Mike Bloomberg spent the day before Martin Luther King Jr. Day speaking about how race played a role in his own success as a businessman, saying that his life “would have turned out very differently if I had been black.”

Speaking to a crowd of several hundred at the Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Sunday, the billionaire presidential candidate discussed his white privilege as part of his push to earn support among black and brown communities.

“As someone who has been very lucky in life, I often say my story would only have been possible in America, and I think that’s true, but I also know that my story would have turned out very differently if I had been black, and that more black Americans of my generation would have ended up with far more wealth, had they been white,” Bloomberg said.

“For black Americans, there was nothing that white landowners, businesses, banks and politicians might not take: their wages and their homes, their businesses and their wealth, their votes and their power, and even their lives,” the former New York City mayor added.

Bloomberg was appearing in Tulsa to unveil his economic justice policy proposal aimed at helping black Americans ahead of the state’s March 3 primary.

The philanthropist utilized the historic backdrop of the Greenwood neighborhood to speak about the 1921 Tulsa massacre.

The massacre took place when the neighborhood was home to great economic prosperity for black residents, often referred to as “Black Wall Street,” before white rioters burned the area to the ground.

White mobs killed an estimated 300 black residents, injured about 800 more, left 8,000 residents homeless — yet saw no punishment from law enforcement.

“The white mob that attacked Greenwood burned 1,200 homes, looted dozens of shops, left nothing but ruins and rubble across 35 blocks, and massacred more than 200 black residents,” Bloomberg said. “During and after the massacre, there were more than 6,000 arrests — of black residents. Not one white person ever went to jail.”

“It was one of the deadliest and ugliest attacks in American history — but like most Americans, I had never heard of it,” the former mayor added. “I remember thinking, ‘How is it possible that high schools and colleges don’t teach this?'”