“Inspiration Out of the Ashes”: A Review of The Victory of Greenwood, by Carlos Moreno

(Tulsa, OK: Jenkin Lloyd Jones Press, 2021). ISBN: 978-0-9755389-0-6

As I write this review, Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a much talked-about city. It’s the official capital of Route 66 as the Mother Road begins its Centennial celebrations. Beyond Tulsa King, with Sylvester Stallone, and Killers of the Flower Moon (the David Grann book and Martin Scorsese film), The Lowdown, a “love letter to Tulsa” starring Ethan Hawke (announced for a second season recently) has everyone talking.

I first fell in love with Tulsa (and realized its sociopolitical complexities) in the summer of 2019, when I was hired to portray Ernesto “Che” Guevara for a 3-week Chautauqua tour that started there. Protests were loud and increased as I moved west across Oklahoma, portraying this controversial physician and revolutionary. I returned 3 years later as Beat poet and activist Allen Ginsberg. The protests came from somewhat separate sectors, but were essentially the same. How fitting to have a police officer standing at the back of the stage, 10 feet behind me, as Ginsberg recited lines from “Howl” and “America.” Since then, I’ve returned several times for a number of presentations about Route 66 and for several in-process immersive and performance projects, and I’ll be “living on Tulsa time,” as Don Williams sang, several times in 2026.

When I was first in Tulsa, I visited the local historical society ahead of a presentation I was doing there. It was then that I had my introduction to the Tulsa Race Riot, as it was then being called. A year or so later, Riot was replaced with Massacre, and rightfully so. I was shocked at the events of May 30 and June 1, 1921, touched off when a 19-year-old Black man accidently made physical contact with a White female elevator operator. In an appalling act of racist-fueled savagery, 35 blocks of the Greenwood district, known as Black Wall Street, were looted, burned, and otherwise destroyed—including by half a dozen planes dropping turpentine balls on homes and businesses. Three hundred people were massacred, including a nationally respected surgeon shot twice in the chest with a shotgun as he stood, arms raised high in surrender, in his own front yard.

In the ensuing 5 years, I’ve been committed to learning about these events and including them in my Route 66–themed historical-education and immersive experience projects. I’ve talked with a plethora of locals and authors, and no one tells quite the exact same story. This is not surprising. Given the obfuscations of the mayor, police leadership, and the nefarious aims of wealthy individuals who were looking for a pretext to seize this prosperous section of Tulsa for industrialization, the true story is bound to be difficult to uncover.

I first connected with the author of this well-researched and beautifully written book, activist and journalist Carlos Moreno, through social media several years ago, and we met in person in the summer of 2025—fittingly, in Greenwood, less than a week after a tragic shooting there during a Juneteenth celebration. As part of my research for an immersive experience I’ve been contracted to cocreate, I read The Victory of Greenwood alongside books on sundown towns, the Green Book, and the experiences of Black travelers from the early 1900s through the time of the Civil Rights movement and subsequent legislation.

Not that racism, segregation, and dangers to Black travelers magically disappeared in the 1960s. And, when it comes to who was complicit, the matter of reparations concerning Greenwood, and the status of race relations in Tulsa, the debates continue to rage.

The Victory of Greenwood is about so much more than the Massacre itself—although it is well covered. The book is, in the end, a celebration of Black Joy. Of Mother Wit. Of fighting for the right to not only Survive but to Thrive. Through a series of biographies, Moreno introduces us to teachers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, doctors, and everyday folk who are indelibly interwoven with the rise, fall, and rise again of Greenwood. If you’ve seen films such as The Green Book, Sinners, and Jazzman’s Blues, and/or the HBO series Lovecraft Country, you’ll have a sense of how immense spirit, abiding faith, family, music, and community saw African Americans through frightening, violent, and nightmarish times.

The Victory of Greenwood will magnify and personalize these works as you read it. You’ll also find great inspiration and motivation in these Troubled Times from the biographies and the chapters on institutions such as the Vernon AME Church and Booker T. Washington High School. You’ll also see how those who lived and worked in Greenwood have made considerable contributions throughout America.

Those interested in how the stories reported on and otherwise disseminated by often-opposing parties and interests are purposely warped and used for manipulation and control like a game of sinister Telephone will find much that’s instructive here.

Like Greenwood itself, Moreno’s The Victory of Greenwood will endure for its fearless reporting of macro racism in America (by focusing on the micro) and its celebration of how those who have suffered at racism’s gnarled and bloodied hands strive to this day to not only Survive but to Thrive in the face of its relentless, ongoing injustices and cruelties.