During Black History Month, it’s a particularly good time to reflect on the abominable riot that destroyed the highly prosperous black community in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921. The area had been called the “Black Wall Street” until a frenzied white mob destroyed it, taking many lives.

In this Townhall piece, Allen West (former member of Congress and a current candidate for governor of Texas); Kent MacDonald, president of Northwood University; and Timothy Nash, director of Northwood’s McNair Center, write about that shameful part of our history.

The authors write, “The once-thriving Greenwood District had more than 1,400 homes and businesses burned to the ground, and nearly 10,000 people were left homeless. While ‘the official’ Greenwood death toll was recorded at 10 whites and 26 Blacks, many experts today believe at least 300 people were killed (mostly Blacks).”

Here’s a point that stands out from this horrendous occurrence: Even in an era when there was widespread discrimination (both official in the form of laws meant to keep black people “in their place” and personal in the form of white attitudes of racial superiority), black people could and did succeed in the nation’s system of laissez-faire capitalism. As Thomas Sowell, the late Walter Williams, and many other economists have observed, free markets enable everyone with talent to thrive, even those in minority groups that are unpopular with many. They can nevertheless do good business with those who care more about getting good value in their transactions than in the race of the person they’re dealing with.

We hear again and again these days that our economic system must be scrapped — “reset” — because it is supposedly inherently unfair, suffused with “institutional racism” that prevents blacks and other minorities from advancing. That’s clearly false, as the prosperity of the black community in Tulsa shows. All they needed was for government to do its job of protecting their rights so they could continue to prosper. But it failed at that, just as many governments failed to protect the rights of citizens during the riots after the death of George Floyd.