By Antoine Gara for Forbes
A century ago, O.W. Gurley built an empire of African American businesses in Tulsa. Though it all came burning down in the massacre of 1921, new generations of entrepreneurs rose from the ashes.
Ottowa W. Gurley knew he would never be a success in the Jim Crow South. Born on Christmas Day 1868 to freed slaves in Huntsville, Alabama, he grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas where he was largely self-educated. Gurley married his childhood sweetheart, Emma, became a teacher, and then took a relatively cushy job with the U.S. Postal Service—but he dreamed of a better life in America. Along with his new bride, Gurley risked everything to join a stampede of homesteaders seeking freedom, opportunity and wealth in the Great Oklahoma Land Rush.
On September 16, 1893, the 25-year-old entrepreneur joined the Cherokee Outlet Opening, running fifty miles before finally stopping at a plot of prairie grass. Standing on a plot of land with Emma, he staked a claim in what would soon become Perry, Oklahoma, one of many towns advertised to Blacks in the new territory.
Gurley envisioned Oklahoma as the start of a new life for Black Americans decades after emancipation—and he was ambitious. He ran for county treasurer, was made principal at the town’s school, and ultimately opened a successful general store, which he ran for a decade. By the turn of the century, Gurley and his fellow homesteaders heard tales of giant oil fields in the nearby boomtown of Tulsa. A gusher well called the Ida Glenn Number 1, the first find in the massive Mid-Continent Oil Field, was making local Tulsans rich—and eventually turned no-name wildcatters Harry Ford Sinclair and J. Paul Getty into oil barons.
O.W. Gurley wanted in.