Split in two by a highway—as communities of color often are—the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was once known as America’s Black Wall Street. At the start of the 20th century, Greenwood was home to one of America’s most affluent Black communities, including a notable density of doctors, lawyers, bankers, and entrepreneurs. I didn’t fully appreciate the neighborhood’s significance when I pulled up to the Greenwood Cultural Center during my first visit to Tulsa in January 2019. With its quiet streets and empty parking lots, Greenwood seemed like so many of the places I’d been to before. But small commemorative plaques on the sidewalks where businesses once stood hinted at an overlooked and extraordinary history.
I was there because the George Kaiser Family Foundation had invited me to town to consider working with them on an economic development project. GKFF is a multibillion-dollar philanthropy that combats intergenerational poverty in Tulsa, making it one of the largest foundations in the United States dedicated to improving lives in a single city. At the time, I was living in Manhattan and leading the cornerstone of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s jobs plan—Cyber NYC, an initiative of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The New York Times called this public–private partnership “among the nation’s most ambitious cybersecurity initiatives,” and GKFF reached out to gauge my interest in helping Tulsa develop its own cyber ecosystem.
My trip happened to coincide with a visit by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. He was in Tulsa to award the Greenwood Cultural Center a million-dollar grant for a public arts project depicting the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that destroyed Black Wall Street. I arrived before the event and wandered around the center, browsing the photographs and news clippings from the tragedy: a White mob attacked Black residents, burned down more than a thousand of their homes, and ruined nearly 200 businesses. I was horrified by the images of charred houses, dead bodies, smoke billowing in the air, land scorched and flattened, rubble drenched by fire hoses. The mob killed as many as 300 Black Tulsans, devastating what legendary sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois called the most “highly organized” Black community he’d ever seen. It was America’s worst episode of racist violence in the 20th century, and its impact lingers to this day.
Understandably, the event at the center had a religious solemnity to it. There were prayers for the victims and moments of silence. Speakers reflected on all that was lost in 1921 and again during the period of urban renewal when, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the community was torn apart for a second time by I-244, the highway that runs through Greenwood today. At the center, there were pleas for neighborhood investment, hope of revitalization, and murmurs about reparations. Speeches reminiscent of Sunday sermons joined with the political rhetoric of local elected officials, such as City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper and Mayor G. T. Bynum, who had just authorized a search for unmarked graves to determine the massacre’s total number of victims.
Juxtaposed against these grim remarks were the flashing cameras, news media, and public excitement that accompany the presence of not just one but two of America’s wealthiest men. Mayor Bloomberg was joined that day by another billionaire, George Kaiser, a lifelong Tulsan and the founder of GKFF. The mix of Black trauma and White philanthropy created a peculiar vibe in the event space, at once somber and thrilling, mournful and hopeful. The dramatic tension in the air mesmerized me, and it caused me to wonder about how Black trauma is often portrayed as spectacle; how White philanthropists relate to the diverse communities they seek to serve; how Greenwood reflects the contemporary effects of past injustice; and what it would take to create economic opportunities for Tulsa’s Black, Indigenous, and White working-class citizens.
The event helped me see a cultural kinship that I hadn’t expected, one that would begin pulling me inexorably toward Tulsa. Listening to Tulsans talk about racism, poverty, and trauma, the need for Greenwood’s redevelopment, and the city’s broader desire to change economic course transported me back to my childhood in New Orleans—growing up in a White working-class family with a single mom, wrestling with feelings of alienation, and living through Hurricane Katrina. I was a stranger in Tulsa, but I felt at home. For me, Greenwood could have easily been the Lower Ninth Ward. I gravitated toward Tulsa’s trauma because it resembled my own, and I understood the city’s need to reckon with it because I had undergone a similar journey myself.
I sensed that both Tulsa and I had chips on our shoulders. Underestimated, we both had something to prove, and I realized that this underdog city had so much more potential than people gave it credit for. A few months later, in September 2019, I packed up my life on the Upper East Side and again lit out for the territory of northeast Oklahoma—this time for more than just a visit.
In January 2020, right before Covid-19’s emergence in the United States, I founded Tulsa Innovation Labs with GKFF’s support. Our organization kicked off a citywide effort to build Tulsa’s innovation economy from the ground up. Like too many places, Tulsa had become complacent with its economy, relying on its oil and gas legacy without investing in a tech ecosystem that could create startups or more durable jobs. For decades, Tulsa struggled to reverse the spiral of economic decline and brain drain initiated by postindustrialism, and it became isolated from the US innovation system—a network of tech companies, venture capital, and research and development. And with automation projected to displace one in four jobs by 2030, disproportionately affecting Black and brown Americans, Tulsa needed to act immediately if it wanted to stay relevant in the 21st century. Tulsa was far from alone in this predicament; most of its midsize-city peers are facing the same challenges. But what made Tulsa unique was the unprecedented ambition to chart a new path forward.
At the same time, Tulsa provided an unlikely case study of economic transformation for another reason: It’s America in miniature. Indeed, when modern-day Don Drapers want to test a product’s national appeal, they get out of Manhattan and head to Tulsa. Tulsa’s mix of demographics and its cultural ambiguity—is it the Midwest or the South?—have made the city ideal for piloting new products for decades, from soft drinks to laundry detergents, pizza to draft beer. Reporting on research that found Tulsa’s demographics “match national averages more closely than any other city,” a 1993 article in the Oklahoman asks a curious question: “Toss the United States into a blender, crank it up and what do you get?” The answer, the article says, is a “big Tulsa puree.”
Of course, the country has changed a lot since the ’90s—economically and demographically. Over those years, Tulsa diversified as did America writ large, and the city became majority minority in 2021. The city’s present racial makeup demonstrates America’s own demographic evolution. Oklahoma represents the sad conclusion of the Trail of Tears, and Tulsa serves as the meeting point for tribal nations—the Osage, Muscogee, and Cherokee. The legacy of 1921 holds special resonance for the city’s Black communities. And a more recent influx of Asian and Hispanic residents has helped Tulsa maintain its status as one of the most representative cities in America.
If the city that embodies the American mosaic mirrors the country’s changing demographics, it also functions as a microcosm for a less positive pattern: Tulsa has fallen out of step with the innovation economies that have bloomed on the coasts, exemplifying a larger trend in the region of which it is a part—the American Heartland.
The Heartland is a political and economic organ that transcends geography, an idea shaped by our own worldviews. Calling “place” a projection, the midwestern novelist Jonathan Franzen asserts that the Heartland is “an idea that exists in a duality with the coasts,” with each representing what the other isn’t. For some coastal residents today, the Heartland may be a reactionary void, backward in thinking with nothing to offer the nation. For those who associate with the Heartland, they may see it as embodying community, faith, and humility. Cable news shows air dueling narratives about which is the “Real America.” But in recent years, there may be a shared understanding that the coasts offer an abundance of opportunity while the Heartland increasingly doesn’t.
What I discovered in Tulsa was that the Heartland encompasses the great middle of the country—not only in geographic terms but in societal, cultural, and even spiritual ones. For me, the Heartland represents midsize cities like Tulsa, middle-class citizens, and those striving to reach the middle class. “Whether the mythical heartland is celebrated or reviled,” historian Kristin L. Hoganson writes, “it fosters the perception that there is a gulf between the center and the edges, between the heart and the national body.” No matter its definition or borders, this perception is real: the Heartland does, indeed, represent a divide. We typically think of people lacking opportunities as marginalized, operating on the edges of society. But the Heartland rightly shows us that the metaphor is inverted—those on the margins of economic opportunity represent the vast middle, while coastal tech hubs, through their concentrated wealth, are in the minority and yet firmly in power.
Every city wants to become a tech hub, but only a handful on the coasts rule America’s innovation system—and that’s a problem. The Brookings Institution found that between 2005 and 2017, 90 percent of growth from the country’s innovation sector came from just five coastal metros. And from July 2022 through July 2023, six coastal cities accounted for almost 50 percent of all US job postings in generative artificial intelligence (AI), which is the cutting edge of today’s tech industry. Through the clustering of talent, industry, and capital and the agglomeration economics that result, big coastal cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and Washington, DC, have monopolized innovation and its myriad benefits. This narrow geographic distribution of the innovation economy leaves Heartland cities out and restricts opportunities for most of the population.
Consequently, the American Dream—the notion that through hard work everyone has an equal opportunity to lead a good and decent life so that successive generations are better off—is moving further out of reach for more people. In 2023, citing rising income inequality, the Harvard economist Raj Chetty said, “If we look at what has happened over time, we see a dramatic fading of the American Dream such that for children born in the middle of the 1980s and the 1990s who are entering the labor market today, it’s now become a coin flip, a 50-50 shot, as to whether you’re going to do better than your parents.” These are unacceptable odds that undermine faith in American democracy and capitalism, and they’re only going to get worse unless Heartland cities act with urgency to reset their economies.
Heartland cities like Tulsa can and must be actors in the innovation economy, which, despite its inequitable access, remains the best opportunity for long-term job and wealth creation. But they don’t need to compete with the big coastal hubs. Middleweights are in a class of their own, and they should strive to become the best version of themselves.
Midsize cities like Tulsa, with metropolitan statistical area populations between 1 and 3 million people, already have the foundation to support a tech ecosystem: population density, cultural amenities, as well as a relatively low cost of living that can de-risk entrepreneurship. Pandemic workforce trends have highlighted these advantages, as members of the creative class can now more easily search for a better quality of life and move away from coastal cities, where growth and equity too often work in opposition. Established tech hubs are driving out even the well compensated, and this cohort of mobile talent is finding benefits in unassuming places like Tulsa. This influx of talent creates an opportunity for any city that can attract and retain them.
Despite possessing many of the key elements for a tech eco system, too many Heartland cities have also shut themselves out of the innovation economy by clinging to outdated notions of economic development, by underinvesting in their communities, or by holding on to a nostalgic sense of culture—an aversion to change that has led to counterproductive policies that turn off outside tech talent and investors and do nothing to foster home grown ecosystems. While most change happens organically over time, skyrocketing domestic inequality and widening geographic disparities in tech have brought us to an inflection point as a country. Heartland cities need to pivot with intention and haste—or risk dying out.
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.
