More than 100 years after the Black Wall Street Massacre, Tulsa has become a haven for entrepreneurs

TULSA — Nestled among the rows of colorful shoes lining the walls of Silhouette Shoes & Art, a framed black-and-white photo reminds owner Veneta Cooper of the giants on whose shoulders she stands.

This photo shows the name and address of the business, Grier Shoe Shop – part of an area known as Black Wall Street. It was the business that occupied the Cooper Building before it was destroyed during the Tulsa Race Massacre more than a century ago.

In the decades between Grier and Silhouette, there have been several waves of black entrepreneurship in the area, local advocates said. They were particularly excited by the focus on innovation and technology in the recent Renaissance, which was supercharged after the racial reckoning of 2020 galvanized corporate and societal interest in uplifting Black Americans.

“We’re trying to revitalize the space, build a successful business here, and get back what was taken from us,” Cooper said in an interview.

Cooper also runs an AI platform for the shoe resale marketplace called Arbit. Through these projects, she has become part of a growing class of Black entrepreneurs who are tapping into Tulsa’s history for inspiration and support resources.

It has passed Verb housean accelerator program for entrepreneurs of color. The program offers a $70,000 investment with no interest or equity requirements, and non-local participants move to Oklahoma’s second-largest city to collaborate with peers and other professionals.

Bringing participants to Tulsa for several months can help them see how they fit into the bigger picture of minority entrepreneurship, said Dominic Ardis, founder of Act House. Some who were not already in the community stayed after the accelerator ended, adding their thriving businesses to the growing ecosystem of minority-owned businesses in the area.

Act House is part of a group of organizations that aim to support Black-owned businesses in Tulsa, a mission that stakeholders consider particularly salient given the city’s fraught history.

It was Greenwood, as Black Wall Street was officially known He was attacked by a white mob On May 31, 1921, an event that was later recognized as one of the The worst racial massacres in American history. More than 1,000 businesses and homes were raided and up to 300 black people were killed when mobs set fire to the neighborhood.

That history gained new attention after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and during the 100th anniversary of the massacre in 2021. Outside of Tulsa, advocates say some corporate interest in supporting Black businesses has waned in the following years with rising interest rates and economic uncertainty. .

But within the local community, groups continue to try to rebuild what has been lost by empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs. One way disparate efforts between stakeholders have been focused to best serve founders is through Build In Tulsa, a network of companies such as accelerators and investors.

Ashley Sims, managing director of Build In Tulsa, said she’s seen more recognition of Tulsa as an emerging technology hotspot and a clearer understanding of why it’s important for Black entrepreneurs to go there given the history. Sims, who grew up in the city, said there was an effort to combat the idea that people had to leave to find the success that was so ubiquitous on Black Wall Street.

“I want young black kids growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to look around and see tech startups, I want them to see CEOs, I want them to see founders, I want them to see innovators,” Sims said. “I want them to see wealth, and I want them to know that it’s part of their future.”

For entrepreneurs, Sims said this means showing that they don’t need to move to a coastal city to take their venture to the next level.

Build In Tulsa recently opened a space for entrepreneurs of color to collaborate and hold meetings. The three-story building is located on the corner of North Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. and the Path of Reconciliation, the latter of which was renamed in 2019 after honoring someone previously Alleged relationships To the Ku Klux Klan.

This physical community in Tulsa was paramount to founders like Edna Martinson, whose company, Poodle, offers 3D toys for children that encourage learning. Through Tulsa, the Act House graduate now feels part of the national Black entrepreneurship space, and finds herself enjoying more connections at popular owner events like Art Basel in Miami and South by Southwest in Austin.

“It’s not like Tulsa on its own,” Martinson said. “It really serves as a gateway to the broader national community of founders of color and ecosystem builders.”

Despite the progress, advocates and entrepreneurs are quick to note that the patchwork of organizations providing support does not erase the inequalities Black founders face across the country. The biggest obstacle cited by many is the difficulty of obtaining financing.

Disparities exist at every stage. A 2016 Stanford study It found that black entrepreneurs start with about $500 in outside equity, while their white counterparts have $18,500. Although the dollar amounts are modest for both groups, the National Bureau of Economic Research reported that white-owned startups saw Five times the capital From family and other people familiar with matters other than those owned by black people.

The black founders received Only 0.48% of venture capital dollars in 2023, according to Crunchbase. Traditional financing measures are hampered by practices such as personal guarantee requirements that make it more difficult for those who do not have generational wealth.

“It’s literally exhausting,” said Latanya White, founder of Concept Creative Group, a company focused on business development and wealth transfer among Black founders. “All the while, you’re still trying to build a business, you’re still trying to create something that will open doors for generations in your family and in your community.”

These challenges add to the already bleak picture of the state of equality within business. Less than 3% of U.S. businesses were owned by blacks despite the racial group making up more than 12% of the country’s population, according to the latest federal data analyzed by CNBC.

Olaoluwa Adesanya is one of the entrepreneurs struggling for financing. While he found reluctance from venture capitalists to invest in hardware-focused tech companies, Adesanya was able to secure financial help from a range of groups focused on founders of color.

In addition to participating in Act House, he has received tens of thousands of dollars from programs like AfroTech and a competition for black founders at Harvard Business School. He also received a grant from the Black Wall Street Organization.

Financial and community support in Tulsa was pivotal in improving the PalmPlug product to improve hand movement, Adesanya said. Before arriving at the accelerator, Adesanya had a prototype that he constantly feared would break. Now, it often brings praise for its design and quality.

“It’s still very difficult,” said Adesanya, who has returned to Seattle but is considering moving to Tulsa permanently. “But I’m also very grateful to the black community, and how they’ve really helped us get to where we are today.”

There is also evidence that black founders have more difficulty winning government grants or contracts, said Grant Warner, director of the Center for Black Entrepreneurship, a collaboration between two historically black colleges and the Black Economic Alliance Foundation. He said one of the most glaring examples he saw was an identical application for a government award that was approved only after a white person’s name was changed to precede a black person’s name.

Entrepreneurship can seem especially risky for Black people as they try to keep their families financially afloat, according to James Lurie, author of two books on minority wealth. That’s partly due to a reluctance to sacrifice the security that previous generations gained when breaking into corporate America, he said.

Blacks don’t always have the same luxury as other racial groups of seeing role models within their communities of people who have successfully started their own businesses, he said. However, Lowry said he is excited to see more black students entering business schools and thinking about creating big ventures.

“It’s like starting late and competing against generations of people who have been entrepreneurs, even within their families,” said Lurie, who is also a senior consultant for workforce and supply chain diversity at Boston Consulting Group. “It’s catching up, but we’re making progress.”

At the national level, advocates see the potential for government programs to help level the playing field for founders of color. For example, The law of ascension It will provide resources to establish business incubators on college campuses that serve historically blacks and minorities, as well as at community colleges. The Minority Business Development Agency’s Capital Readiness Program helps disadvantaged entrepreneurs scale their ventures, but the program has worked More than 1000 requests For less than 50 pips.

Black entrepreneurs and stakeholders point to resilience as a key quality that helps founders succeed despite these unique obstacles. In fact, academic models have found that women and minority founders exhibit this Higher levels of flexibility Due to a range of challenges and support structures.

For Adesanya and others who came to Tulsa, they could see and feel the refusal to give up in the face of the hardships faced by those who came before them.

From sidewalk signs indicating businesses that existed before the massacre, to a museum dedicated to the history of Black Wall Street, reminders of the past helped these founders better understand where they fit in a long legacy. They say it inspires them to break down barriers for themselves and those who come after them.

“We are truly the dreams of our ancestors,” Adesanya said. “What we do is what they dreamed of and what they suffered for.”

-Shaquille Brewster, NBC Parnia Mazhar and Andrew Davis contributed to this report.

Watch more of this story Haley Jackson now 5pm ET.