center of the wealth, and anybody knows

(11:20):
today that if you want to become wealthy in America,
land property ownership. Land ownership is the key because it's
a tangible source of collateral to getting money, and if
you can hold on to it, eventually it's worth more
every year and eventually when you pass on, and it

(11:43):
stays in your kids. And that's the other thing about
the allotments. The Americans promised when the allotments happened, it'll
be in your family for the next twenty generations. Your
family want to have to worry about a thing because
that hundred and sixty acres of being your great great
great great grand kids names, that was a lie from
the federal government. The first generation of freedmen, after they

(12:06):
got their allotments, the system, the laws that the new
state created started dispossessing them of their lands, and all
cole of schemes occurred. They started taxing people who have
never been taxed before in their lives. The fact that
it is the Indians and the freedman never owned personal
property like that, never owned mother Earth. It was impossible

(12:28):
to do that, so there was no taxes on it.
So here's the scheme. You got, you married, you got
an allotment, your wife gets an allotment. You both got
a hundred and sixty acres. But in that six year
time frame, y'all have seven kids between eight and eighteen
o six. Seven kids are actually living. They might not
have been born in that time, but they were living

(12:50):
and living with you, and the youngest being two years
old or maybe two months old. That two months old
got a hundred and sixty acre allotment. So what the
con of the game was is to not put your
property together. You would think you would get a square
mile or a couple of square miles, because what is
the sixty acres that make a square mile? Okay, So

(13:14):
instead of putting you all together in a square mile,
we're gonna split you up. We're gonna put your your
younger kids over in Creek County. We're gonna put you
over in mcintoge County. We're gonna put your wife over
in Tulsa County. Or we might even split up your
allotment and put ten acres somewhere in a hundred and
forty uh fifty acres somewhere else. But you old taxes.

(13:40):
So here you are working in the area of Muskogee,
I mean McIntosh because that's where you got your farm,
and you're raising your kids. And yeah, you got a
young two months old over in Creek County, and the
new county is telling you that two month old old
property taxes. What you're gonna do. You've never even seen

(14:01):
the land because it's blackjacks. It's just the title you got.
What are you gonna do? You either pay it or
the white man ends up with it. Guess what happened.
The white man ended up with it. That is the
bad system of what happened. And that's when we talk

(14:22):
about green. What I keep saying is the forest is
the tree in the forest. It's actually a bush in
the forest that was set a fire while the forest
being nearly three million acres were dispossessed from the hands
of black people who have gonna be these tribal members.
Black people who had ingest become American citizens in nineteen

(14:42):
o one. And that story is the real story of
the Black Wall Street. Thank you so much for tuning
in Money Moves audience. If you want more or a
recap of this episode, please go to the Bank Greenwood
dot com and check out the Money Moves podcast blog.

(15:05):
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