How Tulsa Is Affirming That Black Is Entrepreneurial

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What happened in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood in 1921 wasn’t in mainstream culture until the HBO series “Watchmen” came out in 2019. But to this day, the legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre remains omnipresent in the city, as does the sacred importance of Greenwood as a historical and living neighborhood, and as a national symbol of hope and resilience in the face of racism and inequality.

The buildup to the centennial raised essential questions: How do communities reckon with history? How do you learn from the past without getting stuck in it? What does reconciliation even mean? I regularly heard from Black Tulsans that they didn’t want to become synonymous with the massacre, that they want to harness Black Wall Street’s memory to make Black Tulsa mean something new.

When I was interning for New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu in 2012, his crime-prevention initiative “Flip the Script” (conceived in partnership with filmmaker Spike Lee) was aimed at supporting young Black men who are particularly vulnerable to crime. It focused on investment and support rather than punitive measures, working to change how Black and White communities alike see young Black men.

What if we were to challenge the white gaze and flip on its head the notion that Blackness means problems — to equate Blackness with excellence on a citywide level? Preeminent urban sociologist Mary Pattillo has developed a concept called the Black Advantage Vision, which identifies and analyzes the myriad ways Blacks excel compared to their white counterparts.

What would happen if we took the Black Advantage Vision and applied it to Blacks in tech? Pattillo pointed me to the concept’s urban planning cousin, asset-based community development, and I realized that the concept animated much of my work at Tulsa Innovation Lab as well as efforts to support Greenwood. What if we focused on the entrepreneurial skills, grit, resilience, and strong social networks prevalent in many Black communities?

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As cities consider how best to support their Black populations in tech, nurturing the idea that “Black is entrepreneurial” better balances the narrative, highlights the positive attributes of Black communities, supports an entire population of talent who can contribute to the growth of your city, and inspires people to dream tall.

By reframing economic development interventions for Black people as building on community and cultural assets, not filling in holes, your city could support Black-founded start-ups and encourage investments by White allies. But “Black is entrepreneurial” can’t be a slogan. It needs to be a strategic goal, advanced by tangible investments. Initiatives like Black Tech Street and Build in Tulsa are aimed at doing just that.

Tulsa’s support for Black entrepreneurs

Encouraging Black entrepreneurship is important for reversing one of the most predominant imbalances in American society. According to the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the wealth gap between Black and White Americans is stark.

The average per capita wealth of White Americans was $338,093 in 2019, but only $60,126 for Black Americans, and in 2020, Blacks were 12.4% of the U.S. population but held only 2.5% of the country’s wealth. More broadly, as French economist Thomas Picketty found, the compound interest gained from capital grows faster than wages. This helps explain, in part, the racial wealth gap. For generations, Blacks lacked the ability to earn or invest money.

One of the best ways to achieve intergenerational wealth is through entrepreneurship, yet Blacks face disadvantages in accessing the venture capital investment necessary to grow their businesses. According to Crunchbase, Black-founded start-ups saw their market share drop from 1.5% in 2021 to 1.1% in 2022.

It’s difficult to create a large Black middle class without this kind of transferable wealth. But such transferable wealth won’t be achieved by happenstance: it requires intentional efforts. One example of such efforts is the George Kaiser Family Foundation-backed entrepreneurial support organization Build in Tulsa.

Ashli Sims, Build in Tulsa’s managing director, told Essence that her mission is “to build the infrastructure needed to create multigenerational wealth for Black people.” To achieve this, Build in Tulsa operates a series of start-up accelerators to support Black-founded companies at various stages of growth. The innovation organization Act House operates an accelerator for pre-revenue companies; Lightship Capital, a VC firm, operates an accelerator for revenue-generating companies; and TechStars, the global accelerator chain, operates a program to launch and scale new firms. Build in Tulsa also runs a special accelerator for Black women and hosts an annual summit of VCs dedicated to investing in start-ups founded by people of color.

Another example is the work of Tyrance Billingsley II, one of the leading Black visionaries in Tulsa for helping Black Wall Street live on in the 21st century. Billingsley founded the nonprofit Black Tech Street shortly before the centennial and is working to support the creation of a thousand Black cyber professionals in Tulsa by 2030.

“I asked myself the question, What could Black Wall Street have been had it been supported and not destroyed?” Billingsley told me. “When I thought about the level of tenacity that it took for those entrepreneurs to build such incredible businesses during Jim Crow, the smashing through walls and the out-of-the-box thinking reminded me of the tech industry.”

That led him to the following three-part realization, he explains:

1. Tech is one of the only industries you can build intergenerational wealth in seven to ten years via a successful company exit.

2. Tech is the core medium through which all global innovation takes place.

3. By the year 2030, there are projected to be as many as 4.3 million high-paying vacant tech jobs.

“When I put all three of these things together, I not only saw an incredible wealth-building opportunity for Black people, I saw the Black Wall Street vision pushed to a new horizon,” Billingsley says.

Taken from Reinventing the Heartland by Nicholas Lalla. Copyright © 2025 by Nicholas Lalla. Used by permission of Harper Horizon, a division of HarperCollins Focus, LLC.