Digital Greenwood: Foregrounding Black Women Business Owners, Community Activism, and the Tulsa Race Massacre

Abstract:

African American women helped make Historic Greenwood into the thriving community popularly known as “Black Wall Street.” Despite their rich and varied contributions as business owners and operators and church and community activists, their experiences are frequently ignored in historical and contemporary narratives. Women of Black Wall Street (WBWS), a digital humanities project released for the centennial commemoration in May 2021, reifies this by tracking and analyzing the social, intellectual, and economic contributions of Black women in Greenwood. Through this project, my student research team and I restore the visibility of Black women in the community, including writers like Mary Jones Parrish, who provided the first written account of the massacre, and Blanche M. Woodford, whose newspaper articles about Black Wall Street were read throughout the country. Using historical research and digital methods and tools, WBWS features contextual essays, biographies of ten Green-wood women, maps of their homes and businesses, and interviews with contemporary female business owners in the district. In this article, I discuss the site and the importance of bringing Historic Greenwood’s overlooked women online and to the public. I present how the project transforms the Black Wall Street story and joins digital recovery projects that bring forth the full humanity of marginalized people.