THE DESTRUCTION OF BLACK TOWNS IN AMERICA: Erased History

THE DESTRUCTION OF BLACK TOWNS IN AMERICA: The towns in this book were not failures. Greenwood, Oklahoma was called Black Wall Street because it worked. Rosewood, Florida had churches, schools, families, and futures. Elaine, Arkansas had Black farmers who dared to read their own contracts. Ocoee, Florida had citizens who simply wanted to vote. Each of these communities was, by any honest measure, a success. And each was destroyed precisely because of that success.What I have tried to do in these pages is restore the humanity that official history stripped away. These were not abstractions or statistics. They were people—fathers who built houses with their own hands, mothers who organized schools with no government funding, children who went to sleep one night in their own beds and woke to fire. I have tried to hear them. I have tried to let their stories breathe. Read more