Minneapolis, Minnesota and Tulsa, Oklahoma sit 704 miles apart. Yet the two communities share an experience that is historically common to Black communities: a violent, disruptive event that caught the eye of the nation. Yet, to the people who live there, the event is but a day in history that hints at the racial inequality that existed all along.
Tulsa was a boom town in the early years of Oklahoma’s statehood. In particular, the Greenwood District, nestled in the north side of the city, flourished with opportunity and entrepreneurship. It was one of the promised lands that drew Black people, only a few generations away from their family’s enslaved past, to Oklahoma with the hope of freedom and independence.
On May 31st, 1921, that promise was destroyed by the rage of racial hate and violence. The neighborhood, dubbed as Black Wall Street, was flattened. Photos from those days look like a scene from war-torn Europe during the first world war. Hundreds of Black men, women, and children died over the two days of what is now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.
The south side of Minneapolis inherited a refugee from the Tulsa massacre. As the story goes, A.B. Cassius, born in Guthrie, Oklahoma in 1907, was sent north by his father shortly after the massacre. Cassius, then a teenager, grew up on his own to become a prominent business leader, political advocate for his community, and the first Black man to obtain a liquor license in the city of Minneapolis.
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin just blocks from where Cassius established his Dreamland Cafe, a bar and gathering spot for the southside Black community during the 30s and 40s.
Early in the summer of 2024, a team of Gaylord News student journalists embedded themselves in both communities during their anniversary weeks. The task was to seek common threads between the neighborhoods and to report stories largely ignored by news organizations focused on reporting the anniversaries but not the people living within that history. The learning objective was to give student journalists the experience of being embedded within each community. They sought to find the people often unseen and, then, to listen deeply to everyone they met.
The Greenwood District and George Floyd Square may be hundreds of miles away and a century apart in their pain, but they are not so different. The stories the Gaylord News team produced in these few weeks are not stories of pain. These are stories of strength and endurance in the face of pain. They are resilience stories told by people who understand that word differently than most. They are the Voices of Resilience.
Return to the Voices of Resilience homepage.
Voices of Resilience project was possible because of a generous grant from the Scripps-Howard Foundation. We would also like to thank the Agape Movement in Minneapolis and the Black Wall Street Times in Tulsa for their guidance and commitment to this project.
