A Find of a Lifetime

Posted by Ajit on September 16, 2006. Comment 

The African-American past is an iceberg, still 90 percent submerged. Because so much material remains in family hands or lies piled in the unvisited attics and basements of libraries, newspapers, and even police stations, rich discoveries await. Currie Ballard, a historian in Oklahoma, has just made what he calls “the find of a lifetime”—33 cans of motion picture film dating from the 1920s that reveal the daily lives of some remarkably successful black communities.

The film shows them thriving in the years after the infamous Tulsa Riot of 1921, in which white mobs destroyed that city’s historic black Greenwood district, which was known as the Black Wall Street of America.

Short fascinating piece of history.
Watch it and read – via Metafilter

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