Tulsa is one of the most known. But few know how many times it happened. All across the country, for over a century, Black communities that built real wealth were systematically destroyed.
What follows is a documented record of that destruction, from racial massacres to the federal highways that paved over what the mobs left standing.
The cumulative result of slavery, Jim Crow, and everything since.
Source: Darity & Mullen. See all sources below
Before the violence, Wilmington had a biracial city government, several Black aldermen, and a thriving Black-owned press and banking presence. On November 10, 1898, an organized mob of more than 2,000 white men overthrew that government by force, in what historians call the only successful coup d'etat in U.S. history. They burned the office of the Black-owned newspaper, the Daily Record, and killed an unknown number of Black residents, with estimates ranging from several dozen to several hundred. Roughly 2,100 Black residents fled the city afterward and never returned.
Read more: Equal Justice Initiative · NC Dept. of Natural and Cultural Resources
Atlanta's Black community included some of the most successful Black-owned businesses in the country, among them the barbershop of Alonzo Herndon, a formerly enslaved man who became one of the first Black millionaires in America. After local newspapers ran a string of sensational, ultimately unsubstantiated stories about Black men attacking white women during a heated governor's race, a mob of thousands stormed downtown Atlanta on September 22, 1906, burning more than 1,000 homes and businesses over several days. Herndon's barbershop was destroyed and one of his employees was beaten to death. The official death toll was 12, though most historians believe the real number was closer to 25, and some estimates run as high as 100.
Read more: Britannica · History.com
Springfield was Abraham Lincoln's hometown, which made what happened there especially shocking to the country at the time. After a white mob failed to lynch two Black men held in the county jail on accusations later shown to be false, it turned on the Black neighborhood instead, destroying at least 21 Black-owned businesses and burning the homes of more than 40 families over two days in August 1908. Among those lynched was William Donnegan, an 84-year-old Black cobbler and real estate investor. The outrage that this could happen in the North, in Lincoln's own city, helped push a group of activists to found the NAACP the following year. In 2024, the site was designated a national monument.
Read more: NAACP · National Park Service
Slocum was a rural community of Black landowners, farmers, and shop owners in East Texas. On July 29, 1910, a mob of white residents, reportedly angered that a Black man had been put in a position of authority on a road crew, rode through the area shooting Black residents on sight, some as they fled into the woods. Officials counted between 7 and 22 deaths, though some estimates run into the hundreds. Survivors left everything behind. One man, Jack Hollie, lost his dairy, granary, general store, and 700 acres of land to white residents who took it over once he'd fled. No one was ever convicted, and Texas didn't officially acknowledge the massacre until 2011.
Read more: Equal Justice Initiative · BlackPast.org
Forsyth County, just north of Atlanta, was home to more than a thousand Black residents, including dozens of landowners who collectively held nearly 2,000 acres of property according to tax records. After two white women separately reported being assaulted, three Black men were lynched or executed following rushed trials, and armed white night riders began burning Black homes and churches across the county. Within weeks, the entire Black population, more than 1,100 people, was forced out, abandoning land, homes, and livestock they had no way to reclaim. Forsyth County remained almost entirely white for the next 75 years.
Read more: Atlanta History Center · NPR
Black workers had been recruited to fill jobs at war-industry factories, giving many Black families their first real economic foothold in the city. That economic competition, layered onto existing racial tension, exploded into violence on July 2, 1917, when white mobs attacked Black residents in the streets and set fire to homes and businesses. Britannica puts the official death toll at 40 Black people and 8 white people, though other estimates run higher, and roughly 6,000 Black residents were driven from their homes.
Read more: Britannica · Smithsonian Magazine
Ten days before Chicago erupted, the nation's capital did first. Starting July 19, 1919, white servicemen and civilians, fueled by sensationalized newspaper reports of alleged assaults on white women, roamed Black neighborhoods beating residents and destroying property. By the third day, Black residents organized armed self-defense. At least 15 people were killed and more than 150 injured before federal troops restored order after four days. Washington was one of the first major confrontations of what author James Weldon Johnson called the Red Summer, a wave of more than three dozen racial attacks across the country in 1919.
Read more: Smithsonian Magazine · Britannica
On July 27, 1919, Eugene Williams, a Black teenager swimming in Lake Michigan, drifted past an invisible line separating the "Black" and "white" sides of the 29th Street Beach. He was stoned by white bathers and drowned. When a white police officer refused to arrest the man witnesses identified as the attacker, violence erupted across the city's South Side for nearly a week. By the time the state militia restored order, 38 people were dead (23 Black, 15 white), 537 were injured, and more than 1,000 Black families had been left homeless by arson and looting. Chicago was the deadliest of the Red Summer attacks.
Read more: Britannica · Chicago History Museum
This one started over money, not politics. Black sharecroppers had organized a union to demand fair payment for their cotton crops from white landowners who routinely shorted them. After a shooting at a union meeting on September 30, 1919, white mobs descended on the area for days. Historians now consider it possibly the deadliest racial massacre in U.S. history, with death toll estimates running into the hundreds. Twelve Black sharecroppers were sentenced to death afterward, sentences the U.S. Supreme Court later overturned.
Read more: Encyclopedia of Arkansas · Smithsonian Magazine
On Election Day 1920, a Black landowner named Mose Norman was turned away from the polls after trying to vote. The mob that went looking for him that night burned homes, two churches, and a Masonic lodge, and lynched Black community leader July Perry in the process. Nearly the entire Black population of Ocoee fled and never came back. Researchers at the Orange County Regional History Center later mapped the properties Black residents lost and valued them at more than nine million dollars in today's money. No Black residents lived in Ocoee again for roughly 60 years.
Read more: Britannica · Orange County Regional History Center
Greenwood was the most prosperous Black business district in the country by 1921, the one that earned the name Black Wall Street and the namesake of this site's own name. On May 31 and June 1, a white mob, some of them deputized by the city, burned an estimated 35 blocks to the ground, killed an estimated 300 people, and left roughly 9,000 residents homeless. It took nearly 80 years for the state of Oklahoma to officially investigate what happened.
Greenwood rebuilt. For 45 years, the community recovered and grew. Then in the 1960s, the city routed Interstate 244 directly through the district, destroying what residents had spent decades putting back together. Historians call it Black Wall Street's second destruction.
Read more: Library of Congress · Oklahoma Historical Society · Smithsonian Magazine
Rosewood was a small, self-sufficient community of Black landowners, farmers, and sawmill workers. After a white woman in a neighboring town falsely accused a Black man of assault, a mob descended on Rosewood over several days in January 1923 and burned the town to the ground. The official death count was six Black residents and two white attackers, though survivor accounts suggest the real toll was higher. The town was never rebuilt by its original residents. In 1994, Florida became the first state in the country to pay reparations to massacre survivors and their descendants.
Read more: History.com · Britannica
When the mobs stopped coming, the bulldozers started. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized 41,000 miles of interstate, and planners across the country routed them directly through Black neighborhoods. Exposed to eminent domain seizures and forced relocation with little or no compensation, communities that had survived decades of racial terror were demolished by their own government under the name of progress.
After the 1921 massacre, Greenwood rebuilt. For 45 years, the community recovered and grew into a thriving district again. Then the city routed Interstate 244 directly through the heart of it, demolishing homes and businesses that residents had spent decades putting back together. Historians call it Black Wall Street's second destruction. Unlike the massacre, this time the government did it on purpose, with planning documents and federal funding.
Read more: Smithsonian Magazine · Tulsa World
Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were the heart of Black Detroit, home to more than 300 Black-owned businesses, nightclubs, hotels, and churches that grew out of the Great Migration. In 1951, a Michigan Supreme Court ruling helped the city exercise eminent domain, and demolition began. By the time I-375 was completed in the 1960s, roughly 100,000 residents had been displaced and both neighborhoods were gone. Most residents were renters and received no compensation. In 2022, the state received a federal grant to tear down the highway and replace it with a boulevard, an acknowledgment of what the original project destroyed.
Read more: National Endowment for the Humanities · WDET
Overtown was the cultural and economic center of Black Miami, known as "The Harlem of the South." Its core held more than 100 Black-owned businesses, hotels, and entertainment venues where Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, and Ella Fitzgerald performed when segregation barred them from Miami Beach. When the state routed I-95 and I-395 directly through the neighborhood, more than 12,000 residents were forcibly relocated through eminent domain. Renters, who made up the majority of the community, received nothing. The population dropped from roughly 50,000 to around 10,000.
Read more: Segregation by Design · WLRN
W.E.B. Du Bois called Durham "the capital of the Black middle class," and its Hayti neighborhood was why. Centered around Parrish Street, Hayti was home to Black-owned banks, insurance companies, and dozens of businesses that served Black communities across the state. When the Durham Freeway (Highway 147) was routed through the neighborhood in the early 1960s, more than 700 buildings were demolished and hundreds of families were displaced. Residents identified the project as a federally funded effort to undermine Black economic power. What redlining and urban renewal started, the highway finished.
Read more: ABC11 · Recovering Hayti (UNC)
By the 1950s, more than 80% of St. Paul's African American population lived in Rondo. The neighborhood held roughly 700 homes, around 300 Black-owned businesses, churches, and institutions including the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center and the Pilgrim Baptist Church. Officials chose to route I-94 through Rondo despite the existence of an alternative path through an industrial area that would have caused far less displacement. More than 600 Black families lost their homes. The neighborhood was never rebuilt. In 2016, the Minnesota Department of Transportation formally apologized for what the highway did to Rondo.
Read more: MinnPost · Minnesota Historical Society
Economists William Darity Jr. and Kirsten Mullen, who study reparations broadly, estimate that closing the entire wealth gap between Black and white Americans, the cumulative result of slavery, Jim Crow, and everything since, would take somewhere between $10 and $12 trillion. That figure comes from their book From Here to Equality and is based on the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, which found that the average Black household has roughly $850,000 less in net worth than the average white household. Black Americans make up about 13% of the population but hold just 3.4% of the nation's wealth, according to Federal Reserve data.
Sources on the $10-12T estimate
Tulsa's own numbers are smaller by comparison, and still staggering. The state's 2001 commission valued the property destroyed in the Greenwood massacre at $1.8 million in 1921 dollars, about $27 million today. Read more. That figure only covers what burned that day. It says nothing about what that wealth would have grown into over the following century if it had been left alone.
In June 2025, Tulsa took its first real step toward repair. Monroe Nichols, the city's first Black mayor, announced a $105 million reparations trust aimed at housing, land acquisition, and economic development in north Tulsa, more than a century after the massacre. Read more: Public Radio Tulsa · Washington Post. It's not nearly enough to undo what happened, nothing could be, but it's a real, current example of what restoration can start to look like.