"Violent Utopia traces the long history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre from the migration of Black freed slaves to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity in Tulsa. In doing so, Jovan Scott Lewis resists the temptation to exceptionalize both the violence of the 1921 massacre and the utopia of Tulsa's "Black Wall Street." Both, Lewis argues, exist in larger structures of anti-Black violence and dispossession, expulsion and segregation. Therefore the devastation of Tulsa's Greenwood district owes as much to Jim Crow enclosure and later urban renewal programs as the spectacular violence of the massacre. Violent Utopia illustrates how the North Tulsa community reconciles the inheritance of violence and freedom that formthe very condition of their geography. As such, the book argues that the geography of North Tulsa, as a site of sovereign belonging, is the basis on which Black Tulsans will repair the promise of Greenwood"--
Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and its century-long legacy of dispossession, placing it in a larger historical and social context of widespread anti-Black racism and segregation in Tulsa and beyond.
In Violent Utopia Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession in Tulsa and beyond. He shows how the processes that led to the massacre, subsequent urban renewal, and intergenerational poverty shored up by nonprofits constitute a form of continuous slow violence. Now, in their attempts to redevelop resources for self-determination, Black Tulsans must reconcile a double inheritance: the massacre’s violence and the historical freedom and prosperity that Greenwood represented. Their future is tied to their geography, which is the foundation from which they will repair and fulfill Greenwood’s promise.
