Highway to healing: can removing a road restore America’s Black Wall Street?

Decades after a chilling racist massacre, Tulsa’s Greenwood district was bulldozed for I-244 – but a new plan aims to reverse its punishing effects

Twenty-five years before Don Shaw was born in Greenwood, a white mob invaded the Tulsa neighborhood and killed more than 300 people. Much of the tight-knit community was burned to the ground, including his grandfather’s pharmacy.

But when Shaw was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, few people wanted to talk about the massacre – perhaps in part because much of the damage was no longer visible.