On Sept. 9, 1915, Dr. Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, known today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Woodson, who is also called “The Father of Black History,” was a Harvard-educated historian and author who also established the "The Journal of Negro History," now called "The Journal of African American History" in 1916 as a vehicle to chronicle the Black experience — past and present. 

Naturally, Woodson was eager to designate a time when the whole nation recognized — and celebrated — Black history. In 1925, February was chosen as Black History Month because it’s the birth month of two vital change agents in Black history: Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln. 

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A century ago, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., perished at the hands of a violent white mob.

Imagine a community of great possibilities and prosperity built by Black people for Black people. Places to work. Places to live. Places to learn and shop and play. Places to worship.

Now imagine it being ravaged by flames.

In May 1921, the Tulsa, Okla., neighborhood of Greenwood was a fully realized antidote to the racial oppression of the time. Built in the early part of the century in a northern pocket of the city, it was a thriving community of commerce and family life to its roughly 10,000 residents.

Hundreds of Greenwood residents were brutally killed, their homes and businesses wiped out. They were casualties of a furious and heavily armed white mob of looters and arsonists. One factor that drove the violence: resentment toward the Black prosperity found in block after block of Greenwood.

The financial toll of the massacre is evident in the $1.8 million in property loss claims — $27 million in today’s dollars — detailed in a 2001 state commission report.  For two decades, the report has been one of the most comprehensive accounts to reveal the horrific details of the massacre — among the worst racial terror attacks in the nation’s history — as well as the government’s culpability.

The destruction of property is only one piece of the financial devastation that the massacre wrought. Much bigger is a sobering kind of inheritance: the incalculable and enduring loss of what could have been, and the generational wealth that might have shaped and secured the fortunes of Black children and grandchildren.

“What if we had been allowed to maintain our family business?” asked Brenda Nails-Alford, who is in her early 60s. The Greenwood Avenue shoe shop of her grandfather and his brother was destroyed. “If they had been allowed to carry on that legacy,” she said, “there’s no telling where we could be now.”