Bloomberg | Black Wall Street — Greenwood District, Tulsa

Client: Bloomberg | Year: 2020 | Location: Tulsa, Oklahoma

Photographing Greenwood as the Nation's Attention Converged on Tulsa

In 2020, Christopher Creese documented Tulsa's Greenwood District — known as Black Wall Street — for Bloomberg, at the moment President Trump announced his first campaign rally in months would be held at the BOK Center, directly adjacent to the neighborhood destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The assignment placed CreeseWorks at the intersection of documentary photojournalism and one of the defining political and racial justice stories of the year.

Local Perspective on a Story That Had Gone National

Bloomberg's coverage reached a global financial and policy audience. The assignment required images that could carry authenticity and local perspective into a story that national media were arriving in Tulsa to cover from the outside. Creese documented the landscape, community, and atmosphere of Greenwood — the tension between historic racial trauma and contemporary political energy — as the world's press descended on a neighborhood still bearing the wounds of a century-old massacre.

The Greenwood Story Is Not a Single Moment — It's a Hundred Years

Photographing Greenwood for a financial news outlet during a political flashpoint meant navigating the distance between Bloomberg's audience and the community being photographed. The images had to work on deadline, within the context of a global business news story, while treating the subjects with the dignity and depth the history demanded. Creese had built relationships in Tulsa before this assignment. That access and trust — earned over time — is what gave the work its authenticity.

Greenwood in 2020: A Community Caught Between History and Now

The Greenwood District was destroyed in May 1921 when a white mob burned 35 blocks to the ground, killing hundreds of Black residents. By 2020, the neighborhood bore only fragments of its original footprint. Trump's rally announcement layered fresh political tension onto this already charged ground, drawing national attention to a place that most of the country had only recently learned existed. CreeseWorks' Bloomberg work established the studio as a go-to resource for editorial photography where Black American history intersects with live national news.