Built from the Fire

An ambitious chronicle of a racially motivated atrocity that still resonates today. Veteran Tulsa-based journalist Luckerson, a former staff writer at the Ringer and business reporter for Time magazine, brings his considerable journalistic sensibilities to this sweeping and intimate portrait of racial violence, empowerment, and social action. The author's subject in his debut is the 1921 race massacre in the entrepreneurial Greenwood district of Tulsa, an area popularly known as "Black Wall Street." Luckerson's exhaustive research and interviewing yield an evocative tale related through the sagas of several prominent Greenwood families and massacre survivors--most notably, the Goodwin family, the longest-surviving Greenwood family and caretakers of the invaluable newspaper the Oklahoma Eagle, which becomes another character in the story. Luckerson's well-documented history of the arrivals, struggles, and triumphs of Black Tulsa prior to the massacre is invaluable, particularly his accounts of the development and promise of Tulsa as a whole and of Greenwood's phoenixlike emergence from the ashes. His depiction of the massacre itself is not for the faint of heart, but it's necessary reading nonetheless. "When he stops to reflect on the magnitude of the destruction, and the dark motivation at the heart of it, he thinks pogrom--an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group--may be the most apt description," writes Luckerson about a member of the Goodwin family. The details of the violence, mass graves, and sea of Red Cross tents that resembled a military field hospital necessarily reinforce the horror. Luckerson adeptly describes the centurylong economic, political, and psychological consequences of the massacre, and he clearly demonstrates how those consequences inform contemporary debates in Tulsa, the Oklahoma state legislature, and the nation concerning restitution, police brutality and accountability, and the social responsibility of citizens and businesses, Black and White alike. Pair this excellent history with RJ Young's history/memoir hybrid, Requiem for the Massacre. A vital book for anyone who wishes to understand American race relations past and present.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

April 10, 2023
Journalist Luckerson debuts with an immersive history of Greenwood, the prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., that was burned to the ground by white rioters in 1921. Detailing multiple phases of the neighborhood’s history, he notes that by 1920, Greenwood boasted Black-owned beauty shops, grocery stores, and saloons, as well as A.J. Smitherman’s Tulsa Star newspaper, which covered topics of interest to Black Tulsa, and the Stradford Hotel, which owner J.B. Stradford intended to cater to affluent Black customers. After the massacre, Greenwood residents overcame many obstacles to reestablish the area as a rich wellspring of Black culture and business, but highway construction and “urban renewal” programs in the 1960s and ’70s splintered the community. Documenting the fight to maintain the spirit of Greenwood, Luckerson spotlights the Goodwin family, including patriarch J.H. Goodwin, who left Mississippi for Tulsa in 1913, and his great-granddaughter Regina Goodwin, the only Black woman in Oklahoma’s House of Representatives. The sprawling narrative also touches on the Black Lives Matter movement, the search for mass graves of the riot’s victims, and debates over how best to mark the 2021 centennial of the massacre. It’s a comprehensive and impassioned portrait of a community fighting for its survival. Photos.