Tulsa's latest Equality Indicators report shows measurable progress, but significant disparities remain in access to financial services, healthy food, and public safety. For Greenwood's survivors and descendants, the findings raise familiar questions about economic opportunity, generational wealth, and the meaning of repair.
Tulsa recorded its highest equality score to date in June 2026, an achievement that reflected years of efforts to narrow disparities across the city. The 2025 Tulsa Equality Indicators Annual Report, produced by the City of Tulsa and Tulsa Area United Way, gave Tulsa an overall score of 44.52 out of 100, an improvement of 5.82 points since measurements began in 2018. The report documented encouraging changes in education, housing, and business ownership, suggesting that some of the differences separating Tulsa residents are beginning to narrow.
For Justice For Greenwood, those improvements matter. We want to see Tulsa become a place where Black families can build businesses, own homes, access quality education, and establish financial security without the barriers that have shaped so much of the city's history. But our work with the history of Greenwood also gives us reason to look beyond the overall score. The same report that celebrates progress identifies profound disparities in access to financial institutions, healthy food, and public safety. Those findings speak to concerns that North Tulsa residents have raised for generations and to questions about economic opportunity that remain central to the experiences of Greenwood's survivors and descendants.
The report measures differences between population groups across 54 indicators, rather than the overall quality of life experienced by every resident. A higher score indicates a smaller disparity, although it does not necessarily mean that everyone is better off. This distinction is especially important in understanding the report's findings on business ownership. Tulsa achieved a score of 100 for business ownership by race, one of the strongest results in the report and a substantial improvement from its earlier measurements. Yet geographic access to banks and payday lending received a score of just 1, indicating one of the city's most pronounced disparities.
The contrast deserves closer examination. Business ownership is an important measure of economic participation, but the ability to establish and sustain a business depends on more than ownership alone. Entrepreneurs need access to credit, capital, financial institutions, customers, and the resources that allow an enterprise to survive difficult periods and grow over time. Families need many of those same resources to purchase homes, save for emergencies, and create financial stability for their children.
These questions have particular significance in Greenwood, where Black entrepreneurship and property ownership have long been central to the community's history. Before the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, residents had established a network of businesses and professional services despite the restrictions of segregation. The destruction of Greenwood deprived families of homes, commercial property, income, and accumulated assets. Survivors rebuilt much of their community, but they were never comprehensively compensated for what had been taken from them.
That history does not mean the Massacre alone explains Tulsa's contemporary economic disparities. It does mean that any conversation about financial opportunity in North Tulsa should account for the history of families who lost property and wealth, rebuilt with limited assistance, and continued to encounter barriers to economic security.
Our work with survivors and descendants continually brings us back to the importance of those family histories. Property records, business directories, oral histories, and other documents help establish what Greenwood families owned, how they earned a living, and what happened to their assets over time. They also help us understand why conversations about economic repair extend beyond the immediate destruction of 1921. The consequences of losing a home or business can affect what a family is able to preserve and pass to future generations.
The latest Equality Indicators report cannot calculate those historical losses. But its findings about unequal access to financial services provide a contemporary reason to examine the conditions under which families are attempting to build and protect wealth today.
A similar concern emerges in the report's findings on food access. Geographic disparities in food deserts also received a score of 1 out of 100, placing the measure among Tulsa's lowest-performing indicators. Access to nutritious food is a basic part of community well-being, yet the availability of grocery stores and other food resources remains uneven across the city.
For families living in neighborhoods without convenient access to full-service grocery stores, obtaining food may require additional transportation, time, and expense. Those burdens can be especially difficult for older residents, people with disabilities, and households with limited financial resources. They also illustrate how the absence of neighborhood investment affects everyday life, even in a city where other measures of equality are improving.
North Tulsa residents have been raising concerns about commercial investment and essential services for decades. By the 1990s, government research and community leaders were documenting the economic disadvantages affecting the city's northern neighborhoods. Their concerns included the availability of businesses, employment opportunities, housing, and public resources, all of which influence whether families can establish and maintain economic stability.
The persistence of these concerns makes Tulsa's recent progress worth examining carefully. The Equality Indicators report shows that the disparity in housing complaints between North and South Tulsa has narrowed considerably. Education also recorded meaningful improvements, including smaller differences in chronic absenteeism by race. These are developments that can make a difference in the lives of residents and deserve recognition.
At the same time, progress in one part of community life does not necessarily eliminate disadvantages in another. A family may benefit from improvements in schools while continuing to face limited access to banking or affordable groceries. A neighborhood may see better housing outcomes without experiencing the level of commercial investment needed to support local employment and business growth.
The report's findings on public safety add another dimension to these concerns. Justice was Tulsa's lowest-scoring category, receiving 28.78 out of 100, and the only major category to decline from its 2018 baseline. Particularly troubling were the disparities in homicide victimization by race and police use of force by subject race.
These measures cannot be attributed solely to North Tulsa, nor do they establish that historical events directly caused the disparities recorded today. But they document unequal experiences of safety and the justice system, issues that affect the stability and well-being of families and communities.
For Justice For Greenwood, the significance of these findings extends beyond the numbers themselves. Our work is rooted in the experiences of people whose lives were permanently altered by racial violence and the failure of public institutions to protect their homes, property, and livelihoods. We understand that safety, economic security, and the ability to build a future are closely connected. The experiences of Greenwood families demonstrate how devastating the consequences can be when those protections are absent.
The public recognition of that history took decades. In 1997, Oklahoma established a commission to investigate the Tulsa Race Massacre, bringing together historical research, public records, and survivor testimony. Its final report, released in 2001, documented the destruction of Greenwood and recommended reparations, educational scholarships, and economic development measures intended to address the harm.
Those recommendations acknowledged that the losses of 1921 were not limited to the buildings destroyed during the Massacre. They also involved the economic opportunities that families had worked to establish and the financial consequences of having those opportunities violently interrupted.
Twenty-five years after the commission's report, the question of what meaningful economic repair requires remains unresolved. Tulsa has undertaken initiatives intended to address inequality and historical harm, and its latest Equality Indicators report shows improvement in several important areas. But the findings also demonstrate that disparities in resources essential to economic security continue to affect the city.
We should recognize the progress without allowing an improving overall score to obscure the experiences of communities where significant inequalities remain.
The history of Greenwood is often discussed in terms of what existed before 1921 and what was destroyed during the Massacre. Those histories are essential, but our work also concerns the lives that followed. Survivors continued working, raising children, purchasing property, and building families. Their descendants inherited stories of resilience and achievement, alongside the consequences of losses that were never fully repaired.
Today, our efforts to preserve family histories and protect generational assets are connected to that larger understanding of justice. Learning what an ancestor owned or how a family established itself in Greenwood can reveal more than an individual story. It can help explain how property, financial security, and opportunity were gained, lost, rebuilt, or passed down across generations.
Tulsa's Equality Indicators report offers a contemporary measure of some of the conditions that influence those opportunities. It does not tell us everything about the lives of North Tulsa residents, and it cannot determine the full economic consequences of the Massacre. What it does provide is evidence that, even as Tulsa makes progress, access to important resources remains unequal.
For Justice For Greenwood, that evidence belongs in the continuing conversation about accountability and repair. The families we work to honor are part of Tulsa's history, and their descendants are part of its present and future. Their experiences deserve consideration in discussions about how the city measures progress, distributes resources, and addresses longstanding disparities.
A higher equality score is a meaningful achievement. The more consequential question is whether that progress will continue to reach the families and neighborhoods that have spent generations seeking a fair opportunity to build and preserve economic security.