Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa

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 w...