The myth​ of the American Dream as Told by The Massacre of the Greenwood District

Black Wall Street, or the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was one of few extremely prosperous Black neighborhoods in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s. Unfortunately, this self-sufficient, wealthy Black neighborhood burned to the ground by white supremacists. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 left thousands of Black Tulsans homeless, hundreds dead, and the district completely obliterated. Now that we have reached the 100th anniversary of the tragedy, there need to be reparations from the United States, a country that claims to strongly value the ideas of prosperity, democratic equity, and equal opportunity. The citizens of Tulsa’s Greenwood District who lost their lives in this horrible mishandling of justice were not even buried in marked graves, let alone given the opportunity to pursue the full version of what the American Dream is supposed to be (Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as written by in the Declaration of Independence, for example). Tulsa, and all of Oklahoma for that matter, was a supposed safe haven for Black Americans post-Emancipation Proclamation and the opening of Indian Territory. This safe haven for Black Tulsans was soon turned to Hell due to a horrible assumption of guilt by white Tulsans about 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a Black shoe shiner, who was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white elevator operator of the nearby Drexel Building. He was taken into custody, but white Tulsans decided to riot, massacre many Black Tulsans, and burn the district to the ground regardless. The time to commemorate the success of Black Wall Street and mourn the loss of so many lives is far overdue. As Peter Lupsha states the American values in “American Values and Organized Crime: Suckers and Wiseguys,” “The taproots of American culture are those Lockeian (sic) values embodied in the writings, declarations, and documents of the Founding Fathers and their interpreters. These values are based in beliefs in individualism, property, or ‘materialism,’ competition, and freedom of action, or independence.” Lupsha continues his evaluation by asserting, “From  the  interplay of these values  come our perceptions of opportunity, democratic procedural equality, substantive equality, material success, acquisitiveness, and a belief in rights vested in the individual rather than in the community.” By this, Lupsha is explaining the value Americans find in themselves, rather than value in the community. Similarly, Lupsha explains that our beliefs of “opportunity, democratic procedural equality, substantive equality, material success, acquisitiveness” are merely perceptions, rather than actual foundational truths of the Nation. Lupsha even goes as far as to omit “equality” his second list of values, stating: “it is our values, their openness and pragmatism, beliefs in competition, material success, individual action, freedom, and liberty,” proving that equality was never important enough to our Founders and country. So while the Greenwood District was given the opportunity to achieve the American Dream and thrive for years to come, the fact that the dream was ripped out from under these Black Tulsans proves that the ideals of equal opportunity and democratic equality are entirely a myth perpetuated by the United States of America.