Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street movie review (2021)

Incited by reports of a Black man, a 19-year old shoe shiner named Dick Rowland, accosting a white woman, elevator operator Sarah Page, the gruesome event witnessed racist whites crossing the train tracks into Greenwood, the Black section of town revered as Black Wall Street, to enact revenge. Over the course of sixteen sickening hours, which saw gunfire, lynching, and coordinated aerial assaults, an estimated 100-300 people were murdered. The great majority of them were African American. 100 years after the tragedy questions still remain: Exactly how many people lost their lives? And where are their bodies? 

Executive produced by Lebron James and Maverick Carter, directed by Salima Koroma, the documentary “Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street” premieres on CNN tonight to answer those mysteries while effectively paying tribute to the dead by recalling that day in their words.

To know the story of the massacre, one must first learn the origins of Tulsa. Koroma reaches back to the 1830s to unveil how the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole—first owned Black slaves in their native southern states. Upon the 1830 Indian Removal Act, Native American slave owners took their “property” with them on the Trail of Tears. The Five Civilized Tribes even supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. For most, including myself, these revelations will come as a surprise. What they divulge is how African Americans, even among a group similarly hated by white folks, still occupied the lowest rung in the American experiment.

By the conclusion of the Civil War, the reformed United States government issued the Creek Treaty of 1866. The order made the slaves owned by Native Americans into Freedmen, granting them mineral rich land that held oil. Tulsa not only became the oil capital of the world, attracting whites seeking fame and fortune. It created a Black upper-class, located in Greenwood. Because of segregation, African Americans needed to create their own schools, newspapers such as the A.J. Smitherman-run Tulsa Star, pool halls, hotels, grocery stores, nightclubs, lawyers, doctors, and movie theaters like the Dreamland owned by Loulah and Josh Williams. Hence the creation of the Black Wall Street.