Thread by @singhvianjali

For months, my colleagues and I have been immersed in the world of archival maps, photographs, city directories, books, newspapers, survivor accts. and census data to recreate what was lost 100 years ago in Greenwood, also known as the “Black Wall Street”. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

We talked with historians and researchers, and read books about the massacre to understand the details of the horrific event as well as the people who made up the Greenwood community.

We wrote software to turn the digitized 1921 city directory from Tulsa into a searchable database of businesses in the neighborhood. We parsed out records with a (c) after the name, which meant the business was run by a Black resident.

Newspaper ads from The Tulsa Star, one of two Black newspapers in Greenwood, helped us piece together the ins and outs of daily life in Greenwood.

We georeferenced 1915 and 1920 Sanborn insurance maps and used machine learning to extract building outlines and create a 3D model of the city. Using other maps from that time, we built a street grid of 1921 Tulsa.

Using archival photographs and maps, we created a detailed model of the 100 block of Greenwood Avenue, the main business district. We used city directories to map more than 70 businesses in this one block, including theaters, hotels, barber shops and doctor’s offices.

We spent hours researching reference material so we could incorporate details that helped to bring the neighborhood back to life.

We used census data from Ancestry.com to map the occupations of African-American residents. Teachers, doctors, mechanics and many more jobs were held by Greenwood residents, making it a vibrant and self-sufficient community, less than 60 years out of enslavement

“To this day, not one person has been prosecuted or punished for the devastation and ruin of the original Greenwood.”

This project would not have been possible without the archivists and the librarians who went out of their way to share digital scans of archival material with us, as well as the historians and researchers who helped us understand the details of the massacre.

Thank you to my incredible colleagues for their dedication and hardwork in bringing this special piece to life. @yparshina @haeyoun @abscribe @TroyEricG, Mika Gröndahl, @LingdongH, @wallacetim, @blueshirt, @sjwilliams @aroyalbox @jamiestockwell

Matt Craig, Alain Delaquérière, @LazaroGamio, Guilbert Gates, @huang_apiaries, @BlackiLi, @jugalpatelNYT, @BedelSaget, @alisonsald, Jessica White, Grace Maalouf, Jennifer Martin and Farah Mohamed