Angel Of Greenwood

Angel of Greenwood is set in the real historical community of Greenwood, which was a thriving Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with lucrative businesses and close-knit families. According to The New York Times, approximately 10,000 people lived in the self-sustaining community of Greenwood until 1921, when, over two days, a mob of white people from Tulsa ravaged the community, killing hundreds, displacing thousands, burning buildings, and robbing businesses (“What the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed.” The New York Times, 2021). This terrorist event is now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, although it was largely ignored and even intentionally buried by the news media at the time. Although in the novel, Greenwood is referred to as if it’s separate from Tulsa, it was technically a neighborhood within Tulsa, although it was an autonomous community and residents didn’t need to leave it often.

Greenwood was one of the most prosperous Black communities in the nation, so it’s speculated that one motivating factor behind the white mob’s attack was resentment over this prosperity. An estimated $1.8 million ($27 million in present-day currency) worth of damage was done to Greenwood. Before being destroyed, Greenwood was home to its own newspapers, churches, schools, doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, restaurants, theaters, and more. This was a major feat because, in 1921, it had been less than 60 years since enslavement ended. Booker T. Washington and others did, in fact, refer to Greenwood as a Black version of Wall Street, and this nickname is referenced in Angel of Greenwood.

As Pink notes in the Afterword, the impetus behind the Tulsa Race Massacre occurred on May 30, 1921, when a white woman named Sarah Page screamed in an elevator with a Black man named Dick Rowland (289). There are different versions of what caused the scream in the elevator, but it resulted in a large mob of white Tulsa residents gathering in opposition to Dick Rowland. Although Dick Rowland had been arrested and could not be attacked, the mob instead attacked Greenwood as a whole, looting it, burning it, and killing hundreds of people while injuring and displacing many more. The news did not widely cover the Tulsa Race Massacre at the time, but recently, historians have worked to uncover the truth of the events. In 2001, a committee was formed to investigate the tragedy, including looking into primary sources and oral accounts of the event.

Pink clarifies that Angel of Greenwood is a fictional account, but it’s based on a real community and a real massacre. Many of the characters are completely imagined, including the protagonists, Angel and Isaiah. However, the general setting is meant to be realistic, as are the main events surrounding the massacre itself. Other events in the novel, such as Angel and Isaiah’s interactions with their families, are imagined as well. The author hoped to tell a story about Greenwood and the massacre, although there are still many untold stories about it due to the number of untimely deaths that occurred and the amount of historical erasure that the event was subjected to until recently.