The Neighborhood Fighting Not to Be Forgotten

When Brenda Nails-Alford received the letter informing her that her ancestors were survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, she had to reread it five times. The massacre was a two-day onslaught of racial violence that is believed to have killed hundreds of people and laid waste to the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood—which included a business district known as “Black Wall Street”—in Tulsa, Nails-Alford’s hometown. She had never heard of it.

In 2003, a legal team sued the city of Tulsa, the Tulsa Police Department, and the state of Oklahoma on behalf of more than 300 of the massacre’s survivors and survivors’ descendants. After their letter reached Nails-Alford, she drove to Greenwood and walked up and down the streets, just like she had as a kid. Her memories suddenly felt haunted.

The Tulsa massacre has been revisited on the HBO shows Watchmen and Lovecraft Country in recent years. And this month, which marks the centennial, is likely to see a deluge of media attention and symbolic gestures at remembering what was lost. But Nails-Alford, now in her early 60s and a career-services coordinator at the Tulsa Technology Center, doesn’t want her family’s legacy to be tied to these passing remembrances. She wants Greenwood’s pain—and its triumph—to be protected permanently.

There’s a tangible way to do that: by adding Greenwood to the National Register of Historic Places, the federal government’s official list of sites and structures deemed worthy of preserving for their historical significance. Little of the Greenwood that existed in 1921 is left standing; a place on the National Register would commemorate the