African American Towns That

Were Destroyed By Whites

 A Black Holocaust in America

The date was June 1, 1921, when "Black Wall Street," the
name fittingly given to one of the most affluent all-Black
communities in America, was bombed from the air and
burned to the ground by mobs of envious whites. In a period
spanning fewer than 12 hours, a once thriving 36-Black
business district in northern Tulsa lay smoldering--a model
community destroyed, and a major African-American
economic movement resoundingly defused.

The night's carnage left some 3,000 African Americans dead,

and over 600 successful businesses lost. Among these were
21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores and two movie
theaters, plus a hospital, a bank, a post office, libraries,
schools, law offices, a half dozen private airplanes and even
a bus system. As could have been expected the impetus
behind it all was the infamous Ku Klux Klan, working in
consort with ranking city officials, and many other
sympathizers.
The best description of Black Wallstreet, or Little Africa as it was also
known, would be liken it to a mini-Beverly Hills. It was the golden door of
the Black community during the early 1900s, and it proved that African
Americans had successful infrastructure. That's what Black Wallstreet was
all about.

The dollar circulated 36 to 100 times, sometimes taking a year for currency
to leave the community. Now in 1995, a dollar leaves the Black community
in 15-minutes. As far as resources, there were Ph.D.'s residing in Little
Africa, Black attorneys and doctors.

One doctor was Dr. Berry who owned the bus system. His average income
was $500 a day, a hefty pocket change in 1910.

During that era, physicians owned medical schools. There were also pawn
shops everywhere, brothels, jewelry stores, 21 churches, 21 restaurants
and two movie theaters.

It was a time when the entire state of Oklahoma had only two airports,
yet six Blacks owned their own planes. It was a very fascinating
community.
The area encompassed over 600 businesses and 36 square
blocks with a population of 15,000 African Americans. And
when the lower-economic Europeans looked over and saw
what the Black community created, many of them were jealous.

When the average student went to school on Black Wallstreet,

he wore a suit and tie because of the morals and respect they
were taught at a young age.

The mainstay of the community was to educate every child.

Nepotism was the one word they believed in. And that's what
we need to get back to in 1995. The main thoroughfare was
Greenwood Avenue, and it was intersected by Archer and Pine
Streets.

From the first letters in each of those three names, you get
G.A.P., and that's where the renowned R and B music group
the Gap Band got its name. They're from Tulsa.
Black Wallstreet was a prime example of the typical Black community in
America that did businesses, but it was in an unusual location. You see, at the
time, Oklahoma was set aside to be a Black and Indian state.

There were over 28 Black townships there. One third of the people who
traveled in the terrifying "Trail of Tears" along side the Indians between 1830 to
1842 were Black people.

The citizens of this proposed Indian and Black state chose a Black governor, a
treasurer from Kansas named McDade. But the Ku Klux Klan said that if he
assumed office that they would kill him within 48 hours.

A lot of Blacks owned farmland, and many of them had gone into the oil
business. The community was so tight and wealthy because they traded dollars
hand-to-hand, and because they were dependent upon one another as a result
of the Jim Crow laws.

It was not unusual that if a resident's home accidentally burned down, it could
be rebuilt within a few weeks by neighbors. This was the type of scenario that
was going on day- to-day on Black Wall Street.

When Blacks intermarried into the Indian culture, some of them received their
promised '40 acres and a mule' and with that came whatever oil was later found
on the properties.
Just to show you how wealthy a lot of Black people were, there was a
banker in the neighboring town who had a wife named California
Taylor. Her father owned the largest cotton gin west of the Mississippi
River. When California shopped, she would take a cruise to Paris every
three months to have her clothes made.

There was also a man named Mason in nearby Wagner County who had
the largest potato farm west of the Mississippi. When he harvested, he
would fill 100 boxcars a day. Another brother not far away had the
same thing with a spinach farm.

The typical family then was five children or more, though the typical
farm family would have 10 kids or more who made up the nucleus of
the labor.

On Black Wall street, a lot of global business was conducted. The

community flourished from the early 1900s until June 1, 1921. That's
when the largest massacre of non-military Americans in the history of
this country took place, and it was lead by the Ku Klux Klan.

Imagine walking out of your front door and seeing 1,500 homes being
burned. It must have been amazing.
The Wealthiest Black Community in America
Was Destroyed and No One Remembers It
Happened
Survivors of infamous 1921 Tulsa race riot
Survivor of Black Wall Street
 New York destroyed a village full of African-
American landowners to create Central Park

In the mid 19th century, New York

City decided it needed a park. The
city was growing fast.

There was the problem of the changing downtown area. Once the
spot where fashionable ladies perambulated, it was becoming
crowded with a new immigrant population, as well as noise and the
smoke produced by industry. According to the Louise Chipley
Slavicek, author of New York’s Central Park, the pro-park lobby were
largely “affluent merchants, bankers and landowners”, who wanted a
“fashionable and safe public place where they and their families
could mingle and promenade”.
But there’s another side to the story. By the time the decision to create a park
was made, there wasn’t enough empty space left in Manhattan. So the city chose
a stretch of land where the largest settlement was Seneca Village, population
264, and seized the land under the law of eminent domain, through which the
government can take private land for public purposes. Residents protested to the
courts many times, against both the order and the level of compensation being
offered for their land; eventually, though, all were forced to leave.

Two thirds of the population was black; the rest Irish. There were three
churches and a school. And 50 per cent of the heads of households owned the
land they lived on, a fact conveniently ignored by the media of the time, who
described the population as “squatters” and the settlement as “n***er village”.

If you visited the park during its first 150 years of existence, you’d have no idea
this village ever existed. It was only in 2001 that a small group called the Seneca
Village Project pressured the city to install a small plaque; it describes the village
as a “unique community”, which may well have been “Manhattan’s first
prominent community of African American property owners”.
Since then the group, formed in the late nineties by a group of archaeologists and
historians, has gone much further in bringing the village back into the cultural
consciousness. In 2011, it managed to get permission to carry out an
archaeological dig in Central Park, in order to find out more about the village and
its residents.
 Fragments of crockery found during the
Seneca Village dig. Image: the Media
Center for Art History, Department of Art
History and Archaeology, Columbia
University.
Rosewood massacre
The Rosewood massacre was a violent, racially motivated massacre of blacks and
destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923
in ruralLevy County, Florida. At least six blacks and two whites were killed, and the
town ofRosewood was abandoned and destroyed in what contemporary news
reports characterized as a race riot. Racial disturbances were common during the
early 20th century in the United States, reflecting the nation's rapid social changes.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black males in the years
before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922.
Prior to the massacre, the town of Rosewood had been a quiet, primarily black,
self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Trouble began when
white men from several nearby towns lynched a black Rosewood resident because
of unsupported accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been
beaten and possibly raped by a black drifter. When the town's black citizens rallied
together to defend themselves against further attacks, a mob of several hundred
whites combed the countryside hunting for black people, and burned almost every
structure in Rosewood. Survivors from the town hid for several days in nearby
swamps until they were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. Although state
and local authorities were aware of the violence, no arrests were made for what
happened in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by its former black residents;
none ever moved back.
Although the rioting was widely reported around the United States at the time, few
official records documented the event. Survivors, their descendants, and the
perpetrators remained silent about Rosewood for decades. Sixty years after the
rioting, the story of Rosewood was revived in major media when several journalists
covered it in the early 1980s. Survivors and their descendants organized to sue the
state for having failed to protect Rosewood's black community. In 1993, the Florida
Legislature commissioned a report on the massacre. As a result of the findings,
Florida became the first U.S. state to compensate survivors and their descendants
for damages incurred because of racial violence. The incident was the subject of a
1997 feature film directed by John Singleton. In 2004, the state designated the site
of Rosewood as a Florida Heritage Landmark. Officially, the recorded death toll of
the first week of January 1923 was six blacks and two whites. Historians disagree
about this number. Some survivors' stories claim there may have been up to 27
black residents killed, and assert that newspapers did not report the total number
of white deaths. Minnie Lee Langley, who was in the Carrier house siege, recalls
that she stepped over many white bodies on the porch when she left the
house.[1] Several eyewitnesses claim to have seen a mass grave filled with black
people; one remembers a plow brought from Cedar Key that covered 26 bodies.
However, by the time authorities investigated these claims, most of the witnesses
were dead, or too elderly and infirm to lead them to a site to confirm the stories
All-black towns
across America:
Life was hard but
full of promise.

Other Little
Known Black
Towns Across
America:
Nicodemus Historic District, Nicodemus,
Graham County, Kansas. (Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division
 A few years after the Civil War ended, promoters determined to establish an all-
black town on the Kansas frontier took out an ad in a Kentucky bulletin
promising membership in “The Largest Colored Colony in America” for a small
down payment: “All Colored People that want to go to Kansas, on September
5th, 1877, Can do so for $5.00.”
The bulletin explained those wanting to join this new colony, which would be
called Nicodemus, “can do so by paying the sum of one dollar ($1.00), and this
money is to be paid by the first of September, 1877, in installments of twenty-
five cents at a time, or otherwise as may be desired.”

Life for black settlers was hard in Nicodemus, which, according to the
Nicodemus National Historic Site, is one of the oldest black
settlements west of the Mississippi River.
Six black men and one white man created the Nicodemus Town
Company in 1877, according to the site. They were W.H. Smith,
president; Ben Carr, vice president; W.R. Hill, treasurer; S.P. Roundtree,
secretary; Jerry Allsap; William Edmunds; and Jeff Lenze.
Hill, the only white member, was a land speculator who had traveled
to the South to promote Nicodemus and recruit black people for the
new colony.
Not much was documented about the daily
lives, aspirations and fears of people living in
such towns as “Blackdom, New Mexico;
Hobson City, Alabama; Allensworth,
California; andRentiesville,
Oklahoma because residents failed to record
their experiences and whites were not
interested in preserving and collecting
material on the black towns.”
Oklahoma’s all-black towns
included Clearview, Boley and Langston,
which was founded around 1890, according
to the Black Towns Project.
Mound Bayou, Miss., was founded in 1887 by
freedmen led by Isaiah Montgomery. The
town, according to blackpast.org, was
designed for the residents to have very little
contact with whites, had a post office,
churches, banks, schools and stores and was
often cited by Booker T. Washington as a
model of self-sufficiency.
Eatonville, Fla. was incorporated in 1887.

Eatonville, the city of five lakes, three croquet

courts, three hundred brown skins, three
hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two
schools and no jail house.”

Blackdom, a town in New Mexico, was

founded in 1911 by black settlers, later forced
out by a drought, according to New Mexico
Geneology archives.

Boley, Creek Nation, Indian Territory, was incorporated in 1905, becoming one of the
wealthiest black towns in the country, according to the African-American Registry.
Researchers say it is almost impossible to find a complete list of all-black towns and
communities. Many less famous black towns and communities survived until the
Depression, when black families left out of the necessity to find jobs.
In the Washington area, several communities still exist. Their populations have declined—
but in many descendants still live.
The town of North Brentwood was the first
incorporated black municipality in the
Washington area, according to the Maryland
Heritage Area Authority.
North Brentwood was established in the
1890s after Wallace A. Bartlett, a white Civil
War veteran who had commanded black
troops, sold property to a local realty
company, according to North Brentwood
Historical Society.
The northern tract was designated for blacks
to develop. “North Brentwood’s first residents
were former slaves of local planters and Civil
War veterans,” according to documents by the
Maryland Heritage Area Authority. “The first
lot was sold to an African American by the
name of Henry Randall in 1891.” Randall’s
house stood on Holladay Avenue, which
became Rhode Island Avenue.
Other black towns and communities in Prince
George’s include Glenarden, Lincoln, Chapel
Hill, Rossville and Ridgely.
“Fairmount Heights was founded at the turn
of the Century and Glenarden in the 1920s,”
said Susan Pearl, a historian at the Prince
George’s Historical Society. “Of the
communities listed, North Brentwood,
Fairmount Heights and Glenarden were
incorporated.”
Many were not incorporated. They
include Ridgely, which was established on
what is now Central Avenue in about 1870 by
a black farmer. “It was a very vibrant
community,” said Pearl , who wrote “African-
American Heritage Survey, 1996.”
“There is little left of it. The church and school
are still there.”
Rossville was named after Augustus Ross, who
was born a slave in 1855. He was freed in
1864 and went on to work for the Muirkirk
Iron Furnace. Twenty years later he and 10
other freedmen, many of whom worked at
the furnace, bought land in a new subdivision
that would eventually be named after Ross,
according to the Prince George’s County
African-American Heritage Survey in 1996.
Lincoln was established in 1908 as a retreat community for successful blacks who lived in the
District and could afford to spend time out of the city. “They were movers and shakers in
Washington,” Pearl said. “The biggest mover and shaker in Lincoln was the brother of the man
who handed out the Rosenwald awards.”
But the community did not prosper. “It was never incorporated,” Pearl said. “It didn’t grow
even as a black community. There is hardly anything left of Lincoln.”
Other black communities were established within towns, Pearl said. “What we know as Old
Bowie had a large black population after 1870 because of the people who worked on the
railroad.”
Heritage Montgomery, an initiative created to promote the county’s heritage, collected the
stories of some African American communities in its publication “Community Cornerstones,”
which lists dozens of African American settlements created by freed people after the Civil War.
“A symbol of hope and faith, the church was typically the first institution established in a new
black community, usually followed by a school and a charity hall,” according to the brochure.
“Fortunately, many of Montgomery County’s historic landmark churches still proudly stand as
cornerstones of their communities.”
Those sites include Scotland A.M.E. Zion Church, built in Scotland,
which, according to the Montgomery County Historic Preservation
Commission in Potomac, was created in 1880 by William Dove — a
freedman who bought 36 acres for $210. The community was
originally called Snakes Den.

DeNeen L. Brown is an award-winning staff writer at The Washington Post who has covered night police, education, courts, politics
and culture.
Weeksville
1301 Sterling Place in Weeksville, # 1
Weeksville was named after James Weeks, a stevedore and African-American ex-
slave[1] from Virginia, who in 1838 (just 11 years after the abolition of slavery in New York
State)[2] bought a plot of land from Henry C. Thompson (another free African-American) in the
Ninth Ward of central Brooklyn. The City of New York confuses[3] Weeks with a man of the
same name who lived 1776-1863.[4]
The village itself was established by a group of African-American land investors and political
activists, and covered an area in the borough's eastern Bedford Hills area, bounded by
present-day Fulton Street, East New York Avenue, Ralph Avenue and Troy Avenue.[5] A 1906
article in the New York Age recalling the earlier period noted that James Weeks "owned a
handsome dwelling at Schenectady and Atlantic Avenues."
By the 1850s, Weeksville had more than 500 residents from all over the East Coast (as well as
two people born in Africa). Almost 40 percent of residents were southern-born. Nearly one-
third of the men over 21 owned land; in antebellum New York, unlike in New England, non-
white men had to own real property (to the value of $250) and pay taxes on it to qualify as
voters.[6] The village had its own churches (including Bethel Tabernacle African Methodist
Episcopal Church and the Berean Missionary Baptist Church), a school ("Colored School no. 2",
now P.S. 243), a cemetery, and an old age home.[7] Weeksville had one of the first African-
American newspapers, the Freedman's Torchlight, and in the 1860s became the national
headquarters of the African Civilization Society and the Howard Orphan Asylum. In addition,
the Colored School was the first such school in the U.S. to integrate both its staff and its
students
During the violent New York
Draft Riots of 1863, the
community served as a
refuge for many African-
Americans who fled
fromManhattan.
After the completion of
the Brooklyn Bridge and
as New York City grew and
expanded, Weeksville
gradually became part
of Crown Heights, and
memory of the village was
largely forgotten.
 Black Lands,
White Squatters
 LIFE'S A BEACH
How black land became white sand:
The racial erosion of the U.S. coasts

A couple lounging on Bay Shore Beach, outside Hampton, Va.

The property behind them is now a high-end subdivision.
The beach is restricted to residents.
Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University
In 1910, less than 50 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation, African Americans owned over 25 million acres in the former slave-
holding states. Much of that black-owned property was on the coasts, the
geographic margins of the nation, which at the time were some of the most
undesirable areas for living or leisure.

That was before the Army Corps of Engineers came along to convert those
coastline areas into “flood protection” zones, and beaches. The Corps dumped
over 7 million cubic yards of sand in Mississippi to create “the longest manmade
beach in the world,” but not for all to enjoy.

When the federal government brought the sand to the beach, and a highway
system for city folk to access it, in came droves of white folks, who then effectively
drove black landowners out of their homes.
What the lauded black scholar W. E. B. Dubois called “the color problem of
summer,” the National Park Service called the “spectacular acceleration [of]
private and commercial development” of America’s coasts. What DuBois was
referencing, and what the Park Service was ignoring, was the violent pushing out
of former black landowners into segregated, polluted nooks of the shoreline, if not
off their land altogether.
Other Towns Founded
By Blacks
Pennytown
Pennytown is an unincorporated
area in Saline County, Missouri. Historically it
was the largest African-American community
in central Missouri.[1]
Joe Penny, a former slave from Kentucky,
started what would become Pennytown in
March of 1871 when he purchased eight acres
of land for $160. Ten more purchases by black
families followed during the 1870s and by
1880 black farmers owned more than a third
of the land in the Salt Fork
Township.[2] Historically, its population
consisted of former slaves and their
descendants. Its peak population was 1,000.
The final birth in the community occurred in
1944. Around that period, due to lowering
economic prospects, many families began to
move to Marshall. As time passed, more and
more buildings were razed. As of 2014 the
only remaining building from the former
settlement is the Free Will Baptist Church of
Pennytown.[1]
Martha’s Vineyard

Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, part of

Massachusetts’ Cape Cod Islands, is one of
several historic African American summer
resort communities along the Atlantic
seaboard founded in the 1890s. The” Inkwell”
or Town Beach in Oak Bluffs is the name of
the popular beach frequented by African
Americans beginning in the late nineteenth
century. The strand was pejoratively called
“The Inkwell” by nearby whites in reference
to the skin color of the beach-goers. It is the
most famous of beaches across the U.S. to
transform this odious nickname into an
emblem of pride.

- See more at:

http://www.blackpast.org/aah/inkwell-
martha-s-vineyard-1890.
 Late eighteenth century Methodist and Baptist revival meetings were significant in bringing
early white and some black visitors to Oak Bluffs. The visitors who came sparked the earliest
summer resort community growth. Land developers saw money to be made from the religious
pilgrims who also arrived to enjoy the secular charms of the Island’s bucolic green interior and
pristine oceanfront landscape cooled by sea breezes. By the early twentieth century an
increasing number of African Americans came to the Island as servants to white families with
summer homes.

Although racial discrimination and restrictive covenants persisted on the Island, some of these
early black servants became property owners, year-round residents, and small business
entrepreneurs, particularly in Oak Bluffs. Much of the property purchased by these early
African American Islanders continues to owned by their descendants. In the 1920s the African
American Islanders began to offer accommodations in their small cottages that attracted black
visitors from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other Northeastern cities

- See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/inkwell-martha-s-vineyard-

1890s#sthash.vvZD29jm.dpuf
 Gullah
The Gullah are the descendants of enslaved Africans who lived in
the Lowcountryregions of Georgia and South Carolina, which includes both the
coastal plain and theSea Islands.
Historically, the Gullah region extended from the Cape Fear area on North
Carolina's coast south to the vicinity of Jacksonville on Florida's coast, but today
the Gullah area is confined to the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry. The
Gullah people and their language are also called Geechee, which some
scholars[who?] speculate is related to the Ogeechee River near Savannah,
Georgia.[citation needed] "Gullah" is a term that was originally used to designate the
variety of English spoken by Gullah and Geechee people, but over time it has
been used by its speakers to formally refer to their creole language and
distinctive ethnic identity as a people. The Georgia communities are
distinguished by identifying as either "Freshwater Geechee" or "Saltwater
Geechee", depending on their proximity to the coast
DAUFUSKIE ISLAND

Development Overtakes Island's Black Culture

Published: April 4, 1994

DAUFUSKIE ISLAND, S.C., April 4— In the quiet

glens and sandy lanes of Daufuskie Island, the
descendants of slaves consider nearby Hilton
Head, with its expensive cars, condominiums and
manicured golf courses, as almost another world.
But development is crossing Calibogue Sound, and
longtime residents of this isolated island worry
that growth and higher taxes may drive them from
their homes.
"We're becoming an endangered species," said
Yvonne Wilson, whose ancestors were slaves. One
or two black families typically leave the island
each year, and people like Mrs. Wilson hope that
incentives can be found to encourage others to
stay.
Daufuskie's population had dwindled to about
60 when developers began buying large tracts
on the 12-square-mile island in 1984. Now
antebellum-style houses and developments
line the shore, and 150 people, one-third of
them black, call the island home. Several
thousand people are expected to be living
here within a decade, which worries some of
the old-time islanders.
Photos depict the 1950’s lives of
slave descendants living on a
remote island cut off from the U.S.
mainland

Daufuskie Island is just three miles

from U.S. mainland, but there is
no bridge and the island did
not have electricity until the 1950s
Gentrification
Do or Die Bed-Sty Is now
Stuyvesant Heights
And
Brownsville is Now
Brownsville Gardens
 List of a few Black
Towns
That were Founded
By Blacks
 Hobson City was established on August 16, 1899 and is the oldest incorporated African
American Cities in the State of Alabama and the third oldest incorporated African
American city in the United States in. There are less than 25 remaining African American
cities in the United States

Allensworth
In 1908 four black men formed the California Colony and Home Promoting
Association. The Association purchased 20 acres along the Santa Fe rail line from
the Pacific Farming Company, at a railway stop called Solita. They divided this
land into individual parcels to form the first town in California to be founded,
financed, and governed by blacks. Soon after the town was founded the name
was changed to Allensworth in honor of the association’s president Allen
Allensworth, retired chaplain of the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment. With the
success of its agricultural development and business enterprises, the town
quickly grew.
By the year 1914 the town would not only have a schoolhouse it would become
California’s first African American school district. It became a judicial district,
had a Baptist church, a hotel, and a library that would be made part of the
Tulare County free library system. The year 1914 also brought a number of
setbacks to the town. First, much of the town’s economic base was lost when
the Santa Fe Railroad moved its rail stop from Allensworth to Alpaugh. In
September, during a trip to Monrovia, California, Colonel Allensworth was
crossing the street when he was struck and killed by a motorcycle. The town
refuses to die. The downtown area is now preserved as Colonel Allensworth
State Historic Park where thousands of visitors come from all over California to
partake in the special events held at the park during the year. The area outside
of the state park is also still inhabited.
- See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/allensworth-
california#sthash.xQiVNBxa.dpuf
 Boley, Creek Nation, Indian Territory ,
was incorporated in 1905,
becoming one of the wealthiest black towns
in the country,
according to the African-American Registry.

North Brentwood was the

first incorporated black
municipality in the
Washington area

Glenarden, Lincoln, Chapel Hill,

Rossville and Ridgely.
“Fairmount Heights