"Built from the Fire" by Victor Luckerson

Lectures and conversations with historians, authors, and thinkers.

Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street

WINNER: The Dayton Literary Peace Prize; The MAAH Stone Book Award; The SABEW Best in Business Book Award; The Lillian Smith Book Award; The Oklahoma Historical Society’s E. E. Dale Award
FINALIST: The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his family joined a community soon to become the center of black life in the West. But just a few years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people in one of the worst acts of racist violence in U.S. history.

The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt the district into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived and small businesses flourished. Ed bought a newspaper to chronicle Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry, and his son Jim, an attorney, embodied the family’s hopes for the civil rights movement. But by the 1970s urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood. Today the newspaper remains, and Ed’s granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists to revive it once again. 

In Built from the Fire, journalist Victor Luckerson tells the true story behind a potent national symbol of success and solidarity and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.

Victor Luckerson is a journalist and author based in Tulsa who works to bring neglected black history to light. He is a former staff writer at The Ringer and business reporter for Time magazine. His writing and research have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wired, and Smithsonian. He was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his reporting in Time on the 1923 Rosewood Massacre. He also manages an email newsletter about underexplored aspects of black history called Run It Back.

Produced in partnership with The New York Historical