The RICHEST Black Family in Tulsa — Before They Lost Everything

[00:00:00]This country's most violent race riot didn't happen in Newark or Watts or Detroit. It happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June of 1921.

[00:00:12]>> This is the richest black family in Tulsa, a 54 room luxury hotel with crystal chandeliers built and owned by the son of a Kentucky slave, a movie theater chain across three Oklahoma cities. 40 acres of land in North Tulsa, subdivided by a former presidential appointee, and sold only to black families. By 1921, the wealthiest black families in America did not live in [music] New York. They did not live in Chicago. They lived inside 35 city blocks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a neighborhood the world called Black Wall Street. In a single night, in May of that year, almost all of it burned to the ground. But the bloodline did not burn. The fortune did not vanish. It moved. It went underground. It traveled north on midnight trains to Chicago into Indiana law schools, Hampton Institute classrooms, Princeton dormitories, onto the corporate boards of McDonald's, Nike, and the New York Times Company. A century later, the descendants of Greenwood's wealthiest dynasty are managing billions of dollars in equities. They advise presidents. They run America's largest minorityowned investment firm. They are Greenwood's forgotten heirs and almost no one knows their names. Welcome back to Black Pinnacle, where we go deep on the wealth, power, and legacy of the global black community. Subscribe and turn on notifications because this story is bigger than a single family. This is the story of how American capitalism tried to destroy black wealth in one violent night and how the architecture of that wealth survived. Anyway, this is Greenwood [music] 100 years later. the architect of Greenwood Avenue. To understand the modern Straford Rogers empire, you have to understand the soil it grew from.

[00:01:54]That soil was purchased in 1906 by a man named Ottawa W. [music] Gurley. Gurley was born in Huntsville, Alabama in 1868 to parents who had been enslaved. He worked as a teacher, a postal letter carrier, and a school principal in the Oklahoma town of Perry. He even ran for county treasurer. Then in 1906, [music] he resigned a presidential appointment under President Grover Cleveland and walked into Tulsa with a vision that would build the most prosperous black community in American history. He bought 40 acres of land on the north side of the Frisco Railroad tracks. He named the main thoroughfare Greenwood Avenue after a town in Mississippi and he made a decision that by any commercial real estate standard was radical. He would only sell parcels to other African-Ameans. He was building in the middle of Jim Crow Oklahoma, a closed economic loop [music] where the dollar would circulate by some estimates 36 to 100 times before leaving the neighborhood. By 1914, Gurley's net worth was reported at $150,000, roughly $3 million in today's currency.

[00:03:02]By 1921, that figure had climbed to between $500,000 and $1 million, placing his contemporary net worth between 6.8 and $13.6 million. He owned more than 100 properties in Greenwood. He owned the Gurly Hotel at 112 North Greenwood Avenue valued at $55,000.

[00:03:23]He helped found Vernon Church. He owned an 80acre farm in Rogers County. Forbes magazine in a 2020 retrospective called him the Bezos of Black Wall Street.

[00:03:34]Gurley was the architect. The man who would build the crown jewel on top of that grid was a former Kentucky slave with a law degree, an Oberlin diploma, and a rifle. [music] His name was John the Baptist Stradford.

[00:03:47]And his bloodline runs all the way to a Chicago investment firm managing $13 billion right now. JB Stradford and the pinnacle of black wealth. JB Stradford was born in 1861 in Versailles, Kentucky. His father, [music] Julius Caesar Stradford, had been enslaved. JB did not inherit a single dollar. What he inherited was hunger. He worked his way through Oberlin College in Ohio, becoming part of the first generation of black graduates from the institution. He earned his law degree from Indiana University at the age of 38. He ran pool halls, bathous, shoe shine parlors, and boarding houses across Kentucky and Missouri before he ever saw Tulsa. He understood before almost anyone else of his era that real estate plus hospitality plus consumer [music] services was the formula for compounding black wealth in a segregated economy. He arrived in Tulsa in 1899 with his wife Augusta. He found a kindred spirit in Ow Gurley. For the next 22 years, [music] the two men quietly built the wealthiest black district in the United States. By 1920, JB Stradford was widely considered the richest black man in Oklahoma. His personal residence was valued at $125,000.

[00:05:05]He owned more than two dozen rental houses. He owned a 16 room brick apartment building. His monthly rental income was approximately $500 in 1921 currency, equivalent to roughly $8,500 per month today. The centerpiece was the Stratford Hotel at 301 [music] North Greenwood Avenue, 54 luxurious rooms, Crystal Chandeliers in every banquet hall and lobby, a dining hall, a saloon, a gambling room, a barber shop, a drugstore. When it opened on June 1st, 1918, the Stratford Hotel was the largest blackowned and operated hotel in the United States of America. Straford intended the building to stand as a monument to the thrift, energy, and business tact of the [music] race in Tulsa. It stood for 3 years. The Dreamland Empire. While Stford was building his hotel, a third family was building a media and hospitality [music] empire on the same avenue. John Wesley Williams was a master [music] mechanic.

[00:06:05]His wife, Lula Williams, was a school teacher from Tennessee with a degree from Lane [music] College. Together, they would build an entertainment dynasty that on its own would have made them one of the wealthiest black families in any American city. They started in 1909 with a corner store. By 1914, that store had grown into the Williams Confectionary on Greenwood Avenue, a three-story brick [music] building with a soda fountain and a popcorn machine. According to historian Tim Madigan, more marriage proposals happened inside the Williams Confectionary than at any other location in Tulsa. Next door, in August of 1914, Lula opened the Williams Dreamland Theater. 750 seats, a $10,000 build.

[00:06:51]Vaudeville acts, silent films, boxing matches, and high school graduations all happened under its electric marquee.

[00:06:58]Critically, Lula bought the land in her own name. She owned the theater outright. In 1919, she signed an affidavit declaring herself the sole owner. The Tulsa star called her the foremost businesswoman of the state among Negro women. [music] The Williams family expanded. They opened a second Dreamland theater in Oak Mulgi. They opened a third in Muscogee. [music] John Williams ran the East End Garage, the most successful blackowned auto repair shop in the region. The Tulsa world called him the Negro Rockefeller. This was Greenwood, 41 grocery stores, 30 restaurants, 11 boarding houses, five hotels, a population of 11,000 by 1920.

[00:07:40]Six black families in Greenwood owned their own private airplanes in a state with only two airports. The total accumulated wealth on those 35 blocks in today's dollars [music] has been estimated at $610 million. And in less than 24 hours, it was all gone. The night Black Wall Street burned. On May 31st, 1921, a 19-year-old shoe shiner named Dick Roland was arrested on a questionable assault charge. Rumors of a lynching spread through Tulsa.

[00:08:12]Stradford, who had spent his entire adult life preventing lynchings, gathered a meeting at the offices of the Tulsa Star newspaper. That night, an armed white mob estimated in the thousands moved across the railroad tracks and into Greenwood. They came with rifles, with gasoline, [music] and with at least one private airplane that dropped incendiary devices onto black homes from the sky. The Tulsa race massacre lasted approximately 18 hours.

[00:08:39]Between 75 and 300 black Americans were killed. More than 1,000 homes were burned. 5,000 people were left homeless.

[00:08:47]35 city blocks of accumulated black wealth [music] were reduced to ash. JB Stratford stood in front of his 54 room hotel with a [music] rifle until the mob overwhelmed him. The Stratford Hotel was destroyed. His $125,000 home was destroyed. [music] His 24 rental properties were destroyed. His 16- room apartment building was destroyed. Everything he had built over 22 years vanished in a single night. Own Gurley and his wife Emma were detained in a National Guard internment camp.

[00:09:20]Every property in his portfolio was either burned or seized. The Williams Dreamland theater midscreening when the attack began was burned to the ground.

[00:09:29]Insurance companies citing riot exclusion clauses refused to pay a single claim. The state of Oklahoma indicted 20 black men, including JB Stratford himself, for inciting the very massacre in which they were the victims.

[00:09:43]Stratford jumped bail and fled north. He went first to Sand Springs, then to Kansas, and finally to Chicago, where his son, Cornelius, had already established a law [music] practice. He never operated another hotel. He died in 1935 at the age of 74, despondent over the loss of everything he had built. But here is what the historians missed for almost a century. JB Stradford did not die broke in spirit. He died with his most valuable [music] asset fully intact, his children. The bloodline goes [music] north. When JB Stradford fled to Chicago in 1921, he brought with him something the mob could not burn. He brought the operating system. [music] He brought the discipline of patient capital. He brought the lawyer's brain.

[00:10:30]He brought the ethic of education first, ownership second, real estate always.

[00:10:36]His son, Cornelius Stradford, became a prominent civil rights attorney in Chicago. The Stratford [music] bloodline across the next four generations would produce lawyers, judges, professors, [music] and diplomats. The family fortune in cash was gone. The family fortune in human capital, in network, in name, in expectation, [music] was being silently compounded inside Chicago's southside. In 1958, J.B.

[00:11:04]Stadford's greatgrandson was born.

[00:11:06][music] His name was John Washington Rogers Jr. The Rogers family knew exactly who they were. John Rogers Jr.

[00:11:13]was raised inside an information environment most American children of any race will [music] never experience.

[00:11:20]His father, John Rogers, Senior, was a Tuskegee Airman and a Cook County Juvenile Court judge. His mother, Juel Laontant, was the first black woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School, the first black woman to serve as deputy solicitor general of the United States, and a trustee of Howard University, Revlon, and Mobile Oil. When John W. Rogers Jr. turned 12 years old, his father did not buy him toys for his birthday. He bought him stocks every birthday, every Christmas. From the age of 12, John Rogers Jr., was reading prospectuses the way other 12-year-olds read comic books. He went to Princeton University where he majored in economics and became captain of the men's basketball team under Hall of Fame coach Pete Carroll. [music] He took a job as a stock broker at William Blair and Company in Chicago. And in 1983, at the age of 24, he raised $180,000 from family and friends, secured the management of $100,000 from Howard University's endowment, and founded [music] an investment firm. He named it after a fast, nearly extinct gazelle. He named it Ariel.

[00:12:32]Aerial Investments and the rebuilding of the Stratford fortune.

[00:12:36]Aerial Investments, headquartered in Chicago, became something Greenwood had never quite achieved. It became a national platform for patient, valueoriented black capital. Rogers built the firm on a single discipline.

[00:12:51]Slow and steady wins [music] the race.

[00:12:53]He bought undervalued small and medium-sized companies. He held them. He read five morning newspapers, nine business magazines, and more than 80 newsletters every single day. He invested $9 million in Caesar's World during the October 1987 stock market crash. By July of 1992, the price per share had risen 80%. The firm grew. By 1986, Aerial had $45 million in managed assets. [music] By 2004, the firm was managing approximately $17.5 billion [music] for individuals, corporations, university endowments, and some of the largest public and private pension funds in the United States. Today, Aerial Investments manages approximately $13 billion and remains the largest minority mutual fund firm in America. John W.

[00:13:47]Rogers Jr.'s 's personal net worth [music] has been estimated at approximately $35 million. But the net worth figure alone underells the empire.

[00:13:57]Rogers sits on the boards of McDonald's Corporation, Nike, [music] the New York Times company, and Ryan Specialty Group Holdings. He serves as vice chair of the board of trustees of the University of Chicago. He was a co-chair of President Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural committee.

[00:14:14]He sits on the board of the Obama Foundation. He was featured in the book The World's 99 Greatest Investors [music] alongside Warren Buffett, John Templeton, and Benjamin Graham. The great grandson of a Kentucky slave who built the largest blackowned hotel in America before having it burned to the ground now sits [music] on the corporate boards of three of the most powerful companies in the United States. The Fortune did not die in Tulsa. The fortune migrated and on the south side of Chicago in a quiet, disciplined, valueinvesting way, it returned. [music] The Williams heirs and the Stradford cousins. The Stradford Rogers branch is the headline. It is not the only Greenwood bloodline that survived.

[00:14:57]William Danforth Williams, the only son of John and Lula, graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1922, just one year after the massacre. He earned his bachelor's degree in business from Hampton Institute. [music] He raised a family that would carry the Greenwood story forward through education and medicine. His daughter, Dr. Anita Williamser, earned a doctorate in optometry from Hampton Institute, becoming the first black woman in the United States to do so. She [music] practiced optometry in Tulsa for more than 50 years until her death in 2019.

[00:15:31]In 2011, she and her brother David collaborated with the Smithsonian Institution to donate an extensive collection of Dreamland Theater photographs and artifacts to the National Archive. The Stratford Line, meanwhile, has produced a contemporary network of descendants who are reclaiming the name itself. Nate Callaway, a Straford great great grandchild, and his cousin Aaron Tulle Williams returned to Tulsa in 2021 for the centennial commemoration. They have spoken at the United States House of Representatives. They have advocated for reparations alongside their cousin Victoria Rogers. They have fought trademark battles to control the commercial use of the Stratford name on new hotel developments in North Tulsa.

[00:16:14]The Bloodline is not asking for charity.

[00:16:17]The Bloodline is asking for the receipt.

[00:16:20]The synthesis.

[00:16:23]A 54 room luxury hotel reduced to ash.

[00:16:26]40 acres of subdivided real estate stolen, burned, or sold for pennies. A theater chain destroyed mid-screening.

[00:16:35]610 million of black wealth in today's currency. Erased in [music] 18 hours by a mob the city of Tulsa refused to prosecute. That was the headline of 1921. That is the headline most history books still print today. The deeper story is this. The wealth of Greenwood was never fully held in the buildings.

[00:16:54]It was held in the discipline of the families who [music] built the buildings. It was held in JB Stratford's two degrees from Oberlin and Indiana Law. It was held in Lula Williams' decision to put the Dreamland deed in her own name. It was held in the Stratford household's insistence that the next generation become attorneys, judges, professors, and diplomats. It was held in the network. It was held in the name. [music] When the Stratford fortune migrated from Tulsa to Chicago in 1921, what migrated with it was the operating system, patient capital, long horizons, education as the non-negotiable, ownership as the only acceptable end state. A century later, that operating system running inside the mind of one greatgrandson [music] would build the largest minorityowned mutual fund firm in the United States and place him on the boards of McDonald's, Nike, and the New York Times. Tulsa tried to burn Black Wall Street into nothing. Tulsa burned the buildings. Tulsa did not burn the blueprint. [music] Greenwood was not a place. Greenwood was a method, and the method survived.

[00:18:04]Ottawa Gurley laid out the avenue. JB Stradford built the monument. John and Lula Williams built the entertainment empire. 100 years later on Lasal Street in Chicago, the great grandson of Greenwood's wealthiest hotel year is still doing what his ancestor did. He is buying assets that nobody else wants. He is holding them. He is letting time and discipline compound the value. He is teaching the next generation to do the same. He is rebuilding Black Wall Street the only way it was ever truly built, one patient investment at a time. Which part of this story surprised you the most? Was it the scale of what was destroyed in a single night? Was it the fact that the great grandson of a black Wall Street hotelier now sits on the board of McDonald's? Or was it the realization that the wealthiest black families in America in 1921 were not in New York or Chicago, but in Tulsa, Oklahoma? Drop a comment below and tell us which black wealth dynasty [music] you want us to cover next. Subscribe and turn on notifications. See you on the next video.