Bobby Eaton Jr. stands in front of the building where his family ran a barbershop in Tulsa for decades, and where he now operates KBOB 89.9 FM.Source: CNBC Make It Video
Growing up, Tulsa native Bobby Eaton Jr. knew his grandfather Joseph was a respected member of the community in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He knew Joseph owned a barber shop there — where Eaton’s father and uncle were barbers — among other family-run small businesses.
What Eaton didn’t know until he was adult was that Joseph Eaton was a survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre in Greenwood, and that he helped rebuild the area known as “Black Wall Street.” As a kid, Eaton didn’t even know the massacre had happened.
This May 31 to June 1 marks the 100th anniversary of the massacre, which occurred over two days in 1921 and saw an armed white mob descend upon Tulsa’s Greenwood District. The area was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the U.S. and home to hundreds of Black-owned businesses, earning it its nickname. The violence that ensued killed as many as 300 of the city’s Black residents, injured hundreds more and left 35 city blocks “in charred ruins.”
A black and white photograph of the Greenwood district in Tulsa, OK, with residents walking by shopfronts, before 1921.
A black and white photograph of the Greenwood district in Tulsa, OK, with residents walking by shopfronts, before 1921.Source: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of the Families of Anita Williams Christopher and David Owen Williams
It has been described as “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history,” and much of the property and wealth the city’s then-prosperous Black community had built up over decades was destroyed. A study commissioned by Oklahoma officials in 2001 determined that the massacre resulted in roughly $1.8 million in property damage in Greenwood, an amount that would equal nearly $27 million in today’s dollars, based on inflation.
Today, Eaton, 66 owns a radio station and media company, Eaton Media Services, housed in the same building where his grandfather ran the barber shop for decades after the 1921 massacre.
As a Black business owner in Tulsa, Eaton feels he’s both carrying on a family legacy while also continuing a tradition of Black entrepreneurship that goes back more than a century, to when the Greenwood District was teeming with Black-owned businesses.
Now, Eaton hopes the massacre’s centennial, and the increased national attention it brings to Tulsa, will help boost local efforts to revive the area even after the anniversary has passed.
“Everybody’s talking Black Wall Street, for right now,” Eaton tells CNBC Make It. “My thing is, can we restore and rebuild Black Wall Street? Can we get it back to where it was intended to be?”
A family of entrepreneurs
When the “Black Wall Street” massacre was perpetrated in 1921, Eaton’s grandfather Joseph was a factory worker in his 20s. He joined the effort to rebuild the community in the aftermath, which included building the home where Eaton now lives and runs the radio station that broadcasts on KBOB 89.9 FM.
“He built this home that I occupy right now,” Eaton says. “And next door to it was the barbershop … He went to work every day inside this barber shop. And as his children — my dad, Bobby Sr., and my Uncle Jerry — got older, they became barbers there as well.”
Joseph also ran a nearby grocery store in the years after the massacre. But it was the barber shop that remained open for decades, passing down to the next generation of Eaton’s family, and serving as an important meeting spot for the Black community in North Tulsa, Eaton says.
“That barber shop is where the civil rights movement from North Tulsa … got started,” he says, adding that his father and grandfather would meet with “all of these iconic black men in the community” when Eaton was a child in the 1960s to discuss racism and the Civil Rights movement, while planning local protests. (Eaton’s father, Bobby Eaton Sr., was reportedly one of the first Black men arrested in Tulsa for protesting segregation laws in the 1960s.)
